Janice Cowan arrived in Moscow to fulfill her duties as a Canadian military attaché's wife just weeks before a crucial turning point in Soviet and Russian history: the now legendary August 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev’s government. This three-day event, which caught the world by surprise and brought Boris Yeltsin to global attention, has been analyzed many times over by Russia experts and scholars. Cowan’s bystander account of the coup and its aftermath, filled with vivid details that recreatethe setting for the reader, offers a fresh perspective. Her training as a journalist and her keen skills of observation enabled her to grasp the significance of what she was witnessing, although she was a novice at Russian politics.
Cowan provides in her first chapters a lively and often funny description of her training to be a “spy’s wife” (the principal job of a military attaché is intelligence gathering). But the real story begins when she and her husband...
Amy Knight has written numerous books and articles on Soviet and Russian politics. Her most recent book is How the Cold War Began: The Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies (McClelland and Stewart, 2005).
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