Edward Lucas is
an author
and a journalist.

Edward Lucas is International Editor of The Economist and also oversees the paper’s political coverage of Central and Eastern Europe.

He has been covering the region for more than 20 years, witnessing the final years of the last Cold War, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet empire, Boris Yeltsin’s downfall and Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.

From 1992 to 1994, he was managing editor of The Baltic Independent, a weekly newspaper published in Tallinn. He holds a BSc from the London School of Economics, and studied Polish at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow. He is married to Cristina Odone with three children. “The New Cold War” is his first book.

Q & A

What are your 5 favourite books, and why?

Sword of Honour Trilogy (Evelyn Waugh) — best novel of the Second World War
Middlemarch (George Eliot)—best insight into life and love
Engineer of Human Souls (Jozef Škvorecký) — best novel about communism and emigration
The Light that Failed (Rudyard Kipling) — best book about love, war and journalism
Rates of Exchange (Malcolm Bradbury) — best comic novel about eastern Europe and
The Captive Mind (Czeslaw Milosz) — best book about the communist mindset

Who are your 5 favourite authors, and why?

Jozef Škvorecký, Ivan Klima and Milan Kundera, for their insights into communism in Czechoslovakia.
Evelyn Waugh, for his bleak portrayals of faith and disillusion.
Rudyard Kipling for his historical and emotional depth.

Who or what was your biggest influence in deciding to become a writer?

A way of being paid to travel in my favourite region, talk to my favourite people, and think hard about my favourite subjects.

What inspired you to write The New Cold War: How the Kremlin menaces Russia and the West?

A growing sense of urgency and impatience with the West’s blindness towards the well-documented and growing threat from Russia.

What is your 60-second sound-bite of what your book is about?

We’ve been too complacent about Russia too long. The trajectory is ominous and this is a threat not only to Russians, who suffer under an authoritarian regime, but also to the countries of Eastern Europe, where Russia is pushing back hard, using money rather than military, but still very effectively; and also to us in the West as well.

You say “The Kremlin is menacing the West.” Who is the Kremlin?

When I say “Kremlin,” I mean the ex-KGB people who run Russia. They took piece-by-piece in the 1990s, when the attempt to liquidate the old KGB failed. Mr. Putin came back as prime minister in 1999, when the Yeltsin regime was on its last legs, and then as president in 2000, and that’s really the first time in Russian history that the secret police have actually run the country. That’s had several bad, I would say even deplorable, effects.

What are you reading now?

Sword of Honour (for the 30th time)

What is the most overrated book you’ve ever read?

Ernest Hemingway: The Old Man And The Sea.

If you could require everyone to read just one book what would it be?

Anne Applebaum: Gulag.

What’s the best thing you’ve ever written?

An article called “The Death of Comrade Fear” describing the collapse of communism in 1989

What’s the last piece of your writing that you hated and threw in the wastepaper bin and why?

The first draft of last week’s europe.view, the weekly column on eastern Europe that I write for The Economist’s website.

Is there any particular ritual involved in your writing process (favourite pen, lucky charm, south-facing window)?

Absolutely none: I can write in any conditions, at any time.