In 2004, Randolph Lewis successfully predicted the following year’s coup in Kyrgyzstan in an article published in the journal “Politika i Obschestvo” (Politics and Society). He was on hand to witness Kyrgyzstani revolutions in 2005 and 2010, and just missed the one in 2020.

Lewis grew up in North Florida, attended college in Virginia, where he majored in Russian Studies, and went on to spend much of the next three decades doing business in the former Soviet Union.

While working in finance, mining and construction for Western firms, he found time to fly Cessnas over the Volga river, and MI-8 helicopters through Siberian mountain gorges in search of gold-bearing quartz veins. He rode an emaciated camel through the deserts of Uzbekistan. He addressed, several times, Russian Duma (parliament) committees, and once had his microphone shut off so the chairman, the second-ranking man in the Communist Party, could remind the foreign gentleman” of a few things.

He nearly lost two front teeth in a car accident on a Yakutian ice road. It was April first, and the temperature was minus thirty Celsius. He helped the US ambassador to Kyrgyzstan get the American Chamber of Commerce off the ground in that country two decades ago. More recently, he played the part of a dull Swede looking for a wife in a Russian rom-com. Does that make him a movie star? No. What about in the former Soviet Union? Also, no. But it was quite the experience.