When the Wedgwood Room in the royal palace at Tsarskoye Selo was being restored in the 1960s, he was invited to the Soviet Union as an advisor.
Between 1975 and 1977, he was a visiting lecturer at the Southern Illinois University where he collaborated with Herbert Marshall on the translation of Sergei Eisenstein's writings on drama theory.
[4] He was instrumental in bringing to public attention the works of Russian émigré and exiled writers such as Georgy Vladimov, Zinovy Zinik, and Vasily Aksyonov.
Glenny co-authored, with Norman Stone, an oral history of the experiences of Russian emigres, titled The Other Russia, for which he also conducted many of the interviews.
One of his most monumental works was the translation of Boris Yeltsin's memoirs, 100,000 words of text, which he accomplished in two months in 1990.
Glenny obtained a copy of the script and translated it, and it was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Centre in 1987.
At the time of his death in Moscow in 1990, Glenny was researching the works of Soviet writers who had perished in the gulags, and was awaiting documents from the KGB.