Whipping up a masterpiece: painters and their materials
Martin Gayford finds artists from Rembrandt to De Kooning mixing pigment, egg and oil together with all the skill of an accomplished chef
Sarah Rainsford joins the long list of foreign correspondents banned from Russia
After decades of writing about Russian affairs, Rainsford now finds herself persona non grata – but admits she no longer feels nostalgia for the country
Imprisoned for years on Putin’s whim
Vladimir Pereverzin’s ‘crime’ was to have worked for a company owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky – and refusing to give false evidence resulted in an 11-year sentence in the camps
‘A group of deranged idiots’ – how the Soviets saw the Avant-Gardists
First welcomed, then vilified, by Lenin, Russian artists such as Malevich, Tatlin, Kandinsky and Chagall would find their only real supporters in the West
The deathly malaise that’s crippling Russia
Now is a difficult time to empathise with Russians – which is why we need Maxim Osipov. We need him…
Bright, beautiful and deceptively simple: the art of the linocut
Charlotte Hobson describes the complicated relationship of two artists who championed simplicity
Pure, white and native: the birch as a symbol of Russian nationalism
The image of the birch tree in popular Russian culture is as manifold as the trees themselves, but we could…
The dark side of Venus — goddess of war as well as love
Bettany Hughes has spent a decade, she tells us, exploring the origins of the goddess Aphrodite, first for a BBC…
Words of war: interviews with the children who survived Hitler’s invasion of Russia
In 1990s Russia, war veterans were a bossy, even aggressive presence, upbraiding people in shops and pushing to the front…
Small but deadly: postcards that fuelled the Russian Revolution
In this handsomely illustrated book Tobie Mathew makes a case for the lowly postcard’s role in the politicisation of pre-revolutionary…
‘T’ is for Trotskyite
Varlam Shalamov’s short stories of life in the Soviet Gulag leave an impression of ice-sharp precision, vividness and lucidity, as…
Death-defying acts and the dark side of the circus
In 2013 Tessa Fontaine joined up with the World of Wonders, a circus sideshow that travels around the United States…
The long arm of the Russian super mafia
Mark Galeotti’s study of Russian organised crime, the product of three decades of academic research and consultancy work, is more…
Marina Lewycka’s Granny steals the show
Marina Lewycka’s latest happy-go-lucky tale of migrant folk in Britain takes a remark by the modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin as…
Uncle Joe is revered in Putin’s Russia as a benevolent dictator
‘Lately, the paradoxical turns of recent Russian history… have given my research more than scholarly relevance,’ remarks Oleg Khlevniuk in…
As deadly as the male: female Russian pilots of the second world war were femmes fatales in every sense
The name Lyuba Vinogradova may not ring any bells, but her ferrety eye for spotting a telling detail may already…
Life after Vera: Patrick Gale’s hero finds happiness towards the end of the Saskatchewan line
Patrick Gale’s first historical novel is inspired by a non-story, a gap in his own family record. His great-grandfather Harry…
How Putin turned Russian politics into reality TV
‘We all know there will be no real politics.’ A prominent Russian TV presenter is speaking off the record at…
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, by Anya von Bremzen - review
The early 1990s in Russia were hungry years. At the time, I was a student, too idle to barter and…
