The Crimean War spelt the end of hymns to heroism and glory
Writing from opposite sides, Leo Tolstoy and William Howard Russell exposed the horror of conditions in a quagmire war which seemed to have no meaning
China’s role in Soviet policy-making
Stalin and his successors’ struggle with the US and China reflected conflicting Soviet ambitions to be a superpower and to lead world revolution, says Sergey Radchenko
Why Russia couldn’t give up on empire
One hundred years ago this December, delegations from the core nations of the East Slavs, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus signed the…
How the West misunderstood Russia’s military capabilities
Putin’s new army looked lean and mean, but old, inherent weaknesses persisted: over-rigid commanders, demoralised soldiers and shaky logistics
The humanity of Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev, the final President of the Soviet Union who died last night, was remarkable both as an international politician…
The unedifying Afghan blame game
A year ago we scuttled out of Afghanistan. We abandoned the aim we and the Americans had proclaimed so noisily…
Putin will not survive a failed war in Ukraine
Vladimir Putin has had a very bad week. His army, allegedly refurbished after its poor performance in the war against…
Putin’s nightmare is becoming a reality
‘Those he commands move only in command, nothing in love’. Shakespeare always gets it right. I remembered his words about…
Has Putin lost control?
As the Soviet Union fell to pieces around our ears, we in the Moscow embassy used to discuss the Weimar…
Glasnost merely confirmed Russia’s deep-seated suspicion of democracy
Thirty years ago the Soviet Union was guttering to its close. Those of us who were there remember the exhilarating…
Afghanistan and the end of the American hegemony
We used to sneer at the way the Russians were chased out of Afghanistan by a ragtag of mujaheddin armed…
Why autocracy in Russia always fails in the end
Churchill was wrong: Russia is neither a riddle nor an enigma. Russians themselves concoct endless stories to glorify their country’s…
The true diplomat considers the future more than the present
The 17th-century diplomat Sir Henry Wotton said that an ambassador was ‘an honest man sent to lie abroad for his…
Demystifying the world of espionage
John le Carré once wrote sadly that he felt ‘shifty’ about his contribution to the glamorisation of the spying business.…
The Big Three who ended the Cold War
Historians argue endlessly and pointlessly about the extent to which the human factor rather than brute circumstance determines the course…
Yalta was a carve-up — and the Poles are understandably still bitter about it
‘The strong do what they can. The weak suffer what they must.’ Thucydides’ principle expresses an uncomfortable truth. The eight-day…
When the Grand Design met ‘le Grand Non’: Britain in the early 1960s
Peter Hennessy is a national treasure. He is driven by a romantic, almost sensual, fascination with British history, culture, and…
Of course Russians have a sense of humour – just look at the Salisbury ‘tourists’
The comedy of Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, the two glum Russian ‘tourists’ who denied on television that they were…
The spying game: when has espionage changed the course of history?
Espionage, Christopher Andrew reminds us, is the second oldest profession. The two converged when Moses’s successor Joshua sent a couple…
