Bolsheviks
‘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
Chance encounters
The fates of members of a Jewish family depend on accidental meetings, the boarding of a ship or the ring of a phone in this complex fable woven from 20th-century history
For ruthless inhumanity, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable
Sara Wheeler describes the appalling brutality of the Russian Revolution and its far-reaching aftermath
Celebrating Konstantin Paustovsky — hailed as ‘the Russian Proust’
When is a life worth telling? The Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky’s six-volume autobiography The Story of a Life combines high…
The art of persuasion
It’s hard to admire communist art with an entirely clear conscience. The centenary of the October revolution, which falls this…
Sexual tension and Siberian magic mushrooms
On her arrival in Russia in 1914, Gerty Freely finds it refreshingly liberal compared to her native Britain: here servants…
Teffi: from Russia with laughs
‘Ah! Scrubbing the deck! My childhood dream! As a child I had once seen a sailor hosing the deck with…
When the Russians killed Mother Russia
On the 24–25 October 1917 (according to the Julian Calendar, or 7–8 November according to the Gregorian) the political disputes which…
Murder in the dunes: the ‘26 Martyrs’ of Baku and the making of a Soviet legend
In the pre-dawn hours of 20 September 1918, a train, its headlamp off, heading eastwards out of Kransnovodsk on the…
