Soviet Union
Tales from the Gulag: why I’m helping survivors tell their stories
Why I’m helping survivors tell their stories
Why the far-right flourishes in East Germany
A spectre is haunting Germany — the spectre of the AfD. Having come to prominence on a wave of anti-migrant…
What does Belarus's opposition leader want?
There is an assumption that those fighting tyranny must instead want Western-style democracy, that the arc of history bends towards…
America’s Yeltsin moment
The end of the Cold War was as great a shock to US politics as it was to the Soviet Union’s. The…
Riveting: Dear Comrades! reviewed
Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades! is based on a true event and set in 1962 in the Russian city of Novocherkassk…
Biden’s Brezhnev vibes
Like many other Americans who had the misfortune to live under socialism, I’ve been having lots of flashbacks lately. In…
Olivia de Havilland’s Red Scare
Olivia de Havilland, who has died aged 104, will forever be remembered for the role of Melanie Hamilton in Gone…
From letter to worse
It is a truth generally acknowledged that any statement of civil principles will now be met with pitchforks and personal…
Culture is going underground: meet the rebel army
Leaf Arbuthnot and Igor Toronyi-Lalic on the new cultural rebels
The problem with mystery podcasts like Wind of Change
Did the US secretly write a power ballad in order to bring down the Soviet Union? That’s the question behind…
In his new piano concerto Thomas Ades’s inspiration has completely dried up
There’s nothing like a good piano concerto and, sad to relate, Thomas Adès’s long-awaited first proper attempt at the genre…
The beauty of Soviet anti-religious propaganda
Deep in the guts of Russian library stacks exists what remains — little acknowledged or discussed — of a dead…
Why Roy Cohn is not one of the world’s most evil men
New York The Roy Cohn documentary Bully. Coward. Victim: the Story of Roy Cohn was successfully screened at the…
Why did the Soviets not want us to know about the pianist Maria Grinberg?
Only four women pianists have recorded complete cycles of the Beethoven piano sonatas: Maria Grinberg, Annie Fischer, H. J. Lim…
There is a jewel of a painting at Gagosian’s Francis Bacon show
‘It is no easier to make a good painting,’ wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, than it is…
Dau is not just a pretentious fraud – it’s rather disgusting
The best booers, in my experience, are the Germans. There’s real purpose and thickness to their vocals. Italians hiss. The…
Dau is the strangest and most unsettling piece of art to come out of Russia in years
Dau is not so much a film as a document of a mass human experiment. The result is dark, brilliant…
As a symphonist, Mieczyslaw Weinberg was a master: Weinberg Weekend reviewed
It’s a strange compliment to pay a composer — that the most profound impression their music makes is of an…
Oleg Gordievsky, the ultimate spy story — and Ben Macintyre, the best writer to tell it
Spy stories, whether the stuff of fictional thrillers or, as in the case of Sergei Skripal, the real deal —…
Watch out comrade: big business is turning communist
Is it me, or is business becoming a teeny-weeny bit Stalinist? Common features include 1) Paranoia about political ideology; 2)…
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…
High life
When the Germans smuggled arguably the world’s most evil man into Russia 100 years ago, they did not imagine the…
Meet the fans who risk death for heavy metal
We in the West may snigger at heavy metal, but in some parts of the world its practitioners face the death penalty. Karen Yossman reports
The greatest British opera after Dido and Grimes? Vaughan Williams’s Riders to the Sea
In a remote fishing village a lone figure confronts an unexplained death, standing tormented but unbroken against fate, the community…
Britain needs a museum of communist terror
We need a museum to help us remember that
