Soviet Union

Will the Caucasus ever be tamed?

16 December 2023 9:00 am

Its ruined fortresses, broken monasteries and deserted villages attest to centuries of conflict, and any idea of a united Caucasus remains a dream, says Christoph Baumer

Too in thrall to today’s dogmas: ITV1’s A Spy Among Friends reviewed

15 July 2023 9:00 am

In 2014, Ben Macintyre presented a BBC2 documentary based on his book A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the…

A Soviet version of Martin Parr: Adam Curtis’s Russia 1985-1999 –TraumaZone reviewed

29 October 2022 9:00 am

Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone – even the title makes you want to scream – is Adam Curtis’s Metal Machine Music: the…

What does Russia really want?

22 October 2022 7:00 pm

The question of ‘why’ Russia invaded Ukraine has been forgotten amid war’s fog. Greed and malice partially explains it. History, geopolitics…

What Washington was like during the Cuban Missile Crisis (2002)

12 October 2022 7:00 pm

On 27 October 1962, US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara stepped out of crisis meetings and looked up at the sky.…

The humanity of Mikhail Gorbachev

1 September 2022 5:51 am

Mikhail Gorbachev, the final President of the Soviet Union who died last night, was remarkable both as an international politician…

Gorbachev was no saint. But he was a kind of hero

31 August 2022 8:08 am

Mikhail Gorbachev is dead at the age of 91, and in a way I feel orphaned. I became fascinated by…

The sin of neutrality

7 May 2022 9:00 am

Yet again, millions of civilians across the Horn of Africa are starving. The world blames the crisis on drought and…

Tales from the Gulag: why I’m helping survivors tell their stories

11 September 2021 9:00 am

Why I’m helping survivors tell their stories

Why the far-right flourishes in East Germany

6 June 2021 4:01 pm

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?

7 March 2021 12:03 am

There is an assumption that those fighting tyranny must instead want Western-style democracy, that the arc of history bends towards…

yeltsin

America’s Yeltsin moment

13 January 2021 1:12 am

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

9 January 2021 9:00 am

Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades! is based on a true event and set in 1962 in the Russian city of Novocherkassk…

brezhnev

Biden’s Brezhnev vibes

4 December 2020 2:01 am

Like many other Americans who had the misfortune to live under socialism, I’ve been having lots of flashbacks lately. In…

olivia de havilland

Olivia de Havilland’s Red Scare

28 July 2020 11:26 pm

Olivia de Havilland, who has died aged 104, will forever be remembered for the role of Melanie Hamilton in Gone…

From letter to worse

11 July 2020 8:20 am

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

4 July 2020 9:00 am

Leaf Arbuthnot and Igor Toronyi-Lalic on the new cultural rebels

The problem with mystery podcasts like Wind of Change

6 June 2020 9:00 am

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

2 November 2019 9:00 am

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

19 October 2019 9:00 am

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

12 October 2019 9:00 am

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?

7 September 2019 9:00 am

Only four women pianists have recorded complete cycles of the Beethoven piano sonatas: Maria Grinberg, Annie Fischer, H. J. Lim…

Dark masterpiece: ‘Two Figures’, 1953, by Francis Bacon

There is a jewel of a painting at Gagosian’s Francis Bacon show

15 June 2019 9:00 am

‘It is no easier to make a good painting,’ wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, than it is…

The thrilling first part of Dmitri Tcherniakov's new production of Berlioz's Les Troyens for Opéra Bastille. Photo: Vincent Pontet / Opéra National de Paris

Dau is not just a pretentious fraud – it’s rather disgusting

16 February 2019 9:00 am

The best booers, in my experience, are the Germans. There’s real purpose and thickness to their vocals. Italians hiss. The…

A document of a mass human experiment that is moving, revolting, violent and extraordinarily pornographic

Dau is the strangest and most unsettling piece of art to come out of Russia in years

2 February 2019 9:00 am

Dau is not so much a film as a document of a mass human experiment. The result is dark, brilliant…