Soviet Union
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
Even Corbyn would find Thomas More’s Utopia too leftwing
Thomas More’s 1516 classic is a textbook for our troubled times, says William Cook
Why did a Russian ballet dancer throw acid in his boss’s face?
The 16th June 1961 and 17th January 2013 are two indelible dates in the annals of Russian ballet. Two events…
When technology was art: Cosmonauts at the Science Museum reviewed
‘The dominant narrative of space,’ I was told, in that strange language curators employ, ‘is America.’ Quite so. Kennedy stared…
The surreal beauty of Soviet bus stops
The Soviet Union was a nation of bus stops. Cars were hard to come by, so a vast public transport…
How dedicated a fascist was Le Corbusier?
The ‘revelations’, 50 years after he drowned, that Le Corbusier was a ‘fascist’ and an anti-Semite are neither fresh nor…
Why Putin is even less of a human than Stalin was
LBC likes to tell us it’s ‘Leading Britain’s Conversation’, though in the case of weekday pre-lunch presenter James O’Brien you’ll…
Classical music's greatest political butt-kissers: Dudamel, Gergiev and Rattle
On 8 March 2013, Gustavo Dudamel stood by the coffin of the Marxist autocrat Hugo Chavez and conducted the Simon…
Russians made the theatre space the most liberating imaginative device ever invented
You have to hand it to the Russians. They beat us into space, beat us to sexual equality, and a…
Maya Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin: ‘The KGB put a microphone in our marriage bed’
Ismene Brown talks to the Russian super-couple Maya Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin about ballet, opera and the KGB
Ambridge recovers its sense of humour — finally
‘Isn’t that charming!’ Carol declares at the height of the great Home Farm cocktail party, after being subjected to Jennifer’s…
Vladimir Putin knows what he stands for. Do we?
Possibly because his oratory is no match for his much-displayed pectoral muscles, the speeches of Vladimir Putin are seldom reported…
I was Ralph Miliband's research assistant, and this is what he was like
Memories of being Ralph Miliband’s research assistant
