Stalin
A macabre meditation on psoriasis
Obsessed with purity and pain, the boundaries of blame and innocence, Skin is a fascinating meditation on psoriasis, the long-lasting…
Dark days in the Balkans: life under Enver Hoxha and beyond
For many in the West, Albania remains as remote and shadowy as the fictional Syldavia of the Tintin comics. The…
A divided city: the Big Three fall out in post-war Berlin
Adam Sisman describes the toxic atmosphere in Berlin after the end of the second world war
Why did Hitler’s imperial dreams take Stalin by surprise?
The most extraordinary thing, still, about Operation Barbarossa is the complete surprise the Wehrmacht achieved. In the early hours of…
‘I’m not interested in moral purity’: St Vincent interviewed
Michael Hann talks to St Vincent about Sheena Easton, Stalin and performing in five-inch heels
Churchill’s enigma: the real riddle is why he cosied up to Stalin
The real riddle is why he cosied up to Stalin
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…
The brutality of the Gulag was totally dehumanising
‘It was a gray mass of people in rags, lying motionless with bloodless, pale faces, cropped hair, with a shifty,…
Diplomatic daughters go behind the scenes at Yalta
From Downing Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, history’s powerful inter-family influencers, whether spouses or children, have long operated behind weighty political…
‘I was frightened every single day’: the perils of guarding Stalin
In Russian, the proverb ‘Ignorance is bliss’ translates as ‘The less you know, the better you sleep’. For those who…
Why do monsters make such good writers?
Did any of you know that most of the 20th-century monsters — Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Ceausescu, Duvalier, and even the…
Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales are among the most harrowing in all literature
‘I consist of the shards into which the Republic of Kolyma shattered me,’ Varlam Shalamov once told a fellow gulag…
History may hold the secrets of statecraft – but not the secrets of business leadership
‘How can one person lead one hundred?’ That was one of the questions in my Cambridge entrance exams back in…
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…
How does today’s world compare with Orwell’s nightmare vision?
Apart from a passionate relationship with the common toad, what do George Orwell and David Attenborough have in common? H.G.…
Vasily Grossman: eye-witness to the 20th century’s worst atrocities
Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate (completed in 1960) has been hailed as a 20th-century War and Peace. It has…
What makes Kim Jong-il cute — and Barack Obama not?
Ordinarily, I love books that answer questions I’ve never asked, but Simon May’s baffling book has blown my mind. The…
How Eric Hobsbawm remained a lifelong communist — despite the ‘unpleasant data’
Sir Richard Evans, retired regius professor of history at Cambridge, has always been a hefty historian. The densely compacted facts…
The best way to defeat totalitarianism? Treat it as a joke
Is there anything one can never laugh about? A question inevitably hanging over humour writing, it’s best answered by the…
It is not the masterpieces that were lost, but the collectors, Natalya Semenova rights a wrong
It is not as surprising at it sounds that two of the greatest collectors of modern art should have been…
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…
Rarely have I sat through such a chaotic and whimsical script: Describe the Night reviewed
Describe the Night opens in Poland in 1920 where two Russian soldiers, Isaac and Nikolai, discuss truth and falsehood. Next…
From Stalin’s poetry to Saddam’s romances: the terrible prose of tyrants
‘Reading makes the world better. It is how humans merge. How minds connect… Reading is love in action.’ Those are…
A chance to see the Moomins’ creator for the genius she really was: Tove Janssons reviewed
Tove Jansson, according to her niece’s husband, was a squirt in size and could rarely be persuaded to eat, preferring…
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…
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