the Soviet Union

Boris Iofan – cunning apparatchik of a loathsome regime

30 April 2022 9:00 am

The invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces has rendered what might otherwise have seemed a fairly niche study of a…

Glasnost merely confirmed Russia’s deep-seated suspicion of democracy

11 December 2021 9:00 am

Thirty years ago the Soviet Union was guttering to its close. Those of us who were there remember the exhilarating…

Betrayal was a routine business for George Blake

6 February 2021 9:00 am

Kim Philby once remarked to the journalist Murray Sayle that ‘to betray, you must first belong. I never belonged’. Kim,…

The internet was never intended to spy on us

26 January 2019 9:00 am

There is a trend in non-fiction — in fact my editor has been on to me about this lately —…

1983: the year the world nearly ended

26 May 2018 9:00 am

In 1983, Soviet spies skulked in our midnight streets to check the lights were out. The Kremlin, convinced the West…

Trahison des clercs — a phrase that dates back all the way to 1927

3 March 2018 9:00 am

I had long associated the phrase trahison des clercs with the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft, though I can’t put my finger…

Lyudmila Pavlichenko at Sevastopol, 6 June 1942. Her total confirmed kills during the second world war amounted to 309, including 36 enemy snipers

Heroines of the Soviet Union

5 August 2017 9:00 am

Klara Goncharova, a Soviet anti-aircraft gunner, wondered at the end of the second world war how anyone could stand to…

Gorbachev and Reagan sign the historic treaty on 8 December 1987 eliminating Soviet and Us intermediate-range and short-range nuclear missiles

The four men who averted the Apocalypse

28 November 2015 9:00 am

Robert Service’s account of the greatest turning point in modern history is unlikely to be bettered, says Sherard Cowper-Coles

Alger Hiss attends his trial (Photo: Getty)

Alger Hiss: Tricky Dick’s scapegoat

26 September 2015 8:00 am

In the more than 40 years since Richard Nixon resigned as president — disgraced as much by his inveterate lying…

The Boston marathon bombers: Muslim radicals or ordinary American citizens?

20 June 2015 9:00 am

As Masha Gessen herself admits — and as friends and journalist colleagues repeatedly told her — it was a strange…

Bond would be bored in today’s MI6, says Malcolm Rifkind

6 June 2015 9:00 am

Spying may be one of the two oldest professions, but unlike the other one it has changed quite a lot…

‘We will achieve abundance’ promises a propaganda poster of 1949. But by 1952 most free Soviet citizens shared the same diet as the inhabitants of the Gulag

Uncle Joe is revered in Putin’s Russia as a benevolent dictator

23 May 2015 9:00 am

‘Lately, the paradoxical turns of recent Russian history… have given my research more than scholarly relevance,’ remarks Oleg Khlevniuk in…

Both Belgium and the United States should be called to account for the death of Patrice Lumumba

7 March 2015 9:00 am

For decades, all the outside world knew was that Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader, had been done away with.…