One of the interesting points that you make is how we in the West think of Solzhenitsyn in terms of his The Gulag Archipelago published in 1973. We think of Solzhenitsyn as a human rights actor. But that’s not the role that he plays where Ukraine is concerned. Your argument is that Solzhenitsyn is, as it were,… Read More Decentralizing the Cold War: an interview
Comrade-proletarians, and toilers of all countries: We, Russian workers and soldiers, united in the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, send you warmest greetings and announce the great event. The Russian democracy has shattered in the dust the age-long despotism of the Tsar and enters your family of nations as an equal, and as… Read More CALL BY THE PETROGRAD SOVIET TO THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD; March 28, 1917
NB: The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a popular protest against war. It began spontaneously on International Women’s Day, February 23 (March 8); and was led by women. Soldiers of the Petrograd 66,000 strong garrison refused orders to shoot the protesters, leading to the collapse of the Tsarist regime and the emergence of the Petrograd… Read More Protests in Russia against mobilisation – in pictures
First posted November 11, 2017 Madhavan Palat Utopia is a place or as it literally means, a no place, in Thomas More’s Greek pun, one that does not exist, cannot exist, but ideally should come into being as the good place, the Eutopia. Many utopian projects, be it beauty that never fades or the return… Read More Madhavan Palat: Utopia and Dystopia in Revolutionary Russia
First posted July 28, 2017 Life and Fate was written in the late 1950’s & confiscated by the Soviet authorities. It was published in the West in 1980, and in Russia in 1988. Grossman died in 1964. Linda Grant says of it: ‘Novels fade, your immersion in their world turns into a faint dream, and then is forgotten. Only… Read More The manuscript that was arrested: Linda Grant on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate
First posted June 21, 2014 The Zhivago Affair by Peter Finn and Petra Couvee Reviewed by Adam Kirsch More than Christianity, however, life itself is Zhivago’s sacred value – his name is related to the Russian word for life – and he despises every ideology that claims to be superior to life, to be able to… Read More The Zhivago Affair: one of the Cold War’s most fascinating cultural skirmishes / Boris Pasternak’s refusal of The Nobel Prize. His son’s memoirs
First posted November 3, 2017 NB: This essay has appeared in EPW’s special number commemorating the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which falls on November 7. (A Word file is downloadable here). The revolution began on February 23, 1917, (March 8 according to the new calendar adopted in 1918); but for complex reasons, tended to be identified with the… Read More The Bolshevik Heritage. By Dilip Simeon
Brandon Gage Halfway through his invasion of Ukraine’s sixth bloody month, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power in Moscow is imploding as scores of Kremlin officials are calling upon the 69-year-old autocrat to quit. Putin had anticipated his February 24th “special military operation” to be a cakewalk through the Russian-controlled East into the Ukrainian… Read More ‘We ask you to relieve yourself of your post’: Kremlin officials are turning against Vladimir Putin
First posted September 17, 2017 NB: Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) was a Russian religious and political philosopher. He was among 160 non-communist intellectuals and scholars, deported from Russia in 1922 on Lenin’s orders (after interrogation by Felix Dzherjzinsky, of the secret police), for being spies and counter revolutionaries. Berdyaev had also been convicted of blasphemy for criticising the Russian… Read More Nikolai Berdyaev: The Religion of Communism (1931) / The Paradox of the Lie (1939)
First posted July 22, 2017 Ann O’Loughlin set off across the Soviet Union nearly 30 years ago, looking for adventure and a chance to practise her Russian. Instead, she met a fascinating stranger in a leather jacket in the next carriage … The Trans-Siberian railway, the greatest train journey in the world, is where our… Read More Ann O’Loughlin – How the Trans-Siberian railway became the love train
After the truth-shower 