“Past greatness and weep narrating it”. This verse by Solomos perfectly condenses and captures the feeling left – by enemies and friends alike – by this year’s 9 May parade in Moscow’s Red Square before Mr Putin and other members of his regime. Why? Because what distinguished this year’s parade was its desperate poverty compared… Read More Putin: from victory to victory until the final catastrophe!
By Alexander Zinoviev, from Homo Sovieticus, a novel that was originally published in 1985 and is included in Boredom, an anthology that was published in January by M.I.T. Press and Whitechapel Gallery. Translated from the Russian by Charles Janson. Soviet people are trained to write Reports about everything. It is an indispensable element of the Communist organization… Read More Lord of the Files (Homo Sovieticus)
Peter Pomerantsev The powerful were meant to be afraid of the truth. Journalists were meant to “hold truth to power”. Evidence was meant to destroy wrongdoers as sunlight does a vampire. Find the evidence, the logic went, and the powerful could be shamed and brought to justice. Historically, the powerful would try to censor and… Read More What happens when leaders disregard the truth? Putin and Trump are about to find out
Putin once saw advantage in giving writers a degree of freedom, even to be critical. Those days are long gone, and Russia’s artists are fleeing William Fear As much as Russia is the country of Tolstoy and Rachmaninov, it is also the country of Stalin and the Lubyanka prison – a nation built as much on beauty… Read More As the Ukraine war grinds on, Russia is becoming a cultural wasteland
Since Euromaidan and the first Russian invasion in 2014, Ukrainian filmmakers have been prolifically recording the impact of war on society. The result is an immensely powerful and varied body of work across genres and styles. A survey. Barbara Wurm ‘What power does art have in wartime?’ asks the poster for Iryna Tsilyk’s multiple award-winning… Read More Anthropology of war
Nationalistic propaganda in Russia has intensified noticeably since the invasion of Ukraine last year, and the country’s 17.7 million schoolchildren have not been spared. Vera Akhalaya That said, it’s impossible for the Kremlin to control every teacher – and some are risking prison and their careers to tell their students about the realities of the… Read More How teachers are resisting the Kremlin’s war propaganda in Russian schools
“What is history for? … It makes us brave!” ADAM TOOZE I’ll never forget this response by my distinguished colleague Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith to one of the “theory and practice” questions with which we used to torture Cambridge undergraduates back in the 1990s and early 2000s. Riley-Smith’s answer resonated with me, precisely for its profound, almost archaic… Read More The courage of Vladimir Kara-Murza
Russian opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza, who faces up to a quarter of a century in jail on treason charges, has told a Moscow court that he stood by all of his political statements and said his prosecution resembled one of Joseph Stalin’s show trials. Kara-Murza, 41, who holds Russian and British passports, has denied several… Read More Defiant Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza likens his case to Stalin’s show trials
Revered Russian writer and Putin critic on how the war in Ukraine has divided his nation, and why culture is the only cure Andrew Anthony Read Shishkin’s letter to an unknown Ukrainian Mikhail Shishkin was born in Moscow and is one of the most lauded writers in contemporary Russian literature, and the only one to receive… Read More Mikhail Shishkin: ‘The main enemy of Russian culture is the Russian regime’
Stalin through the journalism of his time: H.R. Knickerbocker’s interview with Ekaterina Geladze; Gareth Jones’s exposé of the Holodomor; W.E.B. Du Bois’s homage to a freedom fighter; and Raymond Aron’s optimism in 1956. Internazionale Storia 5 (2023) On the 70th anniversary of Stalin’s death, a special issue of Internazionale looks at the life and significance of the… Read More ‘The end of the big lie’
After the truth-shower 