The Van Gogh of Kazakhstan who feigned insanity to escape the Soviets
Somewhere near Georgia’s border with Russia, 2,500 LED lamps, two robotic arms, a walking refrigerator, 3,000 sq ft of aluminium foil and many, many rolls of duct…
Trapped in Ukraine’s Soviet Disneyland: a ‘Remainer’ in separatist Donetsk speaks out
As a pro-Ukrainian in the pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic, journalist Stanislav Aseyev is not so much a rare beast as an endangered species. When separatist militias seized…
Trapped in Ukraine’s Soviet Disneyland: a ‘Remainer’ in separatist Donetsk speaks out
As a pro-Ukrainian in the pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic, journalist Stanislav Aseyev is not so much a rare beast as an endangered species. When separatist militias seized…
Comrade Dad, the chilling BBC sitcom that gave us ‘Londongrad’ – and enraged the Soviets
Watched with almost 40 years’ hindsight, Comrade Dad sometimes feels like serious-minded satire. There were other WW3-themed sitcoms from the time: Only Fools and Horses building a…
Ukraine bestselling author Andrey Kurkov: Russian literature ‘has been strangled under Putin’
Like much literature from Kurkov’s part of the world, his novels have a brooding, lugubrious quality, reflecting the absurdities of Communist life and the broken dreams that…
Francis Fukuyama: progressives are threatening our most cherished values
“Francis Fukuyama” was once the punchline to a gibe that went: “Have you heard the latest political science joke?” The reference was to the 1992 book that…
The Dutch student who smuggled Bibles into the Soviet Union in its dying days
This gripping memoir by one of Holland’s most admired novelists begins with a weirdly farcical encounter: in 1988, the author, then a penniless student with a degree…
Stalin’s Library by Geoffrey Roberts review: an air-brushing of a book-loving monster
If most people were asked to name “a serious intellectual” of the 20th century who also “had a high degree of emotional intelligence”, it might be a…
My Cold War mission: to get Francis Bacon to Moscow
The exhibition was finally scheduled for September 22, 1988. As it approached, my mood was touched by the chill of fear. Trouble was brewing. At my suggestion,…
What travelling in the Soviet Union was really like
20. Young pioneers With their white shirts and little red kerchiefs, the Young Pioneers were the USSR’s youth movement. It was here that young citizens got their…
The Spectre of War by Jonathan Haslam, review: a book every intelligent person should read
When the movers and shakers of London, Paris or Berlin compared the rather vulgar Führer with Stalin and his works, it was no contest. In 1936, when…