Uncomfortable truths about the siege of Leningrad
Hero City offers an impressive patch in the tapestry of written history that points toward the truth
Soviets
Thursday
Wednesday
Britain’s rioters have acted like Bolsheviks
Are we truly in danger of an advance on power by the British political far right? Surely not. But there are resonances from revolutions of the past
Wednesday
China’s role in Soviet policy-making
Why should we want to read yet another book about the collapse of the Soviet empire? In To Run the World, Sergey Radchenko attempts an answer
Thursday
In Putin's Russia, Victory Day is no longer about 1945
This year’s parade is a useful milestone for recognizing the extent to which Russia has slipped into a military dictatorship
Friday
Navalny’s final agony at the Polar Wolf gulag
It was here at the Polar Wolf that the Putin regime, with its rigid deafness to irony, chose to imprison the opposition leader
Saturday
The Soviet spectre haunting Afghanistan
As US and British forces pull out of Afghanistan, further victims of the ‘grave of empires’, Russia is experiencing a mix of satisfaction, exasperation and trepidation. It has its own bitter memories of the country, after all. In 1979, as a friendly regime was falling back in the face of a mounting Islamic fundamentalist insurgency, Soviet forces rolled into Afghanistan. The idea was that by installing a new leader and mounting a brief show of force, the rebels would be intimidated back into line. Six months, the old men in the Kremlin told themselves, that is all it would take. And so began a vicious ten-year war that saw the deaths
