Bolsheviks
In Putin’s Russia, feminism is an ugly word
The trad wife, happy to defer to her husband in all matters, is today’s ideal – a far cry from the female snipers and fighter pilots of the Leninist era
The Russian spies hiding in plain sight
A programme of deep-cover espionage, begun in the 1920s, is as important to Russia as ever with the expulsion of so many diplomats in the wake of the war with Ukraine
‘A group of deranged idiots’ – how the Soviets saw the Avant-Gardists
First welcomed, then vilified, by Lenin, Russian artists such as Malevich, Tatlin, Kandinsky and Chagall would find their only real supporters in the West
Chance encounters
The fates of members of a Jewish family depend on accidental meetings, the boarding of a ship or the ring of a phone in this complex fable woven from 20th-century history
An international civil war
Sara Wheeler describes the appalling brutality of the Russian Revolution and its far-reaching aftermath
All human life is here
When is a life worth telling? The Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky’s six-volume autobiography The Story of a Life combines high…
The art of persuasion
It’s hard to admire communist art with an entirely clear conscience. The centenary of the October revolution, which falls this…
Lost in a time capsule
On her arrival in Russia in 1914, Gerty Freely finds it refreshingly liberal compared to her native Britain: here servants…
Fleeing Mother Russia
‘Ah! Scrubbing the deck! My childhood dream! As a child I had once seen a sailor hosing the deck with…
Reds against Whites
On the 24–25 October 1917 (according to the Julian Calendar, or 7–8 November according to the Gregorian) the political disputes which…
The man who disappeared
In the pre-dawn hours of 20 September 1918, a train, its headlamp off, heading eastwards out of Kransnovodsk on the…
