Communism

Four dangerous visionary writers

17 February 2024 9:00 am

Simon Ings examines the lives of Maxim Gorky, Maurice Barrès, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Ding Ling, whose propagandism helped shape – and misshape – the 20th century

An insider’s account of the CCP’s stranglehold on China

27 January 2024 9:00 am

A high-ranking intelligence officer leaves a cache of letters revealing his increasing disenchantment with the party after being purged numerous times

The travails of Britain’s first Labour government

13 January 2024 9:00 am

Attacked in the press, by the right and even by its own supporters, Ramsay MacDonald’s short-lived government still managed to achieve a surprising amount

The freedom fighters who dared to take on a communist superpower

6 January 2024 9:00 am

Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin describe the courage of the youthful protest leaders in Hong Kong who sacrificed so much for the cause of democracy

Poland, 1968: the last pogrom

18 March 2023 9:15 pm

‘Are you Jewish?’ the officious-looking Dutch diplomat asked my dad. ‘Yes’, he said, realising at that very moment, everything had…

We love you, Uncle Xi!

22 October 2022 9:00 am

Tom Miller on the cult of personality that China’s ‘core leader’ has so ruthlessly constructed

The humanity of Mikhail Gorbachev

1 September 2022 5:51 am

Mikhail Gorbachev, the final President of the Soviet Union who died last night, was remarkable both as an international politician…

Gorbachev was no saint. But he was a kind of hero

31 August 2022 8:08 am

Mikhail Gorbachev is dead at the age of 91, and in a way I feel orphaned. I became fascinated by…

Is self-loathing the British disease?

30 July 2022 9:00 am

Whatever one thinks of the government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda, it was amusing to see this country’s left…

The sin of neutrality

7 May 2022 9:00 am

Yet again, millions of civilians across the Horn of Africa are starving. The world blames the crisis on drought and…

Why Russians celebrate monsters

16 April 2022 5:00 pm

Nobody knows how long people live in Dzerzhinsk – life expectancy statistics for the Russian city, 250 miles east of…

Putin’s neo-communism is doomed to fail

11 March 2022 11:29 pm

It is responsible for inequality. For financial instability. And probably for poverty, racism and global warming as well. We have…

What the Russians thought of James Bond in the 1960s

18 December 2021 9:00 am

Last year I wrote a piece about James Bond for the ‘Freelance’ column of the Times Literary Supplement. All true…

Was the US involved in neo-fascist Italian terrorism?

12 September 2021 5:10 pm

Last month, Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Draghi promised to declassify government documents involving two organisations: Gladio, an anti-communist paramilitary group…

Tales from the Gulag: why I’m helping survivors tell their stories

11 September 2021 9:00 am

Why I’m helping survivors tell their stories

Why the far-right flourishes in East Germany

6 June 2021 4:01 pm

A spectre is haunting Germany — the spectre of the AfD. Having come to prominence on a wave of anti-migrant…

The truth about my father, Philip Guston

13 March 2021 9:00 am

Musa Mayer talks to Hermione Eyre about her father Philip Guston’s cancellation and her fear that he will for ever be known as the artist who painted the Ku Klux Klan

Riveting: Dear Comrades! reviewed

9 January 2021 9:00 am

Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades! is based on a true event and set in 1962 in the Russian city of Novocherkassk…

The rotten legacy of communism in Albania

12 December 2020 9:00 am

Our heavily laden taxi turned off the main highway from Tirana and started to negotiate the rough, one-track road. The…

brezhnev

Biden’s Brezhnev vibes

4 December 2020 2:01 am

Like many other Americans who had the misfortune to live under socialism, I’ve been having lots of flashbacks lately. In…

Are liberal conservatives now history?

5 September 2020 9:00 am

It was a luminous late August sunset, and we were in France, dining outdoors with some friends who have a…

Welcome to authoritarian Hong Kong

31 July 2020 11:16 pm

The national security law in Hong Kong has been passed for just over a month, but the scope of Beijing’s…

The forgotten victims of communism

11 July 2020 9:00 am

I just read a piece by Scott McConnell in the American Conservative, a magazine we co-founded 18 years ago. He…

It was Bevin, not Bevan, who was the real national treasure

4 July 2020 9:00 am

Alan Johnson pays tribute to Ernest Bevin, a towering political figure too often forgotten

Anglo-Chinese misunderstanding: an Oxford don visits 1960s Beijing

29 February 2020 9:00 am

This book is a rather startling depiction of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s involvement with the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), his sponsored…