Stalin
Why do monsters make such good writers?
Did any of you know that most of the 20th-century monsters — Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Ceausescu, Duvalier, and even the…
Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales are among the most harrowing in all literature
‘I consist of the shards into which the Republic of Kolyma shattered me,’ Varlam Shalamov once told a fellow gulag…
History may hold the secrets of statecraft – but not the secrets of business leadership
‘How can one person lead one hundred?’ That was one of the questions in my Cambridge entrance exams back in…
The beauty of Soviet anti-religious propaganda
Deep in the guts of Russian library stacks exists what remains — little acknowledged or discussed — of a dead…
How does today’s world compare with Orwell’s nightmare vision?
Apart from a passionate relationship with the common toad, what do George Orwell and David Attenborough have in common? H.G.…
Vasily Grossman: eye-witness to the 20th century’s worst atrocities
Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate (completed in 1960) has been hailed as a 20th-century War and Peace. It has…
What makes Kim Jong-il cute — and Barack Obama not?
Ordinarily, I love books that answer questions I’ve never asked, but Simon May’s baffling book has blown my mind. The…
How Eric Hobsbawm remained a lifelong communist — despite the ‘unpleasant data’
Sir Richard Evans, retired regius professor of history at Cambridge, has always been a hefty historian. The densely compacted facts…
The best way to defeat totalitarianism? Treat it as a joke
Is there anything one can never laugh about? A question inevitably hanging over humour writing, it’s best answered by the…
It is not the masterpieces that were lost, but the collectors, Natalya Semenova rights a wrong
It is not as surprising at it sounds that two of the greatest collectors of modern art should have been…
The spying game: when has espionage changed the course of history?
Espionage, Christopher Andrew reminds us, is the second oldest profession. The two converged when Moses’s successor Joshua sent a couple…
Rarely have I sat through such a chaotic and whimsical script: Describe the Night reviewed
Describe the Night opens in Poland in 1920 where two Russian soldiers, Isaac and Nikolai, discuss truth and falsehood. Next…
From Stalin’s poetry to Saddam’s romances: the terrible prose of tyrants
‘Reading makes the world better. It is how humans merge. How minds connect… Reading is love in action.’ Those are…
A chance to see the Moomins’ creator for the genius she really was: Tove Janssons reviewed
Tove Jansson, according to her niece’s husband, was a squirt in size and could rarely be persuaded to eat, preferring…
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…
The hunger
In 1933 my aunt Lenina Bibikova was eight years old. She lived in Kharkov, Ukraine. Every morning a polished black…
The mystery of socialism’s enduring appeal
One of the mysteries of our age is why socialism continues to appeal to so many people. Whether in the…
Playing Stalin for laughs
Christopher Wilson’s new novel is much easier to enjoy than to categorise. And ‘enjoy’ is definitely the right word, even…
The new age of the refugee
After years of estrangement in a foreign land, what can immigrants expect to find on their return home? The remembered…
The hopeless wasteland of modern Russia
‘Gilded doorknobs,’ spits a Party diehard as she contemplates the blessings of the Soviet Union’s collapse. ‘Is this freedom?’ Dozens…
Enver Hoxha: Stalin’s devilish disciple
In his final public appearance, the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha addressed a Tirana crowd to commemorate the capital’s liberation from…
Britain needs a museum of communist terror
We need a museum to help us remember that
1956: the year of living dangerously
The book of the year has long been a favoured genre in popular history, and is a commonplace today. While…
The tortured genius of Shostakovich
When I look at the black-and-white photograph of Julian Barnes on the flap of his latest book, the voice of…
What happened to British communism?
Like most trade unionists in the 1970s and 80s I worked with a fair few communists. Men like Dickie Lawlor,…
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