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- Ghislaine Maxwell: J’ACCUSE!
- Russia as a Eurasian Power — the history
- Russia in my lifetime : a tragic story Central Moscow in April 1992 was a jumble sale. Trestle tables obstructed the pavements, old counterpanes covered them. Mostly older people, mostly women, displayed trinkets for sale: a cup, a few beads, a spare tin. Outside the Bolshoi Theatre sheet music – bound conductors’ scores even– waited for a chance buyer. They were like cultural treasure turned out of safe-keeping by a marauding army. Over in Sokolniki park at the Sunday market Red Army uniforms were going for a song. The entire Soviet past was ridiculed. It made me feel uncomfortable. I cast my mind back twenty years earlier to my first contact with Communist Russia, when a planeload of young Western visitors who should have known better applauded when we took off for home again. Mostly they didn’t like the food. In Nizhny Novgorod I knew a woman who had been an Intourist travel guide. She knew her lines by heart. ‘You tell the visitor so much they don’t need to ask questions. Isn’t that right, Lesley?’ Galya had a nervous breakdown when both her technique and her beloved knowledge of Soviet history and culture were made redundant overnight. The Cold War, and its end, were a painful business.
- The Old Men at the Zoo: Novelist Angus Wilson (1913-1991) on the Riot of post-war Britain
- A Meeting with Isaiah Berlin and a few reflections on his quarrel with Roger Scruton
- A Meeting with Isaiah Berlin and a few reflections on his quarrel with Roger Scruton
- From Weimar to Washington: The Collapse of the House of Bourgeois Ideas – Part 1
- How Tolstoy named an adulterer — the great writer 110 years on
- The Crown The Making of A National Epic
- The Agonies of George Steiner
- Roger Scruton – A Personal Memoir
- A giant step, but for whom?
- Le Carre’s Agent in a New Field
- A European View of Jeremy Corbyn
- Letter to Nietzsche
- Van Gogh in Kent: the inspiration he took forward from his days in England
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Category Archives: Russia
When I shook Gorbachev’s hand
It was Wednesday 17th July 1991. Russia — and Communism — had preoccupied me for the last fifteen years. A year earlier I’d published In the Communist Mirror. Now with the East Bloc already transformed, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet … Continue reading
Russia as a Eurasian Power — the history
It is a Western question to wonder what is in Vladimir Putin’s mind, just as it is a lazy Western habit to talk of Russia as a “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”. Present Russian ambition seems … Continue reading
Russia in my lifetime : a tragic story Central Moscow in April 1992 was a jumble sale. Trestle tables obstructed the pavements, old counterpanes covered them. Mostly older people, mostly women, displayed trinkets for sale: a cup, a few beads, a spare tin. Outside the Bolshoi Theatre sheet music – bound conductors’ scores even– waited for a chance buyer. They were like cultural treasure turned out of safe-keeping by a marauding army. Over in Sokolniki park at the Sunday market Red Army uniforms were going for a song. The entire Soviet past was ridiculed. It made me feel uncomfortable. I cast my mind back twenty years earlier to my first contact with Communist Russia, when a planeload of young Western visitors who should have known better applauded when we took off for home again. Mostly they didn’t like the food. In Nizhny Novgorod I knew a woman who had been an Intourist travel guide. She knew her lines by heart. ‘You tell the visitor so much they don’t need to ask questions. Isn’t that right, Lesley?’ Galya had a nervous breakdown when both her technique and her beloved knowledge of Soviet history and culture were made redundant overnight. The Cold War, and its end, were a painful business.
Not counting that brief visit in 1972, I first arrived in the Soviet Union in 1978. The travails of a young writer aside, it was obviously my task to understand how a world so grey and glum had come to … Continue reading
Armando Iannucci The Death of Stalin: how do you make comedy out of tragedy?
Armando Iannucci’s film The Death of Stalin (2017) graced The New York Times’ best-of-the-year list last December for good reason. It raised the question of how you treat comically a story of moral depravity on a vast scale. It reminded … Continue reading
Posted in Arc of Utopia - my latest book, Cold War, Film, Russia, Writing
Tagged Criticism, film, Russia
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The Skripal Affair and the Problem of Russia
A few nights ago on the BBC the Russia expert Andrei Illarionov, once a Putin confederate and now at Washington’s Cato Institute, was asked about Britain’s best response to the latest attempt to murder Russian state enemies on British … Continue reading
The Russian Revolution and British Society
The Russian Revolution set British society on fire from the moment in February 1917 when its first instalment happened. From the moment the tsar abdicated and Alexander Kerensky’s Provisional Government took over from the chic salons of Bloomsbury to … Continue reading
The Arc of Utopia in the anniversary year of Russia 1917
Not much enthusiasm has been directed towards the Russian Revolution in this year of its centenary, 2017. At least that’s the case in the British press. Before the fall of Communism in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union … Continue reading
The Royal Academy’s show Revolution and the historic meaning of the 1932 Russian Artists’ exhibition
The Russian Revolution as seen through the history of its paintings and artefacts has delighted and confused visitors to London’s Royal Academy this early Spring. Despite many works by the much loved and admired Kazimir Malevich, and magnificent photographs by … Continue reading
Posted in Art History, Russia
Tagged 1932 art show 'Fifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic, Alexander Rodchenko, Art and Design, Boris Kustodiev, Difference between Nazism and Stalinism, Kazimir Malevich, Kliment Redko, Royal Academy 2017 exhibition Revolution, Russia, The Philosophy Steamer
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From Pasternak’s novel to David Lean’s film of Doctor Zhivago
Pasternak told an interviewer from abroad in 1960 that I wanted to record the past and to honor in Doctor Zhivago the beautiful and sensitive aspects of the Russia of those years. There will be no return of those days, … Continue reading
Posted in Britain Today, Cold War, Current Affairs, Film, Russia
Tagged Russian Literature
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Shostakovich and Football Another Way of Expressing the Soviet Tragedy
4 January 1942 Kuybishev Dear Isaak, I am writing to you a lot these days, as much in fact as my supply of envelopes will allow – this particular product of the papermaking industry is extraordinarily hard to come by. … Continue reading
Lesley Chamberlain 