Soviet union

In a recent interview Oleksandr Syrskyi, the new commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, said that he spends his time off reading books on the country’s ‘difficult history’. If even he finds it difficult, where do us non-Ukrainians start? In the introduction to its new exhibition, the Royal Academy makes a brave attempt at explaining the political background to Ukrainian modernism, developed in a brief window of creative opportunity before it was slammed shut by Soviet repression. To western eyes, though, it’s not immediately clear what distinguishes the 70 works on show – the majority on loan from Ukraine’s National Art Museum and Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema – from

In 2014, Ben Macintyre presented a BBC2 documentary based on his book A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. The programme managed to shed new light on a familiar but still irresistible story by concentrating on Philby’s relationship with his old chum – and fellow Cambridge man – Nicholas Elliott. Elliott was sent in 1963 by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) to question Philby in Beirut where Philby had become the Observer’s foreign correspondent after a long and successful career betraying his countrymen to the Soviets. Elliott did elicit some sort of confession, but a few days later, Philby absconded to Moscow. So had Elliott helped with

Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone – even the title makes you want to scream – is Adam Curtis’s Metal Machine Music: the one where he frightens off his fans by abandoning the trademark flourishes that made him so entertaining and instead goes all pared-down and raw and grim. If you don’t know or remember what those trademark flourishes were, let me refer you to a cruelly funny pastiche which you can easily find on YouTube called The Loving Trap. This sends up poor Adam as a pioneer of the collage-umentary, a genre resembling ‘a drunken late-night Wikipedia binge with pretence to narrative coherence’ which ‘vomits grainy library footage onto the screen to

Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades! is based on a true event and set in 1962 in the Russian city of Novocherkassk where the local factory, the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Plant, went on strike. This doesn’t sound especially sexy, I know, but it is superbly acted and so rivetingly told my concentration did not waver for an instant which, given how hard it has been to concentrate lately, is high recommendation indeed. (It wouldn’t be fair to list the films I couldn’t concentrate on, as the problem is likely mine, but… Mank!) Konchalovsky certainly has a wild CV. He has worked with Tarkovsky. He made the wonderfully hypnotic The Postman’s White Nights,

Among the first to arrive was a Labour grandee. Then others drifted over: academics, musicians, writers, a nurse. They came from different directions, some looking shifty, others excited. The secret meeting point was an inconspicuous pub in north London. Queueing shoppers nearby assumed the growing crowd was waiting to get into the supermarket. In groups of five those gathered were led down a suburban street to a derelict leisure centre. For one night only, the gym had been turned into a makeshift theatre. The audience, of up to 30 people, had congregated to flick a collective V at the social distancing measures, and to watch A Hero of Our Time,

Did the US secretly write a power ballad in order to bring down the Soviet Union? That’s the question behind Wind of Change, a serial documentary that has topped the podcast charts. It’s the work of an investigative journalist called Patrick Radden Keefe who claims to have once received a tip-off, from an intelligence contact, that the song ‘Wind of Change’ — recorded by the hair metallers Scorpions — was actually a CIA campaign to encourage anti-Soviet uprisings. Now he wants to prove it. This week’s episode, the fourth of eight, takes Keefe to a collectors’ convention in Ohio in pursuit of an internet user called ‘Lance Sputnik’ who creates

Deep in the guts of Russian library stacks exists what remains — little acknowledged or discussed — of a dead and buried atheist dream. The dream first took shape among Russian radicals of the mid-19th century, to whom the prospect of mass atheism seemed the key to Russia’s salvation. When Lenin seized power in 1917, the Bolsheviks integrated it into their vision of heaven on earth. To the extent that people in the West have heard of this atheist dream, it has come to them mainly through the voices of its enemies. In 1983, Ronald Reagan put Lenin’s rejection of religion at the heart of Soviet unfreedom in his ‘Evil