Soviet union

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Ambridge recovers its sense of humour — finally

‘Isn’t that charming!’ Carol declares at the height of the great Home Farm cocktail party, after being subjected to Jennifer’s somewhat over-enthusiastic description of her wine storage unit. Just three words but such a lot of meaning. Carol Tregorran’s resurrection in Ambridge after decades of silence is a stroke of genius by The Archers team (led by Sean O’Connor), and almost, but not quite, makes up for the absurdity of the Elizabeth/Roy storyline, still not resolved and likely to linger on for weeks yet, Elizabeth struggling to put Roy back where he belongs, Roy transformed from a cheery family man into a lovelost shadow of his former self. Carol’s return,

Monday

James Forsyth

The traitor Melita Norwood should have been prosecuted

Today brings a fresh reminder of a national disgrace, the failure to prosecute Melita Norwood for treason. Newly released files from the Mitrokhin archive make clear how vital a KGB source Norwood was; Moscow regarded her as an even more valuable asset than Kim Philby. Norwood’s treason was exposed in 1999 when she was still alive. But she was, absurdly, not prosecuted. This was a failure of national nerve. She might have been an old woman by the time her spying was revealed, but she was an agent of one of the most unpleasant authoritarian regimes in history and one which this country was involved in a decades-long struggle against.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Vladimir Putin knows what he stands for. Do we?

Possibly because his oratory is no match for his much-displayed pectoral muscles, the speeches of Vladimir Putin are seldom reported at length in the West. But as a means of understanding the manoeuvres in eastern Ukraine this week, there is no better starting point than the speech he made to the Duma when the Russian parliament annexed Crimea. Lest anyone thinks his words have been enriched by an over-imaginative reporter, the translation is provided by the Kremlin itself. Speaking of the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, he asserted, ‘Russia realised that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered… Millions of people went to bed in one country

Friday

Molly Guinness

Remembering the decimation of Crimea’s Tatars

Crimea’s Tatars are nervous after Russia’s annexation of the territory. The Tatars, Sunni Muslims who account for 12 per cent of Crimea’s population, boycotted Sunday’s referendum worried that the Russians would impose repressive and discriminatory laws on them. Reading Bohdan Nahaylo’s 1980 article, Murder of a Nation*, you can see why. First, Stalin deported the entire Crimean Tatar nation. ‘In the early hours of 19 May 1944, some 238,000 people were abruptly awoken by units of the Soviet security forces and within minutes herded into cattle trucks. Sealed in without food or water, they were transported several thousand miles eastwards and eventually dispersed in Soviet Central Asia. Denounced before the

Thursday

Molly Guinness

The Spectator: on 150 years of punishing Russia

Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine has left western diplomats scrabbling for sanctions that won’t backfire on to the rest of Europe and America. The foreign secretary William Hague said Russia must ‘face consequences and costs’. When a policy paper was photographed that said the UK should not support trade sanctions or close London’s financial centre to Russians, Mr Hague said it did not reflect government policy. But punishing Russia is sure to be an expensive business. Just before the Crimean War, when Russia invaded Turkish Moldovia and Wallachia in 1853, a Spectator editorial took a hard line; Russia should be punished on principle. The present operations of Russia proceed entirely

Thursday

Molly Guinness

The Spectator – on 400 years of unease between Ukraine and Russia

Ukraine declared independence from the USSR in 1991, but Moscow has made sure it’s remained heavily involved in Kiev’s affairs ever since. That has been relatively simple. Soon before independence, Anne Applebaum described how Russia’s ruthless annexation of its neighbour had left Ukraine without much identity of its own. ‘It took 350 years of Czarist domination, several decades of Stalinist purges, two collectivisation-induced mass famines, two world wars, and the refusal to teach Ukrainian children how to speak Ukrainian, along with the systematic elimination of anyone who might be thought a leader, an intellectual, a capitalist, or even a wealthy peasant. But they did it. The Russians have managed to

Thursday

Ann Carlton

I was Ralph Miliband’s research assistant, and this is what he was like

‘You can work as research assistant to Ralph Miliband.’ Thus my tutor at the London School of Economics gave me the news that he had found a way for me to finance my first year of study for an intended PhD on the Labour party’s housing policy between the world wars. The idea was that for twelve months between 1964 and 1965 I would help analyse the changing occupational structure of the British workforce by comparing statistics contained in the 1851 census with those in the 1951 census. As a first step, my new boss took me for a drink in the coffee bar next door to the main entrance

Wednesday

Charles Moore

Why didn’t the Daily Mail stick to the ‘red angle’ when it came to Ralph Miliband?

For those of us of a certain age, Ed Miliband’s speech last week was exhilaratingly nostalgic. His promise to freeze energy prices reminded us of happy times when Labour policies were patently, shamelessly idiotic. At last, after a generation of loss, we began to hope to find reds under the bed again. In its understandable excitement, the Daily Mail made the mistake of finding only a dead red — Mr Miliband’s late father, Ralph. It then compounded its error by saying that Miliband senior ‘hated Britain’, on the basis of some angry remarks he made when aged 17. So the Mail managed to offend against taste and decency on multiple

Douglas Murray

Why are Marxists and Soviet apologists regarded as harmless jokers?

I rather like Ed Miliband, and for what it’s worth I don’t think he has inherited much, if any, of his father’s rancid political views. Nevertheless the fact that Ed Miliband has often referred to his father’s thought makes Miliband Snr fair game in a way that other politicians’ parents might not be. But in the row over the Daily Mail / Ralph Miliband affair two things remain to be pointed out. The first relates to war service. Contra Emily Maitlis (among others) on last night’s Newsnight, it is perfectly possible to fight for a country in a world war and still hold values (then or subsequently) inimical to the country you fought

Monday

Douglas Murray

CND cannot rewrite its own history

Last week I recorded an edition of Hardtalk for the BBC which has gone out today.  It is a discussion with Kate Hudson, the General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), on the future of nuclear weaponry. The discussion is available on iplayer here. A couple of observations. Firstly, I seem to have been responsible for a rare ‘corpsing’ during a Hardtalk recording. Kate Hudson took a comment by me about the ‘decades’ CND had been fighting a losing battle as an ungallant remark on her age. It was not meant as such, but did lead to a temporary break-down in discussions, for which apologies. On a more

Thursday

Stella Rimington

Journalist, novelist, patriot, spy

When I was a new MI5 recruit, working in Leconfield House in 1970, there was a group of middle-aged men who came and went at unusual times of the day, often gathering in the late afternoons, talking loudly and cheerfully. They were the F4 agent runners and I envied them; they seemed to be having a lot more fun than I was. F Branch, the counter subversion branch, was responsible, amongst other things, for monitoring the activities of the Communist Party of Great Britain and in particular for identifying its members, in support of Clement Attlee’s 1948 ‘Purge Procedure’, excluding communists and fascists from work vital to the security of

Friday

The Spectator

From the archives: Chernobyl, as seen from Minsk

It was this week in 1986 that the Soviet Union admitted there was a nuclear accident in Chernobyl. We’ve dug out this fascinating account by Samuel Phipps, who caught in Minsk when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded.  A sudden evacuee, Samuel Phipps, The Spectator, 10 May 1986 Minsk ‘You’ll be national heroes when you get back to England,’ said one of our Russian friends in Minsk, as we sat outside the hostel, waiting in the evening sunshine for our fates to be determined. Sure enough, pictures on Friday lunchtime television showed a relieved mother pouring champagne over her relieved Sloane Ranger daughter at Heathrow. In the studio afterwards, the

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

‘People, your government has returned to you!’

The playwright who became a protestor who became a president, Vaclav Havel, has died today. There is already much on the blogosphere about this Czech great, and there will be more in tomorrow’s papers. But if you only read one thing connected with him, then I’d advise you make it the address he delivered to the Czechoslovakian people on 1 January 1990, which I’ve copied below. It was only a few days after his election as president, yet triumphalism and celebration is there little. Instead, Havel dwells on the horrors his country endured in the Twentieth Century, and — crucially — how they were permitted to come about. It is

Saturday

Anne Applebaum

Thus do empires end

‘This book is a chronicle of one day in the history of one city.’ As first sentences go, that one is hard to beat — particularly given that the ‘one day’ is the last day of the Soviet Union, the city is Moscow and the author, an Irish journalist, was there and knew most of the principal actors. ‘This book is a chronicle of one day in the history of one city.’ As first sentences go, that one is hard to beat — particularly given that the ‘one day’ is the last day of the Soviet Union, the city is Moscow and the author, an Irish journalist, was there and

Monday

Colleen Graffy

Stand up for freedom and freedom will stand up for you (eventually)

It was hard to be a supporter of U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Western Europe. As a student living in West Germany at the time, I remember well the commonly held view of him: B-rate actor who read cue cards, a nuclear-weapons-obsessed warmonger, and not very bright to boot. Never mind that he had also been a popular two-term governor of the most populous state in the U.S. (California), because that did not fit with the bumbling cowboy narrative. When he called the Soviet Union “the evil empire” the chattering classes saw it as simplistic, unsophisticated and cringe-worthy. Not so the people caught behind the Iron Curtain who silently cheered

Saturday

Victor Sebestyen

The missing millions

The collapse of the Soviet Union spawned an entire genre of literature: the Gulag memoir, produced by victims of the USSR’s concentration camps. A few masterpieces were published in the West, or in samizdat, before the 1980s, for example Evgenia Ginzburg’s renowned Into the Whirlwind and the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.But as Soviet-style communism fell apart, the long-suffering voices were allowed to speak, and in Russia an enormous number of first-person books and articles began appearing. In her brilliant 2004 Gulag, Anne Applebaum wrote the best history of the Soviet camps to appear outside of what was once referred to as the Eastern bloc. That was a monumental achievement. But

Friday

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: The Cuban Missile Crisis

48 years ago this week, the Cuban Missile Crisis came to an end. Here are the two Spectator leading articles that bookended our coverage of those thirteen momentous days in October: Trial of strength, The Spectator, 26 October, 1962 The West faces a grave situation. It would be absurd to think that the showdown on Cuba is only a Soviet-American affair. Rather it is the testing-ground of the determination of the freedom-loving peoples to defend themselves – one selected by Russia with a view to causing as much confusion as possible in the countries of the Atlantic Alliance and the uncommitted States. We notice one crucial point at once. The