Persecuted by Stalin, writers Lydia Chukovskaya and Anna Akhmatova endured threats, cold and starvation. And in an epic feat, Lydia memorised the poems of her friend that were too dangerous to commit to paper.
Speaking with: satirist Armando Ianucci on The Death of Stalin
The Conversation, CC BY44.1 MB(download)
Armando Iannucci, the satirist and director behind the film The Death of Stalin spoke with Associate Professor Stephen Harrington, an expert on political satire.
Canada’s “progressive trade agenda” with China might have died in the Great Hall of the People earlier this month. But there’s now an opportunity for a serious reconsideration of the relationship.
Russian revolutionary Nadezhda Krupskaya, like other leading women in the new Stalin-led state, was marginalised. But in her case, because she was Lenin’s widow.
On September 29 1941, Nazis murdered more than 30,000 Jews in a ravine outside Kiev. Dmitri Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony, Babi Yar, is a damning critique of the Soviet Union’s lack of recognition of the massacre, and a condemnation of Stalinism.
The Olympic Games are a theatre — sometimes farce, sometimes tragedy, reality TV, morality play or soap opera — where geopolitical, social and technological dramas are played out.
Ivan Maisky was Russia’s ambassador to the Court of St James from 1932 to 1943. By charming his way into Britain’s inner circles he arguably passed on more secrets than the infamous Cambridge Five.