A plaque on a house in St Petersburg that says: ‘Here the writer Lydia Korneievna Chukovskaya wrote Sophia Petrovna, a story about the Great Terror 1936-1938’.
Wikimedia Commons
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.
The Death of Stalin is about the chaotic political drama that followed the Russian leader’s demise in 1953.
Madman Films
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.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau walks with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang during a welcoming ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China in December 2017.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
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.
Vladimir Lenin and Nadezhda Krupskaya.
Antoon Kuper/flickr
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.
Two big battles which turned the tide of World War II can tell us a great deal about some important present-day challenges.
The 1976 memorial at the Babi Yar massacre site only recognised Soviet victims, despite the killing of more than 30,000 Jewish people. In 1991 a Jewish memorial was installed nearby.
Jennifer Boyer/Flickr
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.
Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard is removed from the entrance to City Park in New Orleans.
REUTERS/Cheryl Gerber
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.
They might look like an alien species, but these bacteria-eating viruses could be the next big thing in the fight against infectious diseases.
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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.