Being seen: Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has maintained a constant stream of appearances to press home his country’s narrative.
Ukraine Presidency/Ukrainian Presidential Press Office/Alamy Live News
The West’s new approach to Russia – bar it from international organizations, restrict international trade, prevent further military moves – looks just like how it treated Russia in the 20th century.
Memorial tanks at the Ukrainian Motherland Monument in Kyiv.
Madeleine Kelly/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
By allowing Russian military presence in Belarus, president Aliaksandr Lukashenka has forfeited his country’s sovereignty.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz sit far apart during talks in the Kremlin in Moscow a week before Russia invaded Ukraine.
(Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
History isn’t just learning facts. Students learn about the past by researching information and synthesising it to form an evidence-based argument. This skill is useful for a range of careers.
Peter Carroll and Mandela Mathia in The Cherry Orchard, Belvoir St Theatre.
Belvoir/Brett Boardman
When the future is clearly changing but we can’t focus on tomorrow, should we just keep dancing? Pamela Rabe anchors the absurdity of The Cherry Orchard.
In control: Vladimir Putin could remain as Russian leader until 2036.
EPA-EFE/Sergei Guneyev / Host photo agency
The way foreign correspondents cover Russia tells the story of its relations with the rest of the world.
Hong Kong protesters shelter behind a thin barrier – and umbrellas – as police fire tear gas and encircle a group of demonstrators.
AP Photo/Vincent Yu
Revolutions are built not on deep misery but on rising expectations. History may not provide much hope of immediate change in Hong Kong – but protesters may have a longer view.
Tarana Burke created #MeToo in 2006 but it didn’t emerge as a mass social movement until 2017.
AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes
From the French Revolution to #MeToo, social movements often burst into the mainstream with what seems like little warning. Cass Sunstein explains why.
Red flag hoisted in Glasgow’s main square.
Wikimedia
This was no high watermark of British communism; just a key milestone in the struggle for better working conditions.
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.
To try and understand the Russian revolution outside of the broader social context of the time is to neglect the development of nationhood in the region.
Wikicommons
A century ago, Russian leaders staged mock trials on rape and abortion to educate citizens about new Soviet laws and values. Then, as now, victim-blaming and ‘he said, she said’ marred the verdict.
On the streets of Petrograd on July 4, 1917, when troops of the provisional government opened fire on demonstrators.
Viktor Bulla/Wikimedia Commons
The physical and political space of cities can be shaped from above or below, but few have had more revolutionary changes, first under the tsars, then the communists, than St Petersburg.
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.
Communist Party of Turkey founder Mustafa Suphi (right) met a mysterious fate when he tried to take on the Ankara government.
Wikimedia Commons
Armando Iannucci plays fast and loose with history in his farce The Death of Stalin. But its depiction of the cult of personality that can develop around political leaders is bitingly relevant.
Female protesters in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) in 1917 on International Women’s Day.
Wikimedia Commons