Soviet Union
David Nice
At the end of an exhausting week in which Holocaust Memorial Day struck a more urgent note than ever as fascism started tearing through the USA, parts of this concert were bound to hit hard. That they did so to the power of 100 was thanks to the extraordinary impact of Jakub Hrůša, now recognised as one of the greats by British audiences as he waits to take up the full-time reins at the Royal Opera. The BBC Symphony Orchestra burned for him in fullest focus.Shostakovich’s Eleventh is one of his symphonies which require special pleading (which is much better than bad, the only adjective to Read more ...
James Birch
In 1988, James Birch – curator, art dealer, and gallery owner – took Francis Bacon to Moscow. It was, as he writes, "an unimaginable intrusion of Western Culture into the heart of the Soviet system". At a time of powerful political tension and suspicion, but also optimism and opportunity, the process of exhibiting Bacon was riddled with difficulties, careful negotiations, joys and disappointments.In this extract, we find James in 1988 and perestroika is in full bloom: General Secretary Gorbachev appears to be at the height of his popularity and power, and a possible democracy beckons. James Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You react differently to Meeting Gorbachev knowing that the film’s subject was on occasions brought to its interviews from hospital by ambulance; his interlocutor, Werner Herzog, doesn’t mention that fact, of course, anywhere in the three encounters on which this documentary is based, but he has alluded to it elsewhere.It seems somehow out of place to express cavils that the tone of this encounter is supremely respectful, that Herzog does not press Gorbachev into commentary on events of history beyond those in which he was immediately involved. Though today’s Russians would hardly agree with Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Stanislav Aseyev is a Ukrainian writer who came in from the cold. Until the spring of 2014, he was an aspiring poet and novelist based in the eastern Donbas region: when, however, its main city and surrounding area fell under the control of pro-Russian militants, he began to document the alternative reality of life in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).Now collected and translated into English by Lidia Wolandskyji, his dispatches (written for the Mirror Weekly newspaper under the pen name Stanislav Vasin) provide a fascinating insight into the culture war at the heart of the fight Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s such a genial feel to the pairing of Oliver Ford Davies and Stephen Boxer in Ben Brown’s new play that there are moments when we almost forget the weighty historical circumstances that lay behind the long-awaited encounter between two old friends, this evening of conversation and drinking, that is its subject. For Brown’s protagonists are sometime MI6 colleagues Graham Greene and Kim Philby, reunited in Moscow in 1987 as the former, now one of the world's best-known writers, pays a visit to his old acquaintance, the defector ensconced in the third decade of his Soviet exile. The Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a striking interview among the extras for this Criterion edition of Russian director Larisa Shepitko’s fourth and final feature. The director was talking in 1978 to Bavarian Television at the Berlin Film Festival, where The Ascent had won the top award, the Golden Bear, the previous year. She had only just turned 40 yet speaks about her World War II film with the absolute authority – not least about moral and spiritual subjects – of a figure far more established on the world cinema scene (her achievements to date were remarkable anyway for the hurdles she had overcome as a woman Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Veteran Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky has gone back to his beginnings for his latest film. The real-life events on which Dear Comrades! is based took place in June 1962, when social unrest over rising prices saw strikes break out in Novocherkassk, an industrial town in Russia’s south, culminating in street protest against the Soviet regime. The very idea of such an uprising was, of course, anathema in the “workers’ paradise” that was the communist system, and it was brutally suppressed by the Kremlin. The extent of the casualties was concealed, the dead secretly buried, and the events Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Kantemir Balagov’s second feature announces the arrival of a major new talent in arthouse cinema. Made by the Russian director when he was just 27, and premiered at Cannes last year, where it won in the “Un Certain Regard” strand, Beanpole approaches its bleak aftermath-of-war story with all the practised subtlety of an established auteur while delivering an emotional impact that is empathetic and shocking in equal measure.Set in 1945 in Leningrad, months after the end of the Great Patriotic War at a time when any elation of victory has given way to an understanding that the future will be Read more ...
India Lewis
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a collective examination of its past, with Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich at the helm. Young Heroes of the Soviet Union looks back at the USSR through the lens of the personal, much like recent memoirs East West Street and The Hare with Amber Eyes. Like these accounts, Halberstadt’s book focuses, at least in part, on the tragic history of the Jews in Europe. It works well in that Halberstadt relates the story to himself throughout – not so frequently as to feel heavy-handed, but often enough so as not to lose himself as the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For travellers, “music is a passport, especially in Russia…” Borrowing an adage from the British diplomat Thomas Preston, Sophy Roberts could be speaking about the eccentric quest that lies behind The Lost Pianos of Siberia. Preston, as consul in Yekaterinburg through the Russian Revolution and ensuing Civil War, no doubt needed all the extra cultural support he could find, witnessing control of the city pass between the Bolsheviks and the Whites, and living there when the Imperial family met its end. That tragic page of history provides a chapter for Roberts, loosely following her search for Read more ...
James Dowsett
When U.S. president George W. Bush looked into the eyes of Vladimir Putin he famously “saw his soul”. In his latest meditation on modern Russia, Britain's top Kremlinologist Robert Service gets as close to the Russian president’s soul as may be possible in a scholarly account. No less could have been expected from the author of a series of magisterial biographies on the Soviet leaders, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. Service offers us no clumsy caricatures in Kremlin Winter. He does not try to scare us with bogeymen. His even-handed, level-headed analysis restores critical ambiguity to the riddle Read more ...
theartsdesk
Between 1991 to 2012, Belorussian journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich travelled the countries that constituted the former USSR conducting interviews with the “the little great people” who had lived under Soviet communism and witnessed its demise. The resulting book, Second-Hand Time, is an oral history which tells through the words of ordinary people the end of what she, in her 2015 Nobel Prize lecture, called a “historical experiment”. This is the third of three extracts.Margarita K., Armenian refugee, 41 years oldOh! That’s not what I’m talking about… that’s not what I want to Read more ...