Soviet Union
Extract: Bacon in Moscow by James BirchFriday, 07 July 2023
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... Read more... |
Meeting Gorbachev review - Werner Herzog offers a swansong tributeWednesday, 31 August 2022
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... Read more... |
Stanislav Aseyev: In Isolation - Dispatches from Occupied Donbas review - journeys through space and time in UkraineWednesday, 29 June 2022
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-... Read more... |
A Splinter of Ice, Original Theatre Company online review - Graham Greene and Kim Philby are friends reunitedMonday, 19 April 2021
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... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The AscentTuesday, 23 February 2021
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... Read more... |
Dear Comrades! review - Andrei Konchalovsky exposes the Soviet pastThursday, 14 January 2021
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... Read more... |
Blu-ray: BeanpoleSunday, 13 September 2020
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... Read more... |
Alex Halberstadt: Young Heroes of the Soviet Union review - a familial history of the twentieth centurySaturday, 08 August 2020
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... Read more... |
Sophy Roberts: The Lost Pianos of Siberia review - a distant musical journeySunday, 09 February 2020
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... Read more... |
Robert Service: Kremlin Winter review – behind Putin's masksSunday, 24 November 2019
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... Read more... |
Book extract: Second-Hand Time by Svetlana AlexievichFriday, 15 November 2019
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... Read more... |
Book extract: Second-Hand Time by Svetlana AlexievichWednesday, 13 November 2019
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... Read more... |
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