Coronavirus: histories of emergency powers
As the proverb goes: it’s pointless to complain about losing your hair when they’re about to cut off your head. Across the world, coronavirus, not its longer-term impact, is the … Continue reading
Stalin and Hiroshima
In Hiroshima today, President Obama avoided a politically toxic and morally doubtful apology for the atomic bombing of Japan. Instead he faced up to the dangers of war. ‘We have … Continue reading
The Nazi-Soviet pact: a moral problem
‘Historians often dislike what happened or wish that it had happened differently,’ wrote AJP Taylor, the great British historian-provocateur of the last century. He concluded: ‘There is nothing they can … Continue reading
John Steinbeck invents ‘late Stalinism’
John Steinbeck visited the Soviet Union in 1947 when it was going through its post-war purgatory. What an encounter: between the author of The Grapes of Wrath (later to win … Continue reading
1917: the revolution of multitudes
‘Make arrangements for the children,’ said Molotov to his closest friend, Alexander Arosev, shortly before Arosev’s arrest in July 1937. You can read this and have a pure connection with the … Continue reading
Stalin, the weak dictator? Or, where was Putin?
Between 1936 and 1938, the people of the Soviet Union were tortured by the Great Terror, the arrest and execution of almost seven hundred thousand innocent people on invented charges. One of the … Continue reading
September 1937: Stalin’s welfare-terror state
The core fact of Soviet history is the Great Terror, the semi-judicial murder of almost seven hundred thousand people between 1936 and 1938. It was the high point of Bolshevik … Continue reading
Two votes: 1946 and 2012
What was it like to vote for Stalin? One of the most important elections in Soviet history was the 1946 poll for the Supreme Soviet, the country’s ‘parliament’. Of course … Continue reading
