Amazing music video that uses the metaphor of Tetris to tell the history of Russia and the Soviet Union
What if the Romanovs had been restored?
November 12, 2008 By
Martin Gilbert, writing in the Times, imagines an entirely different end to the First World War:
Imagine: in October 1918, Lloyd George’s Cabinet is planning for a prolonged struggle in 1919. Haig’s solution promises to avoid a confrontation even bloodier than the Somme or Passchendaele. The Government agrees. Germany’s main condition is to keep
Hammer and sickle over the Reichstag, 1945
May 2, 2008 By
On 30 April 1945, Mikhail Petrovich Minin scrambled to the top of the ruined Reichstag to raise the Soviet flag. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a photographer with him…
Khalkhin-Gol: The forgotten battle that shaped WW2
January 21, 2008 By
In August 1939, just weeks before Hitler invaded Poland, the Soviet Union and Japan fought the largest tank battle the world had ever seen
Future History – The decline and fall of Russia
June 22, 2007 By
Every now and then, someone pops up and says that, for Russia the end is nigh: the oil boom is unsustainable, the population is falling, the Chinese are coming, the vodka will run out – that sort of thing.
But, if Russia actually did collapse, how would it happen? John O’Sullivan has put… Read the rest
The Russians invented blogging
October 10, 2005 By
Oh, come on! Don’t tell me you thought blogging was a modern phenomenon. How foolish can you be? A Russian thought up the concept of blogging way back in 1837.
Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, a science fiction writer, philosopher, composer and all around good guy is the man we have to thank, reports Mosnews. In… Read the rest
Solider Nixon
October 3, 2005 By
What happens when you try to buy Russian literature in small town Queensland?
So I asked the old half-deaf biddy in the second hand bookshop if she had any books by Solzhenitsyn.
“Soldier Nixon, I don’t think so. Are they crime or thrillers or what ?”
Brushing aside the concept that Stalinist era
A 1960s exchange student in Moscow
February 6, 2005 By
David McDuff has just posted a beautifully written eleven part series series about his experiences as a student of Moscow State University in the 1960s.
It’s frightening, at times, how closely his observations of Soviet university life at that time mirror my own of student life in Irkutsk just a couple of years ago. The… Read the rest
