During Viktor Yushchenko’s five years in power, Ukraine did not start facing up to its totalitarian history. Since President Yanukovich came to power, that task has become almost impossible.
Against a backdrop of an ever increasing politization of the Soviet past, journalist Elena Strelnikova returned to her old classroom. Her fly-on-the-wall account shows the contentious debates played through the eyes of 14-year-olds.
The NKVD’s mass execution in 1940 of Polish officers in Katyn Forest has complicated the often tense relations between Russia and Poland. But the plane crash on 10 April 2010 brought the countries closer together. Russia’s Levada Center has recently carried out a survey into Russian attitudes to P
History teaching has fallen victim to politics in Russia. Educational standards are falling and children are not being taught to think. They learn that Russia is great, but not the reasons why. Could this be because it is easier to run a nation of naïve, illiterate people who do not know their his
The plane crash at Smolensk which Poland’s president has provoked an outpouring of Russian sympathy, from Putin down. It has helped many Russians identify their country’s responsibility for the Katyn massacre in 1940. But it has left many others unmoved, even cynical. ‘Re-setting’ Russian-Polish r
With the death of Vladislav Ardzinba, Abkhazia’s first president, a period of post-Soviet upheaval passes further into history. Sergei Markedonov considers Ardzinba’s achievements in the wider context of the Caucasus
Arthur Koestler, whose turbulent life charts the intellectual history of the 20thc in the West, has finally found a worthy biographer in Michael Scammell. A youthful communist and survivor of Franco’s prisons, Koestler developed into one of the West’s most persuasive crusaders against communism.
Viktor Yushchenko has left his successor a ticking time bomb. His name is Stepan Bandera. Should Yanukovych strip him of the official status of hero, which he has been accorded?
Yegor Gaidar, architect of the radical economic reforms in Russia which followed the fall of Soviet power, died on 15 December. Dmitry Travin reflects on the achievement of a great economist and patriot who saved his country and quietly shouldered the hatred that followed.
Today, as Memorial receives the 2009 Sakharov Prize, Lyubov Borusyak talks to Ludmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, about the birth of Russia’s human rights movement. In 1956, after Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’, Russia’s people started talking once more, and circulating ‘samizdat’.
