Russia

Martin McCauley argues that our obsession with Stalin as a mass murderer evades the real question – how did his system work?

Russia oldest love letter was discovered, in 1995, among medieval rubbish heaps excavated in Novgorod.

Mark Galeotti looks at how crime and punishment in Boris Yeltsin's Russia, and that of the Tsars, have uncanny resonances.

Bill Wallace looks at the mixed inheritance of democratic ideas in Mother Russia and beyond as possible auguries for the future of the regimes that have succeeded the Soviet Union.

Paul Dukes looks at how history, like everything else in Russia, is being turned inside out.

By the late 1920s, Stalin and the Soviet Union seemed on the road to totalitarianism. Did the system spawn a monster – or a monster the system? 

The Russians are coming... not the fantasy of a Cold War movie, but the 19th-century attempt at incorporating the West Coast of America peacefully into the bear's domain. Jeffrey Miller tells the story of how it happened and why it failed.

Edward Acton looks to the Tsarist ancien regime of the 19th century to set the scene for a historical understanding of Russia that does not throw out the baby with its Marxist bathwater.

In the light of the revised interest in the Soviet cinema Richard Taylor questions whether our traditional view of its output after 1917 as mere uplift (dreary or otherwise) is justified.