Soviet Union

Maxim Gorky was revered over the lifetime of the Soviet Union as the leading artist and intellectual associated with the 1917 Revolution. But did he really approve of Lenin and the Bolshevik experiment? 

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

David Elliott looks at how Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler used culture to their own ends and how the ramifications of this has continued to the present.

In the first of our contributions from the Russian magazine Rodina, Sergei Kudryashov charts the twists and turns of the Soviet leader's tricksy diplomacy with his Western comrades-in-arms and its impact on the war effort.

How did Hitler's armies try and persuade the occupied populations of the Soviet Union to live with their new regime? British military historian John Erickson comments on wartime posters unearthed from the Russian archives.

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.

An insight into how the activities of Allied crews from the ill-fated PQ-17 Arctic convoy of 1942 to wartime Russia were viewed by one of Stalin's commissars. The article is part of an agreement with the Russian history magazine, Rodina, whereby History Today will have access to and publish in English, formerly top-secret documents now being released from the Soviet archives.

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

Brian Dooley assesses the incident which brought the world perilously close to nuclear war.

Did the system spawn a monster - or a monster the system? Norman Pereira re-evaluates the road to totalitarianism in the Soviet Union after the Revolution, and Stalin's part in it.