Beginning at the End
A childhood world of fallen heroes and shattered certainties experienced during the fall of communism in Albania.
Communism
Between China and a Hard Place
Mao Zedong once said that Taiwan should be independent, but the Chinese Communist Party has since changed its mind. How Chinese is Taiwan?
The First Soviet in Ireland
Striking for better working conditions and equal pay, the attendants and patients of Monaghan asylum took over the hospital and hoisted a red flag.
The ‘Stans’ Turn 30
Is Kazakhstan 30 or 556 years old? As the five states of Central Asia celebrate three decades of independence, they prefer the glories of the ancient past to the legacy of Soviet rule.
Rebels in Rubber Soles
The denizens of an Asian underground who waged a clandestine struggle against European colonial powers.
New Year’s Revolutions
Revisiting 1949, when Mao’s new world beckoned.
The Forging of a Communist
The historian Eric Hobsbawm kept faith with the Marxist orthodoxies of his youth even after the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956, of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Why?
Zhou Enlai: Mao’s Enigmatic Shadow
How important was China’s senior diplomat to his nation’s rise to global power, or is it too early to say?
Revolution and the Fortune of War
On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, five books track its transition from idealism to tyranny.
The Man in Carriage No. 2013
Leo Steveni was a British officer based in St Petersburg at the time of the Russian Revolution. He became an active eyewitness to the chaos of the Civil War that followed.