War in Ukraine

Penal Colony No. 2. A girl in a green coat. Red splashes of fireworks against the night sky. She arrives back in Moscow: photographers, a clamour of questions, what is it like to be free? Meetings, cops, her little six-year-old son with a sparkler, a video being recorded, her mother nearby, anxious. Like the flickering, scratchy lens of a film projector, Maria Alyokhina’s Political Girl illuminates the story of her life from the moment she and the other members of Pussy Riot were let out of prison in 2013 until, in 2022, she finally fled Russia disguised as a delivery driver. Nine years of fighting the slowly tightening noose of

The excellent Moscow-born journalist Julia Ioffe’s first book recounts a well-known slice of Russian history from a fresh perspective – that of the mighty Russian woman who, it’s said, can ‘stop a galloping horse and run into a burning hut’. And how superhumanly brave and resilient they have had to be. Women were granted sweeping rights following the Revolution, then watched them dwindle for the rest of the century, in law but mainly in practice. What remained was the Soviet obligation to work regardless of gender, which created a country of professional women in every sphere: engineers, cosmonauts, judges, professors and 70 per cent of doctors by the 1970s. Ioffe

‘Write and record’ was the dying instruction of the historian Simon Dubnow – shot by Nazis in the Riga ghetto – and two books recently emerging from Ukraine embody this spirit in spades. Now that the world’s anger and sympathies have largely moved on to the Middle East, they may do something to rekindle that earlier sense of outrage and remind the ‘caring’ classes of atrocities closer to home. ‘My hatred flows from thesmall things to the big things. Every fibre is filled with it’ The first, Our Daily War, comes from Andrey Kurkov, the celebrated Russo-Ukrainian novelist and author of 2022’s Invasion Diary, a detailed on-the-ground account of Putin’s