Robin Ashenden is founder and ex-editor of the Central and Eastern European London Review. He is currently writing a novel about Solzhenitsyn, Khrushchev’s Thaw and the Hungarian Uprising.
With the reported arrest on Friday of Igor Girkin (aka ‘Strelkov’ or ‘Igor the Terrible’) the career of one of the Russia-Ukraine war’s most infamous, larger-than-life characters may finally have hit a dead end. Girkin, the career-killer with the sensitive face and soulful eyes, has played numerous parts in his time: activist, blogger, FSB colonel,
If during the 80s and 90s you were any kind of book lover, Milan Kundera – who died this week aged 94 – was one of that small clutch of modern novelists you absolutely had to read. In the late stages of the Cold War, the Czech-born Kundera not only gave us news about what was
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, it always seemed likely that the war would come back to Rostov-on-Don, the city which until then had been my home. Rostov isn’t just close to the border but feels it. Most of my university students were from the Donetsk and Lugansk, refugees from the 2014-2022 war. It’s
The main thoroughfare of Rostov-on-Don is today crawling with military vehicles and masked soldiers carrying automatics, and the entrance to that circus – which backs onto the Rostov military headquarters – is blocked aggressively by a tank. The city is now controlled by the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private army out on the rampage and
‘It’s too soon,’ said an anti-war Russian friend about the crop of books which have been emerging since late last year on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps he is right. Yet, mindful of Lenin’s maxim that ‘there are weeks when decades happen’, many may feel the period since February last year to have been one
Following the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, politicians in the West have followed the familiar dance of condemnation. ‘If it’s intentional,’ said PM Rishi Sunak, it would be ‘the largest attack on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine since the start of the war’ and represent ‘new lows’ in Russian aggression. France’s President Macron
How many memorable quotes has the Russia-Ukraine war produced so far? Along with Snake Island’s defiant ‘F*** you Russian warship’, we’ve had president Zelensky’s refusal to leave Kyiv at the beginning of the war with the words: ‘I need ammunition, not a ride.’ We also have his ‘Bravery takes you through the most unimaginable hardships
Not much happens in Russian families without the say so of the babushka. Russia’s high divorce-rate, and a situation where fathers are often absent and the mother out at work, makes it normal for grandmothers – who often hold the family purse-strings – to raise children themselves. This doesn’t, of course, mean that the younger
There is something oddly Christmassy about the scene: a night-time city bathed, festooned in twinkling white lights, the smoke around them almost luminous. A shower of brilliant sparks falls calmly from the air, lighting up the dark sky – the town below seeming to celebrate something, over and over, with a spectacular firework display: flares,
Few books change your life but one that heavily influenced mine was Among the Russians (1983), Colin Thubron’s travel book about the late Brezhnev-era USSR. Catching me as a 20 year-old, it launched me on a lifetime of living and travelling in the former Soviet Union. Returning in 1999 from a long trip to Minsk,
The Internet Archive (archive.org), a San Francisco-based virtual lending library, is one of the quiet wonders of the modern world. A digital collection of seven million books and nearly 15 million audio-recordings, it was ambitiously intended by its founder Brewster Kahle – a member of the internet ‘Hall of Fame’ – to be a kind of
This morning, like so many other mornings, I spent at least half an hour, over coffee, staring at online pictures of pipes. This does not make me an aspiring plumber, or someone with a fetish for u-bends or draining units. I’m talking about briar pipes, tobacco pipes: for though I know I should quit the
In the wake of draconian laws against ‘LGBT Propaganda’ introduced in Russia at the end of last year – namely, speaking with anything but flagrant condemnation about LGBT matters in public – Russia’s politicians seem to have sunk to a new low: feminism could soon be reclassified as an ‘extremist’ activity. A draft law setting
The last twelve months or so in the post-Soviet sphere have been, among other things, the year of the Molotov Cocktail. Who can forget those clips, amidst the outbreak of war last February, of Ukrainian women calmly packaging up bottles with petrol, rags and grated polystyrene, as though at a local sewing bee? Or of
Cast your mind back just over a decade, to a charity benefit gig in St. Petersburg in 2010. Sharon Stone, Kevin Costner, Gerard Depardieu, Vincent Cassel, Goldie Hawn and Monica Belluci are in the audience. But the star-turn is performed by a man from another branch of entertainment altogether (‘show-business for ugly people’) who in
The last manual typewriter, after 150 years of commercial production, was manufactured in the UK in 2012. Yet like all design classics, it refuses to lie down and die. There is a roaring trade in old models on eBay, and dealers such as the Typewriter Man in the UK and Mytypewriter.com in the US sell
Few people in Rostov-on-Don will weep over the news that a local FSB building in the city caught fire yesterday. Just the mention of the acronym for the Security Services (formerly KGB) was, when I lived there, enough to still and silence a room. When a girl in one of my classes announced rather proudly
With the recent news that Kindle and other e-readers are automatically updating Roald Dahl’s books to sanitised versions, an entire era has come to an end for readers like me. Who in future will feel safe buying an electronic copy of anything? Publishers’ plans here may be modest, but the point about the puritan is
For three and a half years, between Autumn 2018 and 2022, the most thrilling words I could say to anyone – especially myself – were ‘I live in Russia.’ I had read about the country since I was a child – obsessively from my mid-twenties onwards – and it was Holy Land for me. Other
As Vladimir Putin seemingly dithers over the question of whether to send a further 500,000 of his citizens onto the battlefield this winter, one reason against – as reported on Coffee House – is surely a lack of basic equipment for them. Since the ‘partial mobilisation’ of up to 300,000 hapless men last September, there
