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.
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
On a Russian Telegram channel, Svetlana from Samara is making a public plea. She has not heard from her brother since the shelling of Makiivka on 31 December, which may have killed up to 400 Russian soldiers. Enquiries to the military registration, the city governor, the Ministry of Defence have apparently turned up nothing. ‘After all my
‘War is the realm of uncertainty’, said the Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz, and this would seem to apply very well to affairs in Russia at the moment. Following September’s shock ‘partial mobilisation’, rumours have swirled around since of another mass-mobilisation due imminently. Having got Russian New Year (the country’s main December celebration) out
Travel the length and breadth of Russia – as you could fairly easily before the outbreak of war last February – and you will find, in many cities, a museum called Russia: My History. These institutions have a clear message for visitors. Empire-building luminaries like Ivan the Terrible and the despots Nicholas I and Alexander
What a difference 12 months makes. Last year, at the Ikea in Rostov-on-Don, South Russia, I splashed out on some especially good Christmas decorations. I had an eight-year-old, half-Russian daughter growing up in that city, and wanted a tree and lights that were made to last and could be brought out each December as a
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first novel, appeared 60 years ago this month. Vividly portraying a normal day in the life of a Gulag prisoner, it was followed by Solzhenitsyn’s two great anti-Stalinist novels, The First Circle and Cancer Ward (both 1968), which helped establish the Soviet dissident-in-excelsis as a
The latest series of The Crown has arrived on Netflix. To its predictable advantage, the show has already had the advance-publicity of raised voices. Ex-PM Sir John Major, commenting on a particular scene in the series between him and the then-Prince Charles, said it was a ‘barrel load of nonsense’ and would be ‘profoundly hurtful
When I moved to Rostov-on-Don, in the south of Russia, in 2018 for what was to be four happy years, (ending abruptly on 24 February) there was a baker’s shop, one among many, on the main thoroughfare of the city. I wandered past it countless times before noticing a pair of signs hanging outside, one
Renata is a young paediatrician from St Petersburg who, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, keeps crying at work. Her colleagues are baffled: why is she sobbing over Ukrainian deaths when she doesn’t have relatives there? She’s surrounded, she says, by ‘complete incomprehension’ from her fellow-doctors, ‘and I’m quietly going insane.’ Her mother Vinera, a school
Thirty two years ago, on a cold November Thursday, Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister, pushed out of office following 11 years in government. In 2022, after just 44 days, Liz Truss stood outside Downing Street on another Thursday autumn afternoon, to tender her own resignation to the British public. It had taken a cabal
Thousands of Russians are fleeing from Putin’s forced mobilisation. To escape from a call-up – and probable death sentence – on the frontlines of Ukraine, men and women are leaving behind their friends, families and possessions. They must dodge patrols and mobile check points at the borders to catch those trying to evade the call up.
Russia’s new crop of conscripts are a desperate, dejected bunch. A photograph showing an Orthodox priest blessing these men as they headed off to fight from the settlement of Bataysk in the Rostov region summed up their hopelessness. The names of such little known Russian localities must – to an English reader – all merge into one.
Anyone still in any doubt about the lengths to which Queen Elizabeth II was prepared to go in the line of duty might consider the hideous company the role at times foisted on her. In 1991, she had to clink glasses with Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, and 20 years earlier had dined with Ugandan despot
The Russian political and media establishment have got Liz Truss in their sights once again. As well as analyst Igor Korotchenko’s crude declaration that Truss ‘doesn’t belong in politics, but in the kitchen’, a clip currently doing the rounds on Russian TV shows her shocked reaction in July when presenter Kate McCann fainted and keeled
In the spring of 1994, year three of the Bosnian war, Ana, the daughter of the Bosnian Serb Lieutenant Colonel General Ratko Mladic, took a pistol from her father’s room in Belgrade – the special silver pistol with which he’d intended to celebrate the birth of his first grandchild – and shot herself in the
Estonia Independence Day – celebrating the country’s 1918 emancipation from the Russian empire – takes place on 24 February each year. This year, Independence Day for the Estonians was horribly ironic. ‘Instead of opening the news in the morning and seeing the expected ‘Happy Independence Day Everyone!’’ Lidia, a language-specialist, told me, ‘the headline was ‘Russia has
If the chaos of recent weeks in British politics has clarified anything, it’s the almost complete schism between Conservative MPs and the party’s members. That Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have made it to the final round of the Tory leadership contest, ahead of their more popular rivals, paints the Conservatives as a party that no longer
