USSR
Power, Politics and Performance in Russia: Collective Memory and the Cult of Stalin
By Elliot Goat “It took me years to make sense of my own history, and Russian society will take a similar time.”– Vladimir Ashurkov, Russian opposition politician In collaboration with Theatre Royal Plymouth and the Sputnik Theatre, on Thursday 14 January the Frontline Club presented a staged reading of Grandchildren: The Second Act by Alexandra Polivanova […]
BBC Storyville Preview: George Blake – Masterspy of Moscow + Q&A
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director George Carey. In April 1953, George Blake returned to Britain as a national hero, one of a small group of British diplomats who returned alive from three hard years as prisoner of the North Koreans. When the new Queen was crowned a couple of months later, he was among the select few invited to celebrate the day in No. 2 Carlton Gardens, a discreet building overlooking the Mall from where the men who ran Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service were watching the royal procession go by. Little did they know that during his time as a prisoner he had become a Communist and decided to work for the KGB. In The Making of a Traitor, director George Carey speaks to Blake’s close acquaintances, historians and other former spies to chronicle his curious history.
The End of the Wall: 25 Years After the Fall
By Graham Lanktree The young Harvard-educated economist Miklós Németh didn’t dream he would play a decisive role in the fall of the Berlin Wall when he was appointed Prime Minister by Hungary’s Communist Party to fix the nation’s finances in late 1988. Only a year later he was at the centre of it all. On […]