USSR


The legendary Bill Shankly once drolly summed up how important football had become: “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.” There are very few occasions when football lives up to this quote and is literally a matter of life and death, but a […]

The ultimate grudge match


Josef Stalin is remembered for many things – establishing a brutal dictatorship over the Soviet Union, his determination to create a buffer zone in Eastern Europe and thus close the iron curtain, the capriciousness and cruelty of the security system he set up and brutalising terror of the gulag system. It is, therefore, not surprising that Stalin’s wit and raw intelligence are rarely focused on. But […]

The wicked wit of Josef Stalin



The city of Chelyabinsk is situated to the south-east of the Urals, close to Kazakhstan and serves as a gateway to Russia’s vast Asian expanses. It lies on the Trans-Siberian Railway and is one of a string of railway towns that grew to service this immense trans-continental corridor. It was this geographic location that ensured Chelyabinsk would grow to become a town of 45,000 by 1913. […]

Tankograd – Chelyabinsk and the salvation of the Soviet Union


Few military operations can have been given a more appropriate code name than Operation Unthinkable. As Allied armies laboriously clawed through a shattered Europe, circling and invading Nazi Germany, British military planners were considering a possible next chapter for the European theatre of conflict. Remarkably, the plan envisaged an attack on the Soviet Union – Britain’s wartime partner and, by various measures, the strongest of the […]

Thinking the (Operation) Unthinkable



There is an episode of South Park were the children discover that pesky adults and their rules could be made to disappear if they utter a magic word – molestation. Soon, South Park has no adults left as they have either been arrested or have fled to avoid being denounced. It seems far-fetched, but has a disturbingly real parallel in the Soviet Union during the turmoil […]

Denouncing your parents


Of all the possible insults to fling at H G Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb, calling them idiots seems off the mark. All were successful writers, with passionate interests in social reform and the progress of humanity. They were the creative idea-forgers, opinion formers and protest leaders. Amongst their achievements was the foundation of the London School of Economics and Political Science, attempts to […]

The Kremlin’s useful idiots