Iron Curtain


In an era when the Communist countries of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe sought to rival the west in everything, how did they respond to Eurovision? Did they mockingly highlight its kitsch naffness as demonstration of all that was wrong with capitalism? Or did they manage to create something even more awful behind the Iron Curtain? The Cold War was a period of sustained tension, […]

Singing for Communism


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