Soviet Union Archives

Behind the New Iron Curtain

by Marzio G. Mian,Translated by Elettra Pauletto,

Caviar, counterculture, and the cult of Stalin reborn

Cogs of War

From the December 30, 1979, entry in his diary, which was released in May by the George Washington University National Security Archive. Chernyaev, a member of the Central Committee of…

Lord of the Files

by Aleksandr Zinoviev,

By Alexander Zinoviev, from Homo Sovieticus, a novel that was originally published in 1985 and is included in Boredom, an anthology that was published in January by M.I.T. Press and…

Silver Linings Daybook

by Arsenii Formakov,

From letters sent by Arsenii Formakov to his family, in Riga. Formakov was a Latvian poet, novelist, and journalist. In 1940, he was arrested for anti-Soviet activities and sentenced to…

The Trouble with Defectors

by Scott Ritter,

What informants taught an intelligence officer

Trick of the Russian Soul

by Svetlana Aleksievich,

From Secondhand Time, an oral history of post-Soviet Russia compiled by Svetlana Alexievich and published last month by Random House. Alexievich is the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in…

Under Western Eyes

by John Gray,

By John Gray, adapted from an article in the October 2014 issue of Prospect. Gray is the author of many books, including False Dawn, Straw Dogs, and The Silence of…

Each According to His Ability

by Andrei Platonov,

From responses by Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) to authors who submitted manuscripts in 1920 to The Red Village, a newspaper that he edited. Platonov’s novels include Chevengur and The Foundation Pit;…

Interrogation

by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzheniëtìsyn,

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years…

Secretary of Nothing

by Andrew Cockburn,

John Kerry and the myth of foreign policy

Two Women

by Amos Oz,Translated by Sondra Silverston,

By Amos Oz, from the story collection Between Friends, published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Oz is the author of several books, including, most recently, Jews and Words. Translated…

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