On Memory

Memory in Europe and the post-Soviet sphere and its influence on contemporary populist politics.

The Saturday Paper •

Bombard the Headquarters!

In the West, the Cultural Revolution has become a rhetorical bogyman to ward off ideological excesses on university campuses, an analogy that suffers from the fact that the Cultural Revolution was top-down, instigated by Mao Zedong to check reform. It is worth considering why it remains the high-water mark of ideological puritanism and mob justice, remarkable as its actors – mostly students – had no memory of the pre-revolutionary world they were railing against. Sinologist Linda Jaivin somehow...
The Saturday Paper •

The Death of Stalin

If tragedy plus time is comedy, then what does comedy become? Insight? Farce? Revelation? It depends on what and who is writing about it. If the anglophone world’s best historian of the Soviet Union takes over from Britain’s sharpest satirist to deal with the death of a dictator, the stakes run high. The Death of Stalin is Sheila Fitzpatrick’s 30th book in a career that has repudiated top-down monolithic Cold War models to develop an entire school dedicated to understanding the Soviet Union as...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

The untold story of the Australians who helped fight Franco

HISTORY Anti-Fascists: Jim McNeill and his mates in the Spanish Civil WarMichael SamarasConnor Court Publishing, $39.95Doubtless European leaders today use the Spanish Civil War as a lesson to harden resolve against Vladimir Putin and Russia. Like Ukraine, the Spanish War came to represent a global struggle against authoritarianism. The Western democracies’ milquetoast non-intervention response deteriorated into appeasing Adolf Hitler, failing utterly to check fascism’s advance early, leading to...
The Saturday Paper •

Mussolini: Son of the Century is a warning for our times

Throughout the eight-part miniseries Mussolini: Son of the Century, available on SBS On Demand, we almost never see the sky. The camera is instead pressed up against actor Luca Marinelli’s face, tracking every bead of sweat, every throbbing vein, as chiaroscuro warps and pivots across his features. This is Mussolini as Iago, confiding his machinations against the teetering Italian democracy. “Make Italy great again,” he declaims in English, staring directly into the camera. Such a gleeful recog...
The Saturday Paper •

The art of not forgetting in Barcelona

We’re running late. By the time we have woven through central Barcelona’s warren of alleys and plazas to reach Plaça de Sant Felip Neri, the square’s entrance is fenced off by a flimsy yellow barricade. Beyond, a dozen schoolkids squeal and chase a ball over the grimy paving stones, dodging around a dormant fountain where a lone girl sits. Except for a few leafless trees, nothing dampens the crack as the ball ricochets against the façade of the Sant Felip Neri church, its sandstone rudely gouged...
Condé Nast Traveler •

In Georgia, Wine Forges National Identity—and Deep Pride

“How do you know when it's ready to harvest?” I think aloud, staring at what is, now, just a dusty bunch of grapes.Third-generation winemaker Bacho Burjanadze holds the fruit up for us, a group of sixteen travelers who just met this morning. “You see this mist?” he says, rubbing a film of natural yeast off the grape’s skin to reveal shiny sea-green flesh below the brown nebula of sugar. Last season’s late hail ruined much of the harvest, but this year has been warm and dry. Burjanadze is optimis...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Alexei Navalny’s memoir is a reminder of literature’s true purpose

The West’s Alexei Navalny is a sketch joining three data points: his miraculous survival from poisoning, his return to Russia and his death in prison. To Putin, he was another Rasputin who bewitched Russia with the promise of democracy and survived the Kremlin’s attempts to poison, smear and assassinate. Until he didn’t.Patriot, his memoir, renders Navalny back to human proportions, a man who gets butterflies before public speaking, enjoys Rick and Morty, i...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

From brunch to living in a war zone: how war upended a writer’s life

In an article in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Oleksandr Mykhed frames the Russian invasion of Ukraine not as belligerent power play or geopolitical stunt but an outright assault on Ukraine’s very existence.The passage begins with a dream Mykhed has one night, a “whimsical homage” to Catcher in the Rye, but instead of catching children falling from a cliff,...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Eight years’ jail in absentia: The Russian-American journalist writing today’s history

Germany has some of the world’s strictest historical regulations and considers the Holocaust a singular event that is beyond comparison. Gessen’s essay wove together official and unofficial ways the Holocaust is remembered, how the boycott-Israel movement is framed as antisemitic in Germany, and how charges of antisemitism are now wielded by the right against critics. The German-Israeli Society obliquely accused the essay of being antisemitic, important considering Gessen is Jewish and had a gra...
The Age •

An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen as The Sympathizer makes it onto the screen

There’s an irony in the small-screen adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer being a hit with viewers and critics alike, as Hollywood has long been one of his targets. “The Unofficial Ministry of Propaganda for the United States” as he calls Hollywood in the book is “a part of the mechanism of American military and political hegemony, and imperialism that produced someone like me”, Nguyen says, referring to his own experience as a refugee who fled Vietnam, yet who accepts that he
The Sydney Morning Herald •

China’s ‘counter-historians’ challenging the Communist Party

POLITICS Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and the Battle for the Future Ian Johnson Allen Lane, $55 In 2012, I took a five-week bullet-train tour of China’s East Coast. Hoisted on pylons, I soared above the fields and villages of old China, to the surging cities of a bold new country. My final stop was a visit to Mao’s mausoleum in Beijing. A long stream of mourners filed through to view the Great Helmsman, wrapped in the hammer and sickle. Many lay yellow roses, which, lest the pile ti
The Saturday Paper •

The Shortest History of Economics

How did everything become so unfair? As a child I had a keen sense for the rigged. During family games of Monopoly, frustration mounted until some unlucky roll condemned me to jail and I would flip the board. I have now curbed my Godzilla tantrums but today’s real estate ads are enough to summon the same storm clouds. Andrew Leigh’s excellent The Shortest History of Economics explains this was the point of Monopoly. Writer Lizzie Magie created The Landlord’s Game to educate players about 19th-c
The Sydney Morning Herald •

The secret underground city the US tried to bomb out of existence

How long you’ve been in Laos will decide how you react to Viengxay’s landscape. To new arrivals, bungalows nestled between towering misty limestone peaks will constitute an achingly beautiful sight but to the acclimatised, this is just more Northern Laos. And that’s the point. Viengxay was a secret underground city used by the Lao Communist Party (Pathet Lao) between 1964-73, to provide shelter from Yankee bombs, allowing the upper echelons here to conduct a revolution and win a civil war. At it
The Sydney Morning Herald •

When a great journalist turns her scrupulous eye on herself

I began reading Janet Malcolm as did many a budding non-fiction writer with The Journalist and the Murderer. It was an affront to my cherished ideal that contributing to the record was inherently noble. To Malcolm, the journalist is half traitor, half parasite. They seduce their subject, leech their story then publish it as their own. What about when the author is the subject? “If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue what you could call me
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Six decades on, why are these Australian nuclear tests still shrouded in secrecy?

While on research, I visited the Polygon, an area in remote north-eastern Kazakhstan where the USSR conducted hundreds of nuclear tests. It was late summer and the battered earth was carpeted in wildflowers. The situation in our rump-sprung four-wheel drive had become tense. Our guide, a former Soviet nuclear physicist, baulked at a question asking whether the Polygon had been evacuated of Kazakh tribespeople before testing had begun. Incensed, he turned to me: “You are from Australia, no? Why d
The Saturday Paper •

The Shortest History of India

How does a writer condense 5000 years of Indian history into a single short book without losing themselves in what they’re omitting? India is a fluid tessellation of ethnicities and languages that shift through the blooming of religions, the clash of empires and the sweep of invasions. Even the geography is hard to define, with edges that have grown and shrunk. Borders with three neighbours are still in dispute. John Zubrzycki has boldly taken this task on in The Shortest History of India. The
Michael West •

A loud slap for Putin's mates, but are Australian sanctions a paper tiger?

As Russia scales the heights of brutality in its war against Ukraine, sanctions against its wealthy freebooters are an easy step in international lawfare. But such idealism can founder against the wall of worldwide corporate (mis)governance, writes Kurt Johnson. On March 18 the Australian government added Viktor Vekselberg and Oleg Deripaska to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Consolidated List of individuals facing targeted sanctions. That the federal government waited so long led
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Ukraine neighbours try to carry on with ‘surreal’ lives

Over the border, the war is close enough for Tim Tiraspol to hear. Every day it begins “at 5am like clockwork” with bombs and Ukrainian anti-aircraft guns. He has been working for 15 years as a tour guide in the breakaway state of Transnistria, which despite having its own currency and passports, is considered by most countries as simply part of Moldova. Life has become “surreal like a Disney cartoon,” says Tiraspol who also works as local liaison for foreign journalists and takes his work nam
Crikey •

The Soviet past isn’t dead. It’s not even past

In Ukraine, one question looms above all: how will it end? In major Russian cities, protesters have bravely taken to the streets in defiance of armed police. People power has a special tradition in Russia, not only in the Bolshevik revolution but the Soviet collapse and, in its wake, the foiled coup to reestablish the Soviet Union -- all were swayed by those on Russian city streets. Putin’s approval rating was a solid 71% in independent Levada-Center polls, as troops were building up on the bor
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