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FiveBooks Interviews
Journalist and author Oliver Bullough chooses books on the Caucasus and says the only language Russia understands is unconditional surrender, whether Russia is ruled by the Tsars, the Communists or Vladimir Putin. He reminds us that in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia published after the war, the population of Kabardino-Balkaria was listed as 60 per cent Circassian, 10 per cent Russian. The 30 per cent of unmentioned indigenous Balkars had been deported, with about one third dying in the process.
Dr Lyubov Vinogradova was born in Moscow in 1973. After graduating from the Moscow Agricultural Academy and later defending a PhD in microbiology, she took a second degree in foreign languages, choosing English and German. In 1995 she was introduced to Antony Beevor and helped him research Stalingrad. Since then she has worked on many other research projects with Antony Beevor and other English-speaking writers and also her own projects. She is the co-author (together with Anthony Beevor) of A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army. She says American victims of the Great Depression came to Russia to find jobs and support their families in the 1920 and 30s. ‘The Soviet authorities used all sorts of tricks to get them to take up citizenship. They were told that they had to hand over their American passports temporarily and they never saw them again. And then they lost any rights that American citizens have or legal grounds to be protected. It was a great tragedy.’
Andrei Maylunas is an eminent historian on pre-Soviet Russia with unique access to the Moscow archives. He has edited and compiled several books on the Romanoffs. He says Dostoevsky’s book Demons is about Russia’s future. ‘It’s about what has happened, and what’s going to happen to Russia’s intelligentsia and nobility. It gives you a flavour of the nascent 20th-century Russia with all its ups and downs: the literature, horrors, terrors, revolutions, bloodshed, the peaks, the depths – you already feel it. You smell it and you taste it in Demons.’
Rated by the British Library as among the top ten foreign poets currently based in London, Hasan-Zadeh is one of the most exciting voices in contemporary poetry. Her collection On Wings Over the Horizon, translated into English in 2002 by Richard McKane, drew comparisons with Anna Akhmatova and Maria Tsvetayeva.
Robert Service is Professor of Russian Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford. His research interests cover Russian history from the late 19th century to the present day and he has written numerous books on the subject. Nowadays he is focusing on Russia in its international framework. He is currently working on the geopolitics of the Russian Revolution as well as a study of the end of the Cold War. He talks to the Browser about the books that led to his passion and the importance of analysing the causes and outcomes of political processes.
Christie is Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, London. He has worked at the British Film Institute as head of variously Distribution, Exhibition, Video Publishing, and, Special Projects, as well as being an art historian and curator. He talks Eisenstein and Tarkovsky and tells us about a pre-Revolutionary Siberian gold merchant's daughter who opened a cinema for the upper classes called Just Like Paris.
Dr Stephen Lucas is a partner in the banking group of an international law firm, Linklaters LLP. A student of Soviet law, he wrote his PhD thesis on “The Foundations of the Law on Industrial Organisations in Russia and the Former Republics of the USSR”. For more than 15 years, he has advised companies and financial institutions on matters relating to Russian law and investment. In his view, the demise of the Soviet Union left the West somehow bereft of a mainstream political ideological alternative – and so, while the battle for liberty was won in 1991, it seems that the nature of that liberty somehow now misses an important element of radical choice and debate that was posed by the Soviets.
Nick Thorpe lives in Budapest with his wife and five children and began reporting in February 1986 as the first western journalist to be based there. He is the only British journalist to have covered Eastern Europe from the inside for over 20 consecutive years. He witnessed the collapse of Yugoslavia, popular uprisings in Bulgaria and Serbia, and the transformation of non-violent to violent resistance in Kosovo. As the BBC’s Central Europe correspondent he continues to report the successes and the failures of a revolution which never quite reaches its goal.
An Australian writer best known for his historical novels, Thomas Keneally portrays characters who are gripped by their historical and personal past, and decent individuals often at odds with systems of authority. At age 17, Keneally entered a Roman Catholic seminary, but he left before ordination. His best-known work, Schindler’s Ark, adapted into the film Schindler’s List, tells the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than 1,300 Jews from the Nazis. It won the Booker Prize in 1982. His latest novel, The People’s Train, is partly set in Russia and here Keneally tells The Browser which books inspired him.
Vanora Bennett covered the first post-Soviet Chechen war for Reuters and the Los Angeles Times in the course of a wide-ranging career as a foreign correspondent. She received a US Press Club Foreign Reporting Award and an Orwell Prize for Journalism. She talks to The Browser about Chechnya’s long struggle against Russian rule, and the horrific cost in civilian suffering.