USSR
Charlie Bertsch / 28 Jun 2023

Back to the Future

Decisive Pink’s Ticket to Fame

Ticket to Fame, the debut LP by avantpop duo Decisive Pink, isn’t likely to take them far. But the band's refusal to follow the playbook for success gives the record a staying power that hit-minded music rarely achieves.(...)
Drasko Duranovic / 12 May 2023

A Day of Shame

9 May in Montenegro

On that hundredth day, that ninth of May 1942, at opposite ends of Nikšić, two people, Ljubo Čupić and Joka Baletić, went to their deaths because they stood up against fascism.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 05 May 2023

The Long 1980s

Molchat Doma in America

When Belorussian dark wave band Molchat Doma began to play their viral TikTok hit Судно at their recent Tucson, Arizona show, I looked out over the tightly packed crowd filling the floor in front of me and was struck by how happy and how diverse it was, from race to age to fashion.(...)
Natalie Sarkic-Todd / 27 Mar 2023

Restoring Stalin

The House on the Embankment

Seventy years after his death, the rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin was unexpected. Yet however you analyse it, when a government spends decades glorifying a genocidal dictator and only later admits their crimes, we shouldn’t be surprised by a comeback.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 16 Feb 2023

Ukraine in Hindsight

Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front, Edward Berger’s astoundingly brutal adaptation of Eric Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel about World War I – the favourite to win this year’s Best International Film Oscar – is timely to a degree that would have been hard to imagine when the project began.(...)
John Foster / 04 Feb 2023

Fake News About History

Ukraine is Not Stalingrad

Foucault once suggested that Clausewitz's famous observation, "war is not merely a political act but a real political instrument" carried out by other means, be reversed, with politics made an extension of war.(...)