All posts filed under: history and politics

7. Russian Childhood

This week’s Podularity podcast features an interview with Catriona Kelly, who has just published a monumental new history of childhood in twentieth-century Russia. The book, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia 1890-1991, draws not only on a vast amount of archival research but also on hundreds of interviews with Russians of all ages in which they discuss their memories of childhood, both happy and unhappy. What quickly becomes clear is that the familiar western impression of identically dressed children paying homage to ‘Beloved Stalin’ is a crude caricature of a much richer, more complex reality. The book reveals what childhood was really like for millions of Soviet children, shedding light on everything from the swaddling of peasant children to life in orphanages or children’s games and toys. As Catriona explains in our interview, she wanted to convey ‘what Russian schools looked like, what school food was like, what people’s relations to their parents were like in single-room communal apartments – essentially to show how the “children’s world” was not just a cliché, but also the …

Beslan: a photo-essay

This week, instead of a podcast, we have a photo-essay by Timothy Phillips, author of Beslan: the Tragedy of School No.1, which was the subject of our podcast on 15 November. Tim took these pictures in the spring following the terrorist attack. Here is how he describes the moment when, after a long overland journey from Moscow, he first confronts School No.1: I stood still and looked straight ahead. There is was, set in bright grass, dandelion-speckled and overlooked by trees: a building deeply at odds with its surroundings. Swallows and thrushes darted about. I could hear children playing in nearby streets and gardens. The building spoke for itself. It bore witness to the wrongs done inside its walls. The mangled roof appeared jagged against the blue sky. Crimson curtains billowed out of empty window frames. Bullet holes and bloodstains drew my eye away from the flowers. Torn and sodden textbooks lay where they had fallen months before. Graffiti promised those who had not survived that they would be remembered and avenged. You can see …

5. Sofka Zinovieff on the trail of the Red Princess

A few years ago Sofka Zinovieff became fascinated by the life of her grandmother and namesake, Sofka Dolgorouky, who was born into a noble family in imperial Russia exactly a century ago. Sofka had known her grandmother when she was already an old woman and, although she knew something of her colourful life, she was to make many discoveries as she researched her book. Her quest was to take her back to her grandmother’s childhood home in St Petersburg and their country estate in the Crimea. It would also lead her to a prison camp in eastern France and the archives of MI5… You can see some of the great reviews the book has had by clicking here.

4. ‘Real stories of ordinary people…’ – Remembering Beslan

On the morning of 1 September 2004, children and teachers all over Russia were getting ready for the first day of the new school year. So begins Timothy Phillips’ account of the terrible siege of School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia. Of course, we know now that that day three years ago which began as a celebration was to turn into the worst terrorist atrocity in Russian history. But although we remember the harrowing scenes filmed by the terrorists in the school gymnasium on the camcorders which proud parents had brought to the parade, and the disastrous, chaotic end to the siege in which so many people died, many of us may have a sketchier understanding of what lay behind those events: Who were the hijackers? What motivated them? And what why did they come to Beslan? These are among the questions that Timothy Phillips tries to answer in his book on the siege. He travelled to Beslan a few months after the siege and spoke to those involved. In the interview, I ask …