Black Sea Battleground

Posted on by David Gelber

Since the Crimean War of 1853–6 there has been little information for the English-speaking reader on Crimea’s history and peoples. Only the American scholar Alan Fisher has used the necessary Ottoman archives and other Turkic sources, but his writings, published in Istanbul in 1998, are not readily available. Putin’s annexation of Crimea, however, has induced […]

‘Things only ever got worse’

Posted on by David Gelber

Until recently, Svetlana Alexievich was little known outside the world of Russian studies. That changed last October, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first ever Belarussian and the first non-fiction writer since Winston Churchill to receive it. Since the start of her publishing career in the mid 1980s, her theme […]

Russia’s Wild East

Posted on by David Gelber

‘Here was a world all its own, unlike anything else; here were laws unto themselves, ways of dressing unto themselves, manners and customs unto themselves, a house of the living dead, a life unlike anywhere else, with distinct people unlike anyone else.’ So wrote Dostoevsky in Notes from the House of the Dead, a novel based loosely

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