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Registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales. Charity No. 1105296 THE GREAT BRITAIN – RUSSIA SOCIETYPatron: His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Kent, GCVO
Honorary President: Dr. Anthony Bryan Hayward (Group Chief Executive of BP plc)
Honorary Vice Presidents:
The Most Reverend & Rt.Hon. The Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, FBA
Professor Geoffrey Alan Hosking, FBA, FR.Hist.S.
Sir Roderic Lyne, KBE, CMG
The Rt. Hon. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, KCMG, QC, MP
The Rt. Hon. Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, GCMG,
The Rt. Hon. Baroness Williams of Crosby
THE GREAT BRITAIN – RUSSIA SOCIETYAutumn - Winter SessionSeptember – December 2010 All talks will take place in
PUSHKIN HOUSE, 5a BOOMSBURY SQUARE, LONDON WC1A 2TAThe entrance to Pushkin House is on Bloomsbury Way,
virtually opposite the Swedenborg bookshop.
Nearest tube stations are Holborn & Tottenham Court Road.Complimentary Wine Receptions from 6.30 p.m. to 7.00Our talks in Pushkin House usually begin at 7.00 p.m. followed by questions. Meetings end at around 8.30 p.m. Pre-booked seats are held only until 7.00 p.m. unless you phone Pushkin House on 020 7269 9770 before 6.50 p.m.
advising us of the anticipated time of your delayed arrival. MRS OLGA SELIVANOVA LEADS CONVERSATIONS IN RUSSIAN BEFORE MOST TALKS.
Wednesday, 15 September 2010 at Pushkin House, 6.30 for 7 pm.Conspirator – Lenin in ExileHelen RappaportLenin spent seventeen long and often difficult years in exile, living a hand-to-mouth existence, working towards the upheaval that in 1917 transformed the political landscape of Europe – the Russian Revolution. Always on the move with both his wife and mother-in-law, Lenin lived at various times in Paris, London, Geneva, Zurich and Munich, as well as the backwaters of rural Poland and Finland. Many historians have paid scant attention to how Lenin spent his time in these places, especially in Poland and Finland. How did Lenin live? Who helped him? How did he manage to stay at large, avoiding the police and Russian secret agents? What kind of support network did he enjoy? What were his relations with his revolutionary colleagues, and what were their hopes, their dreams and quarrels? Helen’s talk seeks to answer these questions. Helen is an accomplished speaker and writer with many highly acclaimed books on Russian history to her name: her first solo major publication was Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion (ABC Clio, 1999), which was followed by No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War (Aurum, 2007); Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs (Hutchinson, 2009) and Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (Hutchinson, 2010), among many others. She has also worked extensively in the theatre on all the Chekhov plays with Tom Stoppard, Kenneth Branagh and Trevor Nunn for the Old Vic, Wyndhams Theatre, the National Theatre and the RSC, etc. She has also appeared on the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘Women’s Hour’ and at the Buxton and Althrop literary festivals. She is an expert on the Victorian era and has published a book on Queen Victoria and also women social reformers.
Helen’s book Conspirator – Lenin in Exile will be available for purchase on the night, personally inscribed by her for our members.
Monday, 4 October 2010 at Pushkin House, 6.30 for 7 pm.Vasily Grossman: Journalist, Witness, ArtistRobert ChandlerVasily Grossman (1905-1964) covered all the main battles of the Second World War, from the defence of Moscow to the vast tank battle of Kursk and the fall of Berlin. Only eighteen months before composing The Hell of Treblinka (originally published in Moscow in 1945) – one of the first published accounts of a Nazi death camp – he was filing reports from the ruins of Stalingrad. Grossman’s devotion to truth has sometimes led to him being seen merely as an unusually honest and courageous witness. And the epic quality of much of his writing has sometimes blinded critics to its delicacy. In this talk – which coincides with the publication by the MacLehose Press of a selection of Grossman’s stories and articles titled The Road – Robert Chandler will discuss the subtlety of many of Grossman’s perceptions and the extent to which he is not only a heroic chronicler of his age, but also a supreme artist. In particular, he will focus on Grossman’s dialogue with two other great writers of short stories – Isaak Babel and Andrey Platonov.
Robert Chandler is the translator of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (published in Moscow in 1989) and Everything Flows (published in Moscow in 1989), both of which were published first in the West and had to wait for the glasnost’ era before they could be published in Russia. Robert is also a co-translator of many volumes of Andrey Platonov. Some volumes of Robert’s highly acclaimed translations will be available for purchase on the night of his talk.
THE GREAT BRITAIN – RUSSIA SOCIETYAnnual General MeetingWednesday 27 October 2010 at 6.00 p.m. Pushkin House, Bloomsbury Square, London, WC1A 2TA.
Please Make a Special Effort to Attend!We need a minimum of 10% of the Membership to achieve a quorum.Complimentary Wine Reception from 5.45 until 6.00 p.m.
Wednesday, 27 October 2010 at Pushkin House, 6.45 for 7 pm.The Dark Spirit that Explains Leo TolstoyProfessor Tony BriggsTolstoy is famously characterized as full of contradictions and paradoxes. A.N. Wilson concludes that, ‘The more evidence we possess about Tolstoy, the less he makes sense.’ There were different versions of this man; he could change from hour to hour and decade to decade. Is there no unifying principle behind the great writer that would enable us to understand him more clearly overall? One way of answering this question is to consider the handful of people who inspired him most profoundly and lastingly, for whom his reverence was never retracted. We propose to examine his attitude towards three spontaneously adopted mentors, one or all of whom he loved and idolized from the age of fourteen to the day of his death. This leads to some unhappy conclusions. All three were very unpleasant men in terms of their personality, behaviour and philosophy; they are described as monsters and hypocrites. Yet they seem to have spoken to a deep need in Tolstoy to see the worst in life and people, including himself. The one unchanging and unifying principle behind Tolstoy was that of misanthropy, pessimism and a hatred of life itself. This can be demonstrated even in the face of some works by Tolstoy which go against it, notably the optimistic War and Peace. This talk will explore Tolstoy’s relationships with the three individuals concerned. None of this is intended to detract from the universal admiration of Tolstoy’s achievements as a writer of fiction. An attempt will be made to show how and why he was attracted to these men beyond all others. In yielding to their negativism, far from succumbing to external control, he was encountering like-minded thinkers with whom he recognized an instant and indelible affinity. Professor A.D.P. (Tony) Briggs has written, edited or translated many books on Russian literature, most of them to do with Alexander Pushkin or Leo Tolstoy. His recent translation of War and Peace (Penguin Books, 2005) has run to five editions and sold 100,000 copies; his retranslation of Resurrection came out in 2009. His new, concise biography of Leo Tolstoy is published this year by Hesperus Press.
Thursday, 4 November 2010 at Pushkin House, 6.30 for 7 pm.
Stalin’s Children and BeyondOwen MatthewsOwen Matthews relates in his book Stalin’s Children (reviewed E-W Review, Spring 2009) a gripping and extraordinary story set in Russia and spanning three generations of his own family, beginning with his maternal grandfather, Boris Bibikov, then his father Mervyn who married his mother Mila during the Cold War years – all interwoven with a personal account of his own life, working as a journalist in Moscow and seeking out his own path... Boris Bibikov was one of the Party faithful, prepared to sacrifice his all for the ideal that was the Soviet Union and building socialism. One would have thought that Stalin would treasure such a selfless worker, but things turned out quite differently... Owen’s father Mervyn abandoned a career in the diplomatic service, feeling cocooned and isolated in the British Embassy from the true Russia he fell in love with, for a career in academia. He fell in love with Lyudmila, who had survived – amazingly! – her early years in a Russian orphanage, separated from her sister for years, then miraculously they met again. Mervyn and Mila married against all odds, but the Soviet system kept them apart for years, and when finally Mila came to the West, their life together turned out quite differently from what they expected... Owen himself followed a successful career in journalism, chiefly in post-Soviet Russia, witnessing the turbulent times and chaos of privatization and the Soviet Union falling apart. History repeated itself when he, too, married a Russian national, but in very different times and circumstances... All these events are set against established historical facts that can be gleaned from almost any book on Russia’s recent history, but what makes Owen’s story at once heart-rending, poignant and highly individual is that it is intensely personal: we see how some of the most cataclysmic events of modern history profoundly affected the lives of ‘ordinary’ people – in the very best sense of the word – across the ideological divide. And what of life in the Russia of today..? Come and hear Owen’s remarkable story!
Thursday, 18 November 2010 at Pushkin House, 6.30 for 7 pm.Young people in Trouble: a Russian PerspectiveBoris AltshulerTHIS TALK WILL BE DELIVERED IN RUSSIANBoris Altshuler is sponsored by the GB-Russia Society and the BEARR Trust. In Russia young people face extreme problems, such as prostitution, drugs and alcohol addiction, etc., bringing them into direct confrontation with the law. Their problems are rooted in the family and a society within an archaic social system that is inappropriate for resolving these issues: the conservative education system and dramatic lack of openings for professional education, combined with the undeveloped infrastructure for mass sport and leisure time, place young people in a difficult situation. President Medvedev stated, ‘Russia vitally needs a modern system of child protection. At present, we don’t have a system at all!’ The lack any protection agency is patently obvious from the huge number of new orphans who appear every year; daily an average of 315 children separate from their parents without any family-support network. Most young people who spend their life in children’s institutions – 170,000 ‘official’ orphans and more than 300,000 children with health problems or suffering from strained relations with their biological parents – then go out into the big, wide world and get into trouble. Boris Altshuler will discuss this serious social phenomenon from all angles and elaborate on the many problems facing Russian young people, concentrating chiefly on minors below 18 years old and some young people above this age. He will explain recent efforts made towards building an effective social system and the serious obstacles to this imposed by influential circles, who have a vested interest in not improving the lot of children throughout their lives, which leads to disastrous consequences.
Boris Altshuler was born in 1939 in Moscow, where he has lived most of his life. A physicist by training, he participated in the human rights movement from the early 1970s in close collaboration with Andrei Sakharov. He has worked with many groups, and from 1996 with ‘Right of the Child’ – a NGO group formed to help children. He was awarded ‘Man of the Year’ in 2009 for his public activities.
Thursday, 25 November 2010 at Pushkin House, 6.30 for 7 pm.Economy Modernization of RussiaProfessor Phillip HansonThe Russian economy fared particularly badly in the 2008-2009 economic crisis. This cannot be explained simply by Russia being an oil exporter. An alternative explanation is offered, in which the unpredictable business environment in Russia is an important part of the story. Recovery seems to be under way, however. Can Russia expect to return to the rapid economic growth it experienced between the 1998 and the 2008 crises? Is diversification away from oil, gas and metals desirable? Is it likely within the next decade or so? These questions are considered. Answers – ‘No’, ‘Maybe’, and ‘You Cannot Be Serious!’ – are offered. Do future growth and prosperity require radical economic and political reform away from Putinism? The speaker hopes to have an answer to this final question by 25 November. Philip Hanson is an economist, Emeritus Professor of Birmingham University and currently Associate Fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme of Chatham House. While based for many years at the University of Birmingham, he has been a visiting professor or researcher at the universities of Michigan, Harvard, Kyoto and Södertörns (Stockholm), and has worked at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the UN Economic Commission for Europe and Radio Liberty. His books include The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy, (2003).
The Great Britain – Russia Society’s Superb Christmas Dinner & PartyFriday, 3 December 2010
7.00 for 7.30 pm
At the Polish Hearth Club, Ognisko Restaurant.
55 Exhibition Road, London SW7 2PN.
Atmospheric music and dancing, excellent food.
The major social event of the year.A three-course dinner with waiter service, to include a welcome drink, soup starter, lamb stroganoff or turkey (with a vegetarian option) and Christmas pudding. The price of £29 includes VAT and service.There will also be a cash bar.Wine on the table will be extra.Please bring your friends!Book Early to Avoid Disappointment!Musical Entertainment sponsored by the Society
South Kensington tube station is less than 5 minutes from the Restaurant
No Refunds for Cancellations Received After November 25th.
Wednesday, 8 December 2010 at Pushkin House, 6.30 for 7 pm.Russia without YeltsynDr Ekaterina Yur’evna Genieva, Director of the State Library of Foreign LiteratureWere Boris Yeltsyn, his government and its policies a national catastrophe for Russia while he was in power, or was he the answer to Russia’s prayers at that time? Dr Ekaterina Genieva believes that this is an important question that needs to be carefully weighed up from all angles. Yeltsin and those around him had the difficult task of breaking away from the old Soviet empire and founding a democratic Russian state, based on a market economy, not always knowing or being able to predict the outcome and consequences of their policies: the precipitous disbandment of the Soviet Union led to problems on the economic and political fronts, causing complications within the sphere of international relations with the former republics of the S. Union; the policy of privatizatsia (privatization) became known as prikhvatizatsia (‘private grabbing’) and give birth to a whole new class of oligarchs; the Russian constitution hardly kept pace with much needed changes; local autonomy was sacrificed as regional governors were centrally appointed; the Russian legal system showed that it could not cope, and corruption became a scourge. Dr Genieva will examine all these problems in the light of the post-Yeltsyn era. Ekaterina Genieva is the Director General of Margarita Rudomino All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature. She gained her PhD in philology from Moscow State University. Her public activities include membership of various foundations and societies: from 1991 onwards she has been a member (Honorary Member from 1994) of the Board of Directors, Russian Biblical Society; member of the National UNESCO Commission of Russia (from 1997); and member of the ‘Memory of the World’ International Advisory Committee, UNESCO. She is also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. She is an observer for the Russo-German Library Restitution Commission and was Vice-President of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, and a Co-founder and Vice-President of the Russian Library Association (1994-2004). She is the author of over 150 publications related to library and literary studies.
Tickets are not issued for meetings, but names will be put on the attendance lists on a first paid, first served basis. Members are encouraged to book places for their guests or visitors. Cancellations for credit are accepted only if received before 5.00 p.m. on the previous afternoon (‘phone Ute Chatterjee on 0788 4464 461 or email her at membership@gbrussia.org) so that those on the waiting list can be offered places. If you need confirmation of your reservations please send a stamped addressed envelope. All tickets are £5 per person per seat for everyone (except for students belonging to a corporate membership). BOOK EARLY, AND BOOK OFTEN!Remember, if all seats are wanted your reservation is assured only if you have pre-paid.
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