GB-Russia Society Current Lecture ProgrammeRegistered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales. Charity No. 1105296
THE GREAT BRITAIN – RUSSIA SOCIETY
Patron: His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Kent, GCVO
Honorary President: Dr. Ekaterina Genieva, OBE, Director General of the Library for Foreign Literature, Moscow
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 SOCIETY
All talks will take place in
PUSHKIN HOUSE, 5a BOOMSBURY SQUARE, LONDON WC1A 2TA
The entrance to Pushkin House is on Bloomsbury Way,
virtually opposite the Swedenborg bookshop.
Nearest tube stations are Holborn & Tottenham Court Road.
Complimentary Wine Reception from 6.30 p.m. to 7.00
Our talks in Pushkin House usually begin at 7.00 p.m. followed by questions.
Meetings end at around 8.30 p.m.
Tickets are not issued for meetings, but names are put on an attendance list on a first-paid, first-served basis. Members are encouraged to book seats for their guests or visitors.
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.
Cancellations for credit are accepted only if received before 5 pm the previous afternoon of a talk, so that we may offer the seat to another member or visitor who needs it.
MRS OLGA SELIVANOVA LEADS CONVERSATIONS IN RUSSIAN BEFORE MOST TALKS.
Wednesday, 11 January 2012 at Pushkin House, Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TA, 6.30 for 7 pm.
Luke Harding
With Vladimir Putin set to return as Russian President in 2012, the country’s surrender to autocracy deserves increased scrutiny. What went wrong in Russia, which showed such hope in the days of perestroika and after the collapse of Communism? The revival of Soviet-era practices has included the systematic intimidation, harassment, expulsion and imprisonment of public figures who question or criticize the status quo.
Luke Harding’s experience as The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent testifies to the revival of KGB thuggery, and the Kremlin’s intolerance for criticism. During his time in Moscow, he was subjected to a campaign of harassment, featuring tactics redolent of Cold War-era spy fiction. His fascinating account of his experiences, which saw him become one of the most hated foreign journalists in Russia and led to his expulsion in February 2011, is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the new yet familiar face of Russian authoritarianism.
He began his journalistic career at Oxford where he read English and edited the student newspaper Cherwell. After graduating, Luke joined the Sunday Correspondent – which folded soon afterwards – and worked for the Evening Argus in Brighton and then the Daily Mail. He joined The Guardian in 1996. Luke covered Jonathan Aitken’s infamous libel trial for the paper and wrote – with The Guardian’s David Leigh – The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken, published by Penguin and Fourth Estate. In 2000 he became The Guardian’s South Asia correspondent based in Delhi. In 2001 he spent three months in Pakistan and Afghanistan covering the war against the Taliban, and won Foreign Story of the Year from the Foreign Press Association in 2002 for his reporting of the siege in Mazar-i-Sharif. He spent much of 2003 and 2004 in Iraq.
In 2007, Harding arrived in Moscow to take up a new job as a correspondent for The Guardian. Not long after, mysterious agents from Russia’s Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, broke into his flat. He was followed, bugged, and even summoned to Lefortovo, the FSB’s notorious prison.
The break-in was the beginning of a psychological war against the journalist and his family that burst into the open in 2011 when he was expelled from Moscow for reporting allegations that under Vladimir Putin the country had become a ‘virtual mafia state’. The first Western reporter to be deported from Russia since the days of the Cold War, Harding has written about his run-in with the new Russia in his recently published book, Mafia State.
Monday, 30 January 2012 at Pushkin House, Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TA, at 6.30 for 7 pm.
‘See no evil? Labour and The Gulag 1929-31’
Giles Udy
Stalin’s mass deportation of millions of peasant farmers and religious believers in the early 1930s, the death of hundreds of thousands of them in labour camps and of millions more in the consequent famine is considered one of the greatest crimes against humanity of the 20th century.
Less well-known is the fact that, under the Labour Government of 1929-31, Britain was importing over £300m a year of gulag-cut timber – imports which were allowed to continue unhindered in spite of widespread protests against these and Soviet religious persecution by Conservative politicians and churchmen of all denominations.
In public, Labour dismissed the protests as a cynical stunt intended to bring the down the government. Eye-witness accounts were dismissed and Soviet denials repeated as fact. In private, the Cabinet acknowledged the truth of the stories but blocked appeals for an enquiry and declared that the persecution was an internal matter for the Soviets and no concern of Britain’s.
Giles Udy’s lecture will follow events as the evidence mounted and protests by the British public spread and became worldwide. It will also reveal how the government knew all about what was happening in Russia but refused to accept the stories or condemn the Soviets because of their enthusiasm for Soviet Communism and solidarity with their fellow Socialists in Russia. ‘The Soviets are engaged in a vast and very remarkable economic experiment,’ declared one Labour minister in parliament, ‘and are entitled to pursue that experiment without outside interference.’
This story has not been told before and the lecture will present a summary of the research from Foreign Office and other archives which Giles has gathered for his new book on the subject. While based on events in 1929-31 it will also cover Labour-Soviet relations in the years before and after that.
Giles Udy is an independent academic and a member of the Council of Keston Institute. His long-term work is on the history of the gulag camps of Norilsk, the northernmost city in the world, three hundred miles above the Arctic Circle in Siberia.
Wednesday, 15 February 2012 at Pushkin House, Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TA, at 6.30 for 7 pm.
‘Travels Among the Defiant Peoples of the Caucasus’
Oliver Bullough
Oliver Bullough travelled in a dozen countries, meeting residents of and refugees from the Caucasus Mountains, to research his book Let Our Fame be Great. He tells the story of Russia’s conquest of the mountains through the lives of the people he met; describes their cultures and speculates about their future.
Oliver Bullough moved to Russia in 1999 on a whim, liked it and stayed, eventually ending up as Reuters Moscow correspondent. He specialized in Chechnya and the Caucasus, and came to love the mountains of Russia’s south. His encounters there gave him the idea for his Let Our Fame be Great, which was nominated for the Orwell Prize and praised by the Times Literary Supplement as a ‘beautifully written piece of reportage’.
Wednesday, 29 February 2012 at Pushkin House, Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TA, at 6.30 for 7 pm.
‘Peeping Through the Iron Curtain:
Travellers’ Accounts of the Soviet Union and Russia
during and after the Cold War’
Professor Chris Read
From the sixteenth century the British imagination has been stirred by travellers’ accounts of visits to Russia. Even so, for successive generations, Russia has remained mysterious, supposedly impenetrable and unknown. This was especially the case during the Cold War. In those frozen decades the regular exchange of media information simply did not take place. Given the difficulties for foreigners of filming and broadcasting from the USSR, especially the provinces, and also the largely crudely propagandistic nature of material of Soviet origin, the writing of travellers and journalists maintained a significance they were losing to television elsewhere. The aim of the talk is to raise some questions about English-speaking writers have produced some of the best-known portrayals of the Soviet Union. The main focus will be on John Gunther, Inside Russia Today (1957); Laurens van der Post, Journey into Russia (1964); Hedrick Smith, The Russians (1976) and Robert Kaiser, Russia: the People and the Power (1976). Some attention will also be given to post-Soviet travellers such as Jonathan Dimbleby and the increasing number of adventure travellers of whom Ewan Macgregor and Charlie Boorman (LongWay Round) are probably the best known. Surprisingly, many characteristics of the earlier writings have survived the 1991 break. Today, the same supposed mystery remains. One of the most recent traveller’s accounts(just out in paperback) is subtitled A Journey to the Dark Heart of Russia. Why is it taking so long to throw any light?!
Christopher Read is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Warwick. He has written widely on twentieth-century Russian social, political and cultural history. His books include From Tsar to Soviets - the Russian People and their Revolution 1914-21 (1996); The Making and Breaking of the Soviet System (2001); Lenin – A Revolutionary Life (2005). His latest book Russia in War, Revolution and Civil War will be published in 2012 and he is currently working on a biography of Stalin.
Thursday, 15 March 2012 at Pushkin House, Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TA, at 6.30 for 7 pm.
‘The Last Day of the Soviet Union’
Conor O’Clery
The Soviet Union came to an end on December 25th 1991, with the resignation of President Mikhail Gorbachev, the transfer of the nuclear suitcase to the president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, and the lowering of the Red Flag from the Kremlin. My talk will focus on how and in what way the Soviet Union disintergrated so abruptly that day, without a shot being fired, and the significance in this regard of two events in the weeks beforehand; the meeting in a Belarus forest on December 7-8 at which the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine decided to ‘collapse’ the Soviet Union, and the drink-fuelled encounter between Gorbachev and Yeltsin in the Kremlin’s Walnut Room on December 23rd at which Gorbachev finally accepted the inevitable. It will also look at how the personal antipathy between Gorbachev and Yeltsin contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union, and impacted on the key events of December 25th.
Conor O’Clery was Moscow correspondent of The Irish Times during the last five years of the Soviet Union. In a 30-year career with The Irish Times he was also resident staff correspondent in London, Washington, Beijing and New York. He twice won Irish journalist of the year for his foreign reporting, from Moscow in 1987, and from New York in 2001. He is the author of eight books, including in 2007 The Billionaire Who Wasn’t, a biography of the American philanthropist Chuck Feeney which was listed as best book of the year by the Economist and BusinessWeek, and most recently Moscow, December 25, 1991: The Last Day of the Soviet Union, which was nominated best non-fiction book of the year in 2011 in Ireland. He lives in Dublin with his Russian-born Armenian wife, Zhanna.
Thursday, 22 March 2012 at Pushkin House, Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TA, at 6.30 for 7 pm.
‘Stalin’s Legacy – How the Soviet Union Waged War on Nature’
Struan Stevenson
‘Stalin’s Legacy’ details how Josef Stalin and his immediate successors waged war on Mother Nature, viewing it as something that needed to be controlled and marshalled for economic gain rather than respected and nurtured for human survival.
They regarded nature as an enemy that could be overcome by the might of Soviet technology and the brute force of slave labour. Stalin ordered vast networks of canals and irrigation channels be dug by hand in an attempt to transform deserts into lush pastures. He built gigantic dams and reservoirs and diverted the course of major rivers. He used his own citizens as human guinea-pigs for nuclear tests and he conducted top secret biological weapons experiments on islands that had been cleared of all animal and insect life.
The legacy of Stalin’s ill-considered environmental adventures has been devastating. In Central Asia, the Aral Sea has been virtually drained; toxic dust storms rage across the landscape; anthrax, typhus and other deadly bio-weapons have been exposed to human contact; generations face illness and disease because of exposure to radiation; acute water shortages threaten regional conflict and the mass migration of environmental refugees. Stalin’s legacy touches upon each one of these global issues with world-wide consequences that may yet impact on us all.
Struan Stevenson has served as a Conservative Euro MEP for Scotland since 1999. He is Chairman of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with Iraq, Senior Vice President of the Fisheries Committee and President of the Climate Change, Biodiversity and Sustainable Development Intergroup. During the 2010 Kazakh Presidency of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation Europe, he was appointed as a Personal Representative (Roving Ambassador) of the Chairman-in-Office responsible for Ecology and Environment with a particular focus on Central Asia.
In 2004 he won the Templeton Foundation $50,000 literary prize for his essay CRYING FOREVER, about the plight of victims of Stalin’s nuclear tests in East Kazakhstan. He donated all of this money to hospitals in the area. He went on to publish a book, also entitled CRYING FOREVER, which was launched in the UN headquarters in New York in 2008, with a Russian version published in 2009. These publications, together with other generous contributions, have to date raised more than $80,000 which has also been donated to the victims of the nuclear tests in Kazakhstan through the worldwide charity Mercy Corps.
Thursday, 12 April 2012 at Pushkin House, Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TA, at 6.30 for 7 pm.
‘Inside Russia: A Correspondent’s Personal Notes’
Bridget Kendall
The BBC’s Bridget Kendall is probably best known for her reporting from Moscow at the end of the perestroika era, when as BBC Moscow correspondent as she charted the Soviet Union’s collapse, the failed coup of 1991 and the emergence of a new Russia under Boris Yeltsin.
In fact her acquaintance with the country goes back to the mid 1970s when she studied for a year in a provincial university in what was still the height of the Brezhnev era. Thirty years on, her experience of ordinary life in a stagnating and strictly controlled Soviet Union is a useful reminder of just what living in Soviet Union meant on a day to day basis.
At that time, many experts still considered the Soviet system might remain entrenched for decades to come. But in fact, when she returned for a second year of study in the early 80s, she was witness to a rather different mood: the Soviet Communist empire was beginning to crumble, under the strain of a failing economic system that could no longer compete with its cold-war rival, compounded by an unpopular war in Afghanistan and the incompetence of an aging and ailing leadership.
In this talk Bridget will share her personal reminiscences from the Soviet era, chart her experiences of reporting on Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms and the extraordinary collapse which twenty years ago led to the end of the USSR, and offer some thoughts on the turbulent path Russia has travelled since then.
Wednesday, 25 April 2012 at Pushkin House, Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TA, at 6.30 for 7 pm.
‘The Siege of Leningrad:
A New Perspective from Personal Diaries’
Anna Reid
‘28 December 1941 at 12.30 pm – Zhenya died. 25 January 1942 at 3pm – Granny died. 17 March at 5am – Lyoka died. 13 April at 2am – Uncle Vasya died. 10 May at 4pm – Uncle Lyosha died. 13 May at 7.30 am – Mama died. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.’
Thus wrote a twelve-year-old girl in the pages of a pocket address book during the siege of Leningrad, the deadliest blockade of a city in human history.
When Hitler made his surprise attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, he meant to capture Leningrad before turning on Moscow. In early September he changed strategy, deciding to concentrate his tanks on the attack on Moscow, and starve Leningrad out. Leningrad did not surrender, but for the next two winters no food was able to reach the city except by air or across Lake Ladoga. By January 1944, when the German armies finally began their long retreat, about three-quarters of a million civilians – between a quarter and a third of Leningrad’s pre-siege population – had died of hunger.
Drawing on newly available diaries and government records, Anna Reid describes Leningrad’s descent into mass death: the shrinking of the bread ration; the breakdown of electricity and water supply; the consumption of pets, joiner’s glue and face cream; the withering of emotions and family ties; looting, murder, and cannibalism – and at the same time, extraordinary endurance and self-sacrifice.
Today, twenty years after the fall of Communism, memories of Leningrad’s suffering are still suppressed, as are those of the cruelty and incompetence of Russia’s wartime leadership. Stripping away decades of Soviet myth-making, Reid gives Tanya Savicheva and thousands like them back their voice.
Anna Reid read law at Oxford and Russian history at London University’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. From 1993-5 she lived in Kiev, reporting on Ukraine for the Economist and Daily Telegraph. From 2003-7 she ran the foreign affairs programme at the centre-right think-tank Policy Exchange. Her previous books are The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia, and Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine.
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 [removed]) 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 talks 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.
Registered Charity Number 1105296