Charlotte Hobson

Putin’s stranglehold on the Russian press

5 July 2025 9:00 am

Two former Izvestiya journalists describe how all but the bravest in the media have crumpled under pressure to toe the Putinist line

Whipping up a masterpiece: painters and their materials

19 October 2024 9:00 am

Martin Gayford finds artists from Rembrandt to De Kooning mixing pigment, egg and oil together with all the skill of an accomplished chef

Sarah Rainsford joins the long list of foreign correspondents banned from Russia

10 August 2024 9:00 am

After decades of writing about Russian affairs, Rainsford now finds herself persona non grata – but admits she no longer feels nostalgia for the country

Imprisoned for years on Putin’s whim

6 July 2024 9:00 am

Vladimir Pereverzin’s ‘crime’ was to have worked for a company owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky – and refusing to give false evidence resulted in an 11-year sentence in the camps

‘A group of deranged idiots’ – how the Soviets saw the Avant-Gardists

8 June 2024 9:00 am

First welcomed, then vilified, by Lenin, Russian artists such as Malevich, Tatlin, Kandinsky and Chagall would find their only real supporters in the West

A deadly vacuum

8 October 2022 9:00 am

Now is a difficult time to empathise with Russians – which is why we need Maxim Osipov. We need him…

Double vision

30 October 2021 9:00 am

Charlotte Hobson describes the complicated relationship of two artists who championed simplicity

Russia’s sacred tree

19 June 2021 9:00 am

The image of the birch tree in popular Russian culture is as manifold as the trees themselves, but we could…

The dark side of Venus — goddess of war as well as love

11 January 2020 9:00 am

Bettany Hughes has spent a decade, she tells us, exploring the origins of the goddess Aphrodite, first for a BBC…

Words of war: interviews with the children who survived Hitler’s invasion of Russia

20 July 2019 9:00 am

In 1990s Russia, war veterans were a bossy, even aggressive presence, upbraiding people in shops and pushing to the front…

‘The conclusion of the 18 October demonstration’

Small but deadly: postcards that fuelled the Russian Revolution

12 January 2019 9:00 am

In this handsomely illustrated book Tobie Mathew makes a case for the lowly postcard’s role in the politicisation of pre-revolutionary…

‘T’ is for Trotskyite

21 July 2018 9:00 am

Varlam Shalamov’s short stories of life in the Soviet Gulag leave an impression of ice-sharp precision, vividness and lucidity, as…

The pain of scorching her own face exorcises the helplessness Fontaine feels at her mother’s suffering

Death-defying acts and the dark side of the circus

23 June 2018 9:00 am

In 2013 Tessa Fontaine joined up with the World of Wonders, a circus sideshow that travels around the United States…

The long arm of the Russian super mafia

5 May 2018 9:00 am

Mark Galeotti’s study of Russian organised crime, the product of three decades of academic research and consultancy work, is more…

All is not lost

7 May 2016 9:00 am

Marina Lewycka’s latest happy-go-lucky tale of migrant folk in Britain takes a remark by the modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin as…

‘We will achieve abundance’ promises a propaganda poster of 1949. But by 1952 most free Soviet citizens shared the same diet as the inhabitants of the Gulag

Micro-managing the terror

23 May 2015 9:00 am

‘Lately, the paradoxical turns of recent Russian history… have given my research more than scholarly relevance,’ remarks Oleg Khlevniuk in…

Attack of the night witches

11 April 2015 9:00 am

The name Lyuba Vinogradova may not ring any bells, but her ferrety eye for spotting a telling detail may already…

Cold comfort farm in Canada

21 March 2015 9:00 am

Patrick Gale’s first historical novel is inspired by a non-story, a gap in his own family record. His great-grandfather Harry…

Soviet smoke and mirrors

14 February 2015 9:00 am

‘We all know there will be no real politics.’ A prominent Russian TV presenter is speaking off the record at…

Salad days

12 October 2013 9:00 am

The early 1990s in Russia were hungry years. At the time, I was a student, too idle to barter and…