Soviet Union
Under Review
The Fraught U.S.-Soviet Search for Alien Life
During the Cold War, American and Soviet scientists embarked on an unprecedented quest to contact extraterrestrials. But communicating across the Iron Curtain could be just as hard as sending messages into space.
BySophie Pinkham
The New Yorker Documentary
A Girl’s Forced Marriage in Post-Invasion Afghanistan, in “Hills and Mountains”
An accusation levelled against a teen-age girl changes the course of her life, in Salar Pashtoonyar’s documentary about life after the Soviet-Afghan war.
A Critic at Large
Has the C.I.A. Done More Harm Than Good?
In the agency’s seventy-five years of existence, a lack of accountability has sustained dysfunction, ineptitude, and lawlessness.
ByAmy Davidson Sorkin
Postscript
Mikhail Gorbachev, the Fundamentally Soviet Man
The last leader of the U.S.S.R. attempted to modernize and reform his country, even as he failed to imagine it as anything but an empire.
ByMasha Gessen
Q. & A.
Nina Khrushcheva on Putin’s Poisonous Nationalism and a New “New Russia”
The great-granddaughter of Stalin’s successor discusses Ukrainian identity and the lingering wounds of the Cold War.
ByIsaac Chotiner
Our Columnists
The Crushing Loss of Hope in Ukraine
Putin has declared that history is destiny, and that Ukraine will never get away from Russia.
ByMasha Gessen
News Desk
The Russian Memory Project That Became an Enemy of the State
Two courts have ordered the shutdown of Memorial, a human-rights organization that documents the history of Soviet state terror.
ByMasha Gessen
Letter from Moscow
A Black Communist’s Disappearance in Stalin’s Russia
What happened to Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the only known African American to die in the Gulag?
ByJoshua Yaffa
Our Columnists
“Dear Comrades!” Is the Story of Two Russian Families and a Century of Terror
For decades, the Soviet regime suppressed public discussion of the bloody Novocherkassk protests, which are now dramatized in Russia’s Oscars entry.
ByMasha Gessen
A Critic at Large
The Drenching Richness of Andrei Tarkovsky
The Soviet director bestowed a new way of looking at the world. Amid the awe-inspiring imagery, his drift toward nationalist mysticism can take on an ominous tinge.
ByAlex Ross
Our Columnists
Why America Needs a Reckoning with the Trump Era
We must recover from the trauma of Trumpism. The Biden Administration should assume the responsibility of guiding us through that healing process.
ByMasha Gessen
Our Columnists
Why America Feels Like a Post-Soviet State
The callous nihilism of contemporary Russian society is everywhere in the Trump Administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
ByMasha Gessen
Dispatch
What the Removal of a K.G.B. Statue Can Teach America
Along with toppling monuments, exorcising history involves talking about and processing past crimes.
ByJoshua Yaffa
Watch
“And Then We Danced,” A Queer Love Letter to Georgian Culture
The director Levan Akin’s coming-of-age story about a traditional dancer had just a three-day run of screenings in Georgia, where it led to rioting, twenty-seven arrests, and one hospitalization.
ByDavid Kortava
Culture Desk
October’s Child: The Year I Left the Soviet Union
In Russia, appearances have always mattered more than reality, and, judging by appearances, we lived in a socialist Arcadia that our grandparents had sacrificed themselves to build.
ByAlex Halberstadt
Our Columnists
What Bernie Sanders Should Have Said About Socialism and Totalitarianism in Cuba
The Democratic front-runner’s recent comments exposed a divide between the native-born American left and those who fled totalitarian regimes.
ByMasha Gessen
Q. & A.
How Putin Controls Russia
The Moscow-based political analyst Masha Lipman on how the Russian President’s proposed constitutional reforms may reshape the Russian state.
ByIsaac Chotiner
Our Columnists
The Erasure of Political History at the National Archives
In altering photos from the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, the National Archives engaged in the very opposite of what it had been created to do: forge a clear and accurate historical record.
ByMasha Gessen
Our Columnists
How Trump’s Supporters Distort Alexander Vindman’s Very American Origin Story
For some, the fact that Vindman, an Army lieutenant colonel, is an immigrant is enough for him to be painted as a double agent, a traitor, or a spy.
ByMasha Gessen
Dispatch
When the Soviet Union Freed the Arctic from Capitalist Slavery
In the Soviet view, the nomadic Chukchi reindeer herders chose to live in the past, and there could be no future until their way of life was dismantled.
ByBathsheba Demuth