Joseph Stalin related content 

Should the slaughter of ‘social and political groups' be considered genocide? There is a controversial addition to the debate. Stanford University historian Norman Naimark...

Russia's acknowledgement of responsibility for Katyn is good news for Russians as well as for Poles. The resolution adopted by Russia's State Duma on 26 November...

The death of a Polish president in Russia could bring Warsaw and Moscow closer together Ever since the end of the Second World War, reconciliation between nations and their...

As this column noted recently, the era of ‘therapeutic historiography' is drawing to a close in central and eastern Europe (with the odd exception). Even before the...

Central and eastern Europe may be joining the European club of the ahistorical and apathetic. Where would they be without their past, the ex-captive nations? (Or...

If you are planning to give an eastern European country some unpleasant news, it is good to know which dates to avoid. History was a long time ago, unless it happened to...

What Russia's prime minister should have said at the commemoration of the start of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Honoured guests, dear Excellencies.

Comparisons between countries' shameful wartime episodes are fraught with difficulty and hard to measure. How far does context determine blame and praise? That is a question...

It says much that, in Russia, equating Stalin with Hitler might be deemed a criminal act. It is depressing that it even needed to be discussed. On Sunday in Vilnius, the...

Russia can do better than bully other countries to abandon complexities and fit their history into a Soviet straitjacket. Forget gas, nukes or Iran. The deep divide between...

Kyiv urges the EU to back its efforts to persuade the UN to recognise the famine of 1932-33 as a crime against humanity. Ukraine has welcomed the European Parliament's...

European Parliament labels the Soviet-era famine in Ukraine a "crime against humanity". The European Parliament today voted for a resolution to call the

Stuck for reading matter? There's still a chance to grab some new and old central and eastern European classics. If readers of this column are anything like its author, they...

Imagine Nazi rule in Germany surviving for decades, with Hitler undefeated in war, but succeeded on his death in the early 1950s by a series of lacklustre party hacks who...

During the Second World War Finland committed the cardinal error of making an alliance with Hitler to fight Soviet Russia. It was what the English call “Hobson's choice”....

Now that the Russian Federation has restored good old Uncle Joe Stalin to his real or virtual pedestals, the Kremlin feels free to whine on about plans to move a certain...

There is a book in Kaunas, Lithuania's fascinating second city, that I wish could talk. It's an atlas, published in Germany in 1922, and it is open at the map of Europe. But...

Imagine a book, well written, accurate and moving, that gives the first really thorough account of America's slave trade, told through painstaking research in previously...

It wasn't tuneful, but it was memorable. I was chairing a conference about ‘Empire”' in Sweden and on the final evening I got bored with the official entertainment and...

Imagine that a gang of thugs in your neighbourhood abducted and raped your grandmother 60 years ago, stole and ruined your family property, terrorised your family and somehow...