Soviets in Scotland, Brits in USSR 1950s
Sometimes an extended dig in an archive turns up the unexpected. This happened when I was in Moscow last winter. I had been spinning through wheels of microfilm without much luck for a few days when suddenly all these photographs appeared on the screen. The photos were cuttings of newspaper items, all seemingly reporting the […]
and my story begins in Russia… #2
On the ‘Red Arrow’ — a famous Soviet-period overnight train between St Petersburg and Moscow — I shared a cabin with a kindly man named Igor. His English vocabulary extended to the words ‘dog’ and ‘bed’, which got us only so far. The crowning moment of our communication came when he showed me a photo on his […]
And my story begins in Russia…
I’ve just got back to London after a month in Russia. The picture above is the front of Finlandskiy Station, St. Petersburg, where in October 1917 Vladimir Lenin rolled in to begin the Revolution that rocked the world. For the first three weeks I lived just off the famous Nevskiy Prospekt, St. Petersburg, where I studied Russian for […]
