Anne Applebaum's magisterial Iron Curtain tells the largely untold story of Eastern Europe's suppression at the hands of the Soviets after the Second World War

Dictatorships may not be lumbering behemoths, but William J Dobson overstates the extent to which authoritarians have changed their ways

In 1962 Bobby Fisher claimed "the Russians have fixed world chess". He was certainly paranoid but was proved to be partially right

Orlando Figes's Just Send Me the Word conveys the enduring love of a couple whose incarceration in Stalin's gulags couldn't suppress

Folk music has long been influenced by ultra-Left politics. Yet as the example of composer Cornelius Cardew has shown, even those with Communist sympathies have things to teach us about community music

Book review of Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-century Europe by Jan-Werner Müller

'Step by step Soviet attitudes had regained the ground they seemed to have lost when the Soviet Union collapsed'

The Left must abstain from lionizing the life and work of the Polish-born German Marxist martyr, Rosa Luxemburg

‘People who excuse Mao’s regime should remember that at least 45 million people died in the Great Leap Forward’

A tale of two émigrés: One of whom wanted to subvert the British State, while the other embraced it