USSR, Lomo, Stratosphere
Studio 360 looks back at a country that doesn’t exist any more — the Soviet Union. Kurt Andersen and the writer Svetlana Boym expose the art that was made in secret during the Communist regimes, and...
View ArticlePainting in Pre-Glasnost Russia
When we think of Soviet Art, we think of the propaganda posters and the figurative heroic paintings and sculpture that glorified the Soviet leaders. That kind of Social Realism dominated official art...
View ArticleLomo
Twenty years ago in Leningrad, the Soviets developed the Lomo camera as a way to provide Western-style consumer electronics to comrades throughout the Eastern bloc. The Lomo became the standard issue...
View ArticleCultural Exchange
For a moment during the Cold War — in the decade between Josef Stalin's death until the Cuban Missile Crisis — something called "Cultural Exchange" formed a warm glow in US-Soviet relations. It started...
View ArticleSpecial Guest: Svetlana Boym
Kurt Andersen and the writer Svetlana Boym explore how artists worked in the Soviet Union and what it means to them and to us today.Svetlana Boym is a Harvard professor of Slavic and Contemporary...
View ArticlePurge
Finnish-Estonian novelist and playwright Sofi Oksanen discusses her novel Purge, an international bestseller that has won Finland’s most prestigious literary awards.Set in 1992, shortly after the...
View ArticleWNYC Covers the Celebration of Wiley Post's Record Breaking Flight Around the...
New York Mayor John P. O'Brien* pinned a gold medal on Wiley Post, 'round-the-world flier' on the steps of City Hall, July 26, 1933. Post's wife Edna Mae is on the right behind the WNYC microphone....
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Communist Propaganda or Capitalist Commercial? A 1930s WNYC Broadcast is...
Moscow's Park of Culture and Rest was one of the topics in a controversial series of travelogues aired by WNYC in late 1937 and early 1938. Critics of the station charged the broadcasts were Soviet...
View ArticleAleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Apricot Jam and Other Stories
Ignat Solzhenitsyn discusses his father Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Apricot Jam and Other Stories, available for the first time in English. After years of living in exile, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returned...
View ArticleBlacklisted by Putin: Bill Browder Speaks
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin hopes to return to the president's office in Russia, but he never really gave up any of the power that went with the office. Putin rules Russia with an authoritarian hand...
View ArticleSvetlana Alliluyeva's Graceful Defection from the Soviet Union
In this recording from April 26, 1967, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Joseph Stalin, fields a variety of questions from the New York press after leaving her homeland. "I feel like Valentina...
View ArticleWarlords
Kimberly Marten, Barnard College political science professor and the author of Warlords: Strong-arm Brokers in Weak States, talks about those who impose order in failed states.
View ArticleLife Behind the Iron Curtain, 1944–56
Pulitzer Prize-winner Anne Applebaum discusses how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed the individuals who came under its sway. Her history Iron Curtain: The Crushing...
View ArticleDiplomatic Impunity: Dean Acheson Counsels Audiences on Disarmament
In 1958, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson was out of power but not out of opinions. At this Book and Authors Luncheon the influential statesman weighs in on the pressing foreign policy question...
View ArticleWorld War II ‘Night Witch’ Dies at 91
Born in 1921 in a small coal-mining town in Eastern Ukraine, Nadezhda Popova dreamed of becoming a teacher or a nurse when she was young. Then one day a pilot was blown off course and landed in a field...
View ArticleThe Former Soviet Union in the '90s, in Blue
One of the leading photographers of the former Soviet Union is showing 40 years of work in New York City.Boris Mikhailov's retrospective is at the Dominique Levi gallery on the Upper East Side.The show...
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Happy Cosmonautics Day, and Other Fascinating Moments From Radio Moscow
As the Winter Olympic games get under way in Sochi, the American press appears to be extra sensitive about getting the 'real story' out of Russia lest they be tagged propagandists for what many in the...
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Lenin's Favorite Songs
The father of the Russian Revolution was reportedly a big music lover. Along with songs of revolution and struggle, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was said to be a fan of Russian folk songs, Tchaikovsky,...
View ArticleGhosts of Russian History Still Alive in Europe
As Russia flexes its muscles in Ukraine and Crimea, for many former Soviet citizens, the present looks all too familiar to the past. This week, The Takeaway hears from former citizens of the Eastern...
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