Siege of Leningrad: New Perspective from Personal Diaries, Apr 25

The Siege of Leningrad: A New Perspective from Personal Diaries 
by Anna Reid 
GB RUSSIA SOCIETY PROGRAMME
Language: In English
Wed 25 April 2012 – 7.00pm

Talk at Pushkin House, London

‘28 December 1941 at 12.30 pm – Zhenya died. 25 January 1942 at 3pm – Granny died. 17 March at 5am – Lyoka died. 13 April at 2am – Uncle Vasya died. 10 May at 4pm – Uncle Lyosha died. 13 May at 7.30 am – Mama died. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.’


Thus wrote a twelveyear- old girl in the pages of a pocket address book during the siege of Leningrad, the deadliest blockade of a city in human history.


When Hitler made his surprise attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, he meant to capture Leningrad before turning on Moscow. In early September he changed strategy, deciding to concentrate his tanks on the attack on Moscow, andstarve Leningrad out. Leningrad did not surrender, but for the next two winters no food was able to reach the city except by air or across Lake Ladoga. By January 1944, when the German armies finally began their long retreat, about three-quarters of a million civilians – between a quarter and a third of Leningrad’s pre-siege population – had died of hunger.


Drawing on newly available diaries and government records, Anna Reid describes Leningrad’s descent into mass death: the shrinking of the bread ration; the breakdown of electricity and water supply; the consumption of pets, joiner’s glue and face cream; the withering of emotions and family ties; looting, murder, and cannibalism – and at the same time, extraordinary endurance and
self-sacrifice.


Today, twenty years after the fall of Communism, memories of Leningrad’s suffering are still suppressed, as are those of the cruelty and incompetence of Russia’s wartime leadership. Stripping away decades of Soviet myth-making, Reid gives Tanya Savicheva and thousands like them back their voice.


Anna Reid read law at Oxford and Russian history at London University’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. From 1993-5 she lived in Kiev, reporting on Ukraine for the Economist and Daily Telegraph. From 2003-7 she ran the foreign affairs programme at the centreright think-tank Policy Exchange. Her previous books are The Sham an’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia, and Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine.


TO BOOK FOR THIS TALK PLEASE EMAIL membership@gbrussia.org
Tickets: £5
http://www.pushkinhouse.org/en/events/the-siege-of-leningrad-a-new-perspective-from-personal-diaries

TONIGHT: Inside Russia: A Correspondent's Personal Notes at Pushkin House, London

Thu 12 April 2012 – 7.00pm
Talk
Inside Russia: A Correspondent’s Personal Notes 
by Bridget Kendall 
GB RUSSIA SOCIETY PROGRAMME


The BBC’s Bridget Kendall is probably best known for her reporting from Moscow at the end of the perestroika era, when as BBC Moscow correspondent as she charted the Soviet Union’s collapse, the failed coup of 1991 and the emergence of a new Russia under Boris Yeltsin.


In fact her acquaintance with the country goes back to the mid 1970s when she studied for a year in a provincial university in what was still the height of the Brezhnev era. Thirty years on, her
experience of ordinary life in a stagnating and strictly controlled Soviet Union is a useful reminder of just what living in Soviet Union meant on a day to day basis.


At that time, many experts still considered the Soviet system might remain entrenched for decades to come. But in fact, when she returned for a second year of study in the early 80s, she was witness to a rather different mood: the Soviet Communist empire was beginning to crumble, under the strain of a failing economic system that could no longer compete with its cold-war rival, compounded by an unpopular war in Afghanistan and the incompetence of an aging and ailing leadership.


In this talk Bridget will share her personal reminiscences from the Soviet era, chart her experiences of reporting on Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms and the extraordinary collapse which twenty
years ago led to the end of the USSR, and offer some thoughts on the turbulent path Russia has travelled since then.


TO BOOK FOR THIS TALK PLEASE EMAIL membership@gbrussia.org
Tickets: £5
http://www.pushkinhouse.org/en/events/inside-russia-a-correspondents-personal-notes

CONF: Legacies of Russian Avant-Garde at Columbia, 24-25th Feb

Conference: Legacies of the Russian Avant-Garde 

The Harriman Institute, Columbia University

Friday, 24 February 2012–Saturday, 25 February 2012 

Room 1501, International Affairs Building 

This conference brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, poets, and artists, to re-examine the story of the Russian avant-garde. The panels, talks, and screenings will treat seminal and lesser-known works from a wide range of media, including literature, the visual arts, architecture, dance, film, and theater. Key issues to be explored will be the formation of the historical avant-garde; its appropriation by both official and dissident culture; avant-garde theory; and the Russian avant-garde’s dissemination abroad. By examining the seemingly paradoxical "traditions" of the avant-garde, we hope to raise broader questions about art practice and the cultural heritage of the twentieth century.

Participants: Arnold Aronson (Columbia), John Bowlt (USC), Svetlana Boym (Harvard), Devin Fore (Princeton), Boris Gasparov (Columbia), Nina Gourianova (Northwestern), Boris Groys (NYU), Tim Harte (Bryn Mawr), Valentina Izmirlieva (Columbia), Dragan Kujundzic (U of Florida), Mark Lipovetsky (U of Colorado at Boulder), Ronald Meyer (Columbia), Nicoletta Misler (Istituto Universitario Orientale), Catharine Nepomnyashchy (Columbia)

Eugene Ostashevsky (NYU), Harsha Ram (Berkeley), Masha Salazkina (Concordia), Yuri Shevchuk (Columbia), Nariman Skakov (Stanford), Tatiana Smoliarova (Columbia), Rebecca Stanton (Columbia), Malynne Sternstein (U of Chicago), Cristina Vatulescu (NYU), Matvei Yankelevich (Ugly Duckling Presse).

The Harriman Institute at Columbia University is the oldest academic institution in the United States devoted to the study of the countries of the former Soviet Union, East Central Europe and the Balkans. Their mission is to serve our large and diverse community at the university and beyond by supporting instruction and dialogue, sponsoring vibrant, multidisciplinary events that bring together their extraordinary resources of faculty, students, and alumni. Most importantly, they are committed to training the next generation of regional specialists to play leadership roles in setting the academic and scholarly agenda, making policy and challenging accepted truths about how we study our rapidly changing world.

Conference Program- download PDF

http://www.harrimaninstitute.org/MEDIA/02124.pdf

Russian Master Leonid Steele celebrates his 90th birthday with cover of an American Magazine

 

For Leonid Steele, a painter often called “a living legacy to the art of the Soviet Union”, holding in his hands a fresh February issue of the respected art magazine “Fine Art Connoisseur” marks a very special moment. As one of the leading practitioners of the Russian School of the Soviet Period known as “Socrealism” he had his share of public recognition in the Soviet Union throughout his long career there from the 1950s to 1980s. Residing in Los Angeles since 1990, he is now experiencing a fresh wave of recognition by the young generation of artists in his new home in America.

As the world once again faces anxiety and uncertainty, Leonid has an important lesson to share from his remarkable life story and through his art aptly reflecting his tumultuous times. Born in Ukraine, he lived through the great famine of 1933, known in Russian and Ukrainian as “golodomor,” and considered by some a deliberate act of communism and one of the genocides of the 20th century. Later he survived a severe concussion in the Great Patriotic War (WWII). As a true individual within the Soviet art world, he never yielded his stubborn creative spirit to the hammer of the Soviet bureaucratic system.

A graduate of the venerated Leningrad Repin Art Institute, (formerly the Russian Imperial Academy of Arts), he is one of the masters of what became known in the West as Soviet Impressionism of the 1950s – early 1960s, and one of the pioneers and leading masters of the Severe Style of the 1960s.

As a painter, Steele is significant and quite unique in both showcasing the strongest aspects of this important school, as well as in continuously pushing its boundaries. His career is a life-long lab of stylistic development in search of the most powerful expression for his major works. He managed to preserve his innate need to “keep going” and to achieve recognition by the public while perfectly willing to pay the price if necessary for daring to succeed on his own, outside the expected steps of “going through the ranks” or favors of government-appointed official art-bureaucracy -- something that the tightly controlled bureaucratic system could not afford to forgive for its own survival.

“What my Dad had to go through to pay for his stubborn individualism and what the bureaucratic art system of the Soviet Union had put him through are quite staggering by comparison with the friendly spirit of camaraderie in the American art world. Yet the rewards of speaking with his powerful works directly to the viewers thirsty for a liberating sense of truthfulness about their lives in a totalitarian pressure cooker were also immense” says his son Alexey Steele, a noted LA painter in his own right.

The vast collection, now under the care of Alexey, represents a look – rare in its completeness -- at the inner workings of an important practitioner of this school. “The core, most important works are really of such a unique level that they shall eventually belong to important public institutions”, says Alexey Steele. Lots of works, including some of the important early works in the collection, are also badly in need of some serious restoration, which will take sizable funds. To this end, Alexey is planning to make some works available without “commercializing” them via the official website www.leonidsteele.com

Managing to preserve and nurture his individual spirit and artistic freedom, Leonid Steele became one of the early pioneers of the Severe Style, a powerful visual language that combined a strong figurative backbone of academic tradition with a laconic language of simplified forms, resulting in such major works as “The Land” and “The Family”.

This tenacious creative force not only did not fade with age, but it seems to have become a hidden fountain of youth for Steele as today he paints with just as much passion and energy as ever, still turning out some amazing works. Perhaps the most fascinating of them are his portrait studies, deeply striking in freshness and truthfulness of character rendition. Enormously forceful, each based on an hour or hour and a half live sitting from his LA-Russian friends, people of the former Soviet Union and the last remaining members of remarkable generation. And what an amazingly faithful devotion to his characters...these are the same people he painted in the 50s, 60s, 70s, but now he paints them in LA, all bearing a remarkable sense of wisdom, strength and completeness of a long journey. Till the end, the Master remains faithful to portraying his now aging and so quickly disappearing truly great generation that survived and persevered through the hard roads and turns of the turbulent 20th century.

Celebrating Leonid’s 90th birthday crystallizes the importance of inviting a serious look at the cultural significance of this unique era as a whole, in its complete picture, and finally bridging the historic divide along the Western Modernism – Eastern Realism fault line.

So what’s the main secret the old Russian Master has to share with young talents of our time? “Going all the way and no matter what” is the only road to the glistening mountain of any true art.
http://www.leonidsteele.com

5th Russian Film Festival, 4–13 November

On Friday 4th November, the 5th Russian Film Festival opened with the UK premiere of Generation P, the adaptation of Victor Pelevin's cult novel. The film was presented by director Victor Ginzburg and leading actors. The film portrays the complex and often  absurd story of how today's Russia came into being – and was shown on Russian National Unity Day. 


GENERATION P
While the Soviet Union was falling apart at the seams, living out its final days, Western brands began rapidly flooding the post-Soviet market. With his nose to the ground, main character Babilen Tatarsky sets up his own advertising agency with a mission to popularise new products, helped by fun, catchy slogans adapted for the “Soviet mentality”. And so begins a new era. An era of destroying outdated ideals. The youth brought up on these advertising captions will later become known as “generation Pepsi”.

The main programme of the 5th Russian Film Festival will include the 10 best Russian feature films of the year, made by a new generation of Russian film directors. All films have received recognition at prestigious international and national festivals and have been specially selected for the Russian Film Festival by the programme director, Andrei Plakhov, President of FIPRESCI. Further, the Russian Film Festival in London is the only event where all these acclaimed films will be shown in one single place and presented by their world famous directors and actors, who will join us for Q&As and discussions.


Vitaly Mansky, Russia's master of documentary film, has put together a striking selection of contemporary Russian documentaries by women and about women. In addition we will be holding a special screening of short films including under the radar works by some of Russia's best RUSSIAN FILM FESTIVAL. There will also be the ever popular comprehensive and diverse programme of animation, ready to enchant adults and children alike with its charm and imagination.


The Russian Film Festival is an important annual event for Russians living in London and a unique window onto today's Russia for a British audience.


First Russian-British Co-Production and Distribution Forum
As part of the Russian Film Festival, Academia Rossica, in partnership with the BFI and the Russian Cinema Fund, is organising the first Russian-British Co-Production and Distribution Forum on 11 November at the British Film Institute. The forum aims to introduce leading film professionals of both counties to each other and explore opportunities of collaboration and partnership. Participants include top Russian producers Sergei Selyanov, Artem Vasiliev, Natalia Ivanova, Raisa Fomina and Igor Tolstunov.


The Russian Film Festival is organised by ACADEMIA ROSSICA who have been showcasing Russian culture for over 10 years.

http://russianfilmfestival.co.uk/