The Bolsheviks’ efforts to change the world remain relevant in our own time of popular disaffection with establishment politics and brutalist economics, says Geoffrey Roberts

The president cannot be tamed, so it is time to put the national interest ahead of party politics, says Nina L Khrushcheva.  

Donald Trump has called journalists the ‘enemy’, and his autocratic tendencies should be a call to arms for writers, painters, and filmmakers, says Nina L Khrushcheva.

Richard Fitzpatrick selects an eclectic mix of summer reading options

The leaders of Russia, Turkey, and China have cast off quasi democratic checks and balances, but the more autocratic their rule, the more they have to lose, writes Nina L Khrushcheva

British, French, and German leaders and bureaucrats realised after World War II that only an economically stable ‘United States’ of Europe would guarantee peace, says Kyran Fitzgerald.

US: When a Detroit pizza delivery driver was injured in a car crash a suburban police officer took the food to its destination.

What difference do individuals make to history? This question is explored in Margaret McMillan’s new book, History’s People. 

JULIAN BARNES transports us back to the former Soviet Union’s days of “endless terror” for his first novel since winning the Man Booker Prize in 2011. 

Richard Fitzpatrick selects the biggest reads of 2015 across the various genres

Landmark was not something Elizabeth ‘had ever aspired to’.

There has been much commentary on Éamon de Valera infamous condolences to the German ambassador on the death of Adolf Hitler, 70 years ago.

The Soviets were crucial to the Allied victory in WW2, but 70 years on there is a rift again, says Geoffrey Roberts

Like Stalin, Putin has nurtured a climate of fear and lawlessness, in which those who rally behind the Kremlin feel a duty to eliminate the leader’s opponents however they can, says Nina L Khrushcheva

Banish the winter blues with some classical music or opera. Cathy Desmond selects the best events of the months ahead.

The Scots went to some trouble to make Richie McCaw feel at home at Murrayfield, unearthing evidence placing his ancestors from the same county as Robbie Burns, Bill Shankly and Robert the Bruce.

Joseph Stalin was violent and ruthless from an early age, and his criminality, his talents as an organiser and a manipulator, and his over-weening ambition, facilitated his later rise to power, says Geoffrey Roberts. 

Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s move to force a Government majority onto the banking inquiry was compared to what happened in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia by opposition senators.

Mary Soames, the last surviving child of Winston Churchill, has died, it was announced yesterday.

Obama has to stop lecturing Putin — it didn’t work in the past and won’t work now, writes Nina Khrushcheva.

Fighting broke out between pro and anti-Russian demonstrators in Ukraine’s Crimea region as Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered military exercises just across the border.

A Moscow court has convicted dead Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky of tax evasion, provoking outrage over the posthumous prosecution of a man whose death in pre-trial detention led to a major diplomatic row with Washington.

The mother of the two Boston bombing suspects says she now regrets moving her family to the US and believes they would have been better off in a village in Dagestan.

When Barack Obama was sworn in as 44th President of the United States on Jan 20, 2009, the event was expected to spark great, positive change.

Seventy years ago today Hitler’s armies at Stalingrad surrendered after 200 days of the most savage fighting. Geoffrey Roberts on the moment the long, crooked and twisted journey to today’s democratic Europe began

General Zhukov is seen by many as a hero who defeated Hitler and by others as an egotistical brute. Either way he lives on in public consciousness in Russia today, writes Geoffrey Roberts

SATURDAY

They might get spanked in Ireland’s Pool C but a shift in attitude to the sport in Russia means this could be the last World Cup they’ll head to as minnows. Ciaran Cronin explains.

Peter Falk, the stage and movie actor who became identified as the squinty, rumpled TV detective in 'Columbo', has died.

Hitler’s attack on Russia on this day 70 years ago was the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany, writes Geoffrey Roberts

Estonia holds its first election as a eurozone member today, with the centre-right government hoping for an unprecedented second term for steering one of Europe’s most depressed economies back to growth.

PRESIDENT Dmitry Medvedev yesterday slammed the Soviet Union as a totalitarian regime that suppressed human rights, in the most damning assessment of the USSR by a Russian leader in recent years.

LAST week, the HSE was ‘baffled’ by the decision of the board of Our Lady’s, Crumlin, not to cooperate with the choice of the Mater site. Nobody else is ‘baffled’ by this ‘bafflement’.

U2 star Bono has been named as one of Time magazine’s persons of the year.

At a turbulent point in his presidency, US President Bush sought to bolster public backing for his war policies today, just days after the US death toll in Iraq surpassed 2,000.

I WISH to congratulate US President George W Bush on being named Time magazine's Person of the Year 2004.

TRUTH may be the first casualty of war, but it just as surely falls victim to the slings and arrows of Edward Horgan’s Peace and Neutrality Alliance (Irish Examiner letters, Jan 28).