Aleksei Rykov News Today

The Great Terror of 1937, also known as the Great Purge, was a deadly political campaign led by Joseph Stalin to eliminate dissent in 1930s Soviet Union.

Stalin’s Architect chronicles the career and legacy of Boris Iofan, an architect who designed buildings for Soviet Russia.

The invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces has rendered what might otherwise have seemed a fairly niche study of a Soviet-era architect rather more resonant. Boris Iofan was born to a Russian-speaking Jewish family in Odessa in 1891. After initial studies in his home city and a brief period working with his older brother Dimitri

This short pamphlet was put together by Simon Pirani in 1996/7 from a series of interviews with Ukrainian worker activist Oleg Dubrovskii. It’s of general interest in relation to the way that life for the workers changed when the old Soviet Union disintegrated, but also provides some useful background information to what’s happening in the Ukraine today.