There’s been some fine media coverage to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall. So apart from my numerous posts under the Maoism tag, here’s a roundup of some of my posts on life, and death, behind the Iron Curtain—always bearing Chinese connections in mind.
On the GDR (for which note the useful Twitter # @DDROnline):
- Lives under the GDR (based on Timothy Garton Ash, The file)
- Life in the GDR, 2 (Stasi memorial sites)
- Red love
- Siblings
- The successive escapes of my orchestral colleague Hildi, Parts 1 and 2
- Nina Hagen
- Klaus Tennstedt
- Subversive feature films
- Some notes on Deutschland 89.

Blind minstrels of Ukraine https://stephenjones.blog/2018/10/13/blind-minstrels-ukraine/
On the USSR:
- Lives in Stalin’s Russia
- Bloodlands
- Blind minstrels of Ukraine
- Famine: Ukraine and China
- Between East and West
- Cheremis, Chuvash—and Tibetans
- The first gulag
- Kolyma tales
- The ethereal theremin
- Soviet lives at war
- The death of Stalin
- The Kazakh famine
- The genius of Sergei Parajanov.
See also my roundup of posts on Ukraine.
Elsewhere:
- Bulgaria
- Serbia
- Musical cultures of East Europe
- Folk traditions of Poland
- Madonna pilgrimage in Communist Poland
- Polish jazz, then and now
- From Bosch to Stańko.
For the wider picture, see
And for bitter jokes from behind the Iron Curtain:
See also various posts under the Czech tag, notably
All this complements posts on Nazism, such as
- Trauma: music, art, objects
- A Nazi legacy
- The Ratline
- Ravensbrück
- Sachsenhausen
- The psychology of evil
- Forgotten victims
- Les Parisiennes.
See also Timothy Snyder on tyranny.
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