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.

GDR 2 https://stephenjones.blog/2018/05/02/gdr-2/

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
• 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

• Why the First World War failed to end
• The great siege of Przemyśl.

And for bitter jokes from behind the Iron Curtain:

• Hammer and tickle
• More Hammer and tickle
• Big red joke book

See also various posts under the Czech tag, notably

• A Czech couple in 1950s’ Tianqiao
• Hašek’s adventures in Soviet Tatarstan.

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.