MIK SABIERS savours the first headline solo show of the stalwart of Brighton’s indie-punk outfit Blood Red Shoes
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The political advantage of an anti-war position
GAVIN O’TOOLE applauds a uniquely nuanced people’s history of the revolutionary period, told from below
BLOODBATH: Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), July 17 1917 - July 4, 1917 (Julian calendar) troops of the Provisional Government fired machine guns at the 500,000 protestors - 700 people were killed, most of them Bolsheviks or Bolshevik sympathisers
New releases reviewed by IAN SINCLAIR
STEVEN ANDREW is moved beyond words by a historical account of mining in Britain made from the words of the miners themselves
CAILEAN MCBRIDE welcomes a refreshing and timely study of the way officialdom creates structures that exclude LGBT+ rights and humanity
The bard mourns the loss of comrades and troubadours, and looks for consolation with Black Country Jess
CHRIS MOSS relishes the painting and the life story of a self-taught working-class artist from Warrington
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a star-studded adaptation of Ibsen’s play that is devoid of believable humanity
Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914-1924
Robert Service, Picador, £30
REFERENCES abound to similarities between the current geopolitical context — a combustible mixture of warmongering by corrupt elites, resentful nationalism, and brooding popular discontent — and circumstances on the eve of WWI.
Bellicose politicians today banging the war drums as a distraction would, therefore, do well to revisit the starkest lesson to emerge from a period during which a gasping Europe was drowned in a cauldron of blood.
The defining event of that era was not the Treaty of Versailles, but the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk — the separate peace agreed between the new Bolshevik government of Soviet Russia and the Central Powers.
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