Miriam Dobson

Call me comrade: Cold War Pen-Pals

Miriam Dobson, 17 April 2025

In 1971, an elderly bookseller in Berkshire, Harold Edwards, began writing to the Aidov family in Moldavia. Slava Aidov was serving time in Dubravlag, a Soviet camp for political prisoners, and his wife, Lera, isolated and lonely, seized on the connection with Harold. Their correspondence continued for fifteen years. They talked about children and grandchildren, about the television they...

Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women
by Alexis Peri.

In 1949 – as hostilities between Stalin and Truman escalated – 319 pairs of women were regularly exchanging letters between the US and USSR. The pen-pal programme had its origins in wartime Moscow. With the USSR desperate for outside assistance, the Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee was tasked with encouraging British and US women to ‘invest personally’ in the war effort. They envisaged sustained exchanges of letters, with women encouraged to write not only about world events and politics but about their everyday lives, their relationships and families, their jobs and hobbies.

Tuts on the Trolleybus: Bone Music

Miriam Dobson, 30 March 2023

Adecade ago, the musician Stephen Coates was in St Petersburg to play a concert with his band. While he was there, some Russian friends took him to a flea market, where he found and bought a strange, unmarked disc. Back in London, he put it on: it was ‘Rock around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets. He held up the disc to the light and saw two skeletal hands. It looked...

Kid Gloves: Memory-Obsessed

Miriam Dobson, 7 October 2021

Maria Stepanova’s story begins with the death of her aunt. Towards the end of her life, Galya retreated from the world, unplugging her phone and devoting her time to classifying, sorting and sometimes discarding the possessions that crowded the ‘cave of her tiny apartment’. Shortly after her death, Stepanova sits among her aunt’s piled-up photographs and postcards,...

In Memory of Memory
by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale.

In Memory of Memory shows that the compulsive wish to remember and be remembered is in no way peculiar to the digital age. Maria Stepanova sees our obsession with genealogy websites, with social media and selfies, as a continuation of her ancestors’ hoarding of insignificant objects, of their need to pass them on – to a loved one, to a future self, to an unknown posterity.

How to Flip a Church: Prokudin-Gorsky’s Postcards

Miriam Dobson, 18 February 2021

In the decade or so before the revolutions of 1917, the photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky crisscrossed the Russian empire on its growing network of railways. He visited the medieval towns of Yaroslavl and Smolensk, went deep into Siberia and north to the Solovetsky islands, and travelled south to Bukhara and Samarkand, Central Asian cities colonised over the preceding century. He...

Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky
by William Craft Brumfield.

Blowing religious buildings up was appealing to the Bolsheviks, but so was protecting them as symbols of national heritage and pride; or preserving them while transforming their use and meaning, turning them into props for the story of communism’s secular triumph – a fragile narrative that had to be constantly retold. Contemporary Russia may like to see itself as the saviour of a religious tradition all but obliterated by the communists, but this too is a fragile narrative.

Who can I trust after this? A Sino-Soviet Romance

Miriam Dobson, 22 November 2018

Beijing, 1920. A young member of the new Communist Party in China, Zhang Guotao, is discussing revolutionary politics with a Comintern representative dispatched from Moscow. ‘Filled with youthful enthusiasm’, the Russian visitor ‘very easily fell in with people that held the new attitudes … And he drew no distinction between Chinese and foreigners, between the...

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