Tony Wood

She is recognisable even in the grey, pixellated CCTV images: a tall, slender woman with grey hair, her oval glasses perched on an aquiline nose. She is looking to her right, a stern expression on her face, as she carries her shopping towards the door of her apartment building. She enters, disappearing from view; the time-stamp reads 16:01. It is the last time she will be seen alive. She will...

Writing his memoirs in 1946, two years before his death, Sergei Eisenstein declared that he had ‘been fascinated by bones and skeletons since childhood’. His first experience of film involved watching a flying skeleton horse pull a bewitched carriage across the sky, in Georges Méliès’s Les 400 Farces du diable. It was skeletons, he says, that made him go to...

On 16 April, President Medvedev announced the official end of Russia’s ‘counter-terrorist operation’ in Chechnya, effectively declaring victory in the long war against Chechen separatism. Much of Grozny – virtually razed to the ground during a decade and a half of fighting – has now been reconstructed, and in recent years there has been a marked decline in the...

The conflict in South Ossetia has produced a cloud of rhetoric that seems to have grown in inverse proportion to the intensity of fighting on the ground. Once the outcome became clear – a crushing Russian military victory – Cold War imagery flooded the Western press. Far more than the status of a tiny mountainous enclave in the South Caucasus was said to be at stake: not only was Georgia’s territorial integrity imperilled by Russian tyranny, but the future of democracy was under threat. In the Washington Post of 11 August, Robert Kagan asserted that the conflict will be seen as ‘a turning point no less significant’ than the fall of the Berlin Wall. Given this ‘much bigger drama’, ‘the details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s war against Georgia are not very important.’