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Mexico in Flux

Against the rightward trend of the Old World, countries in Latin America continue to favour governments of the left. The resounding mandate for Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico’s presidential election confirms Morena’s hegemony within the new party system. Where exactly on the political map should its project be placed?

Matrix of War

Fine-grained tripartite analysis of the historical dynamics—Russia’s recovery and nationalist re-assertion, Ukraine’s internal political evolution, NATO expansionism—that produced the broader context in which the Kremlin launched its murderous war.

Retrocession in Ecuador

Tony Wood on Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. Indigenous resistance to statist development as background to an electoral defeat of the left in the Andes.

Mesoamerican Pathways

Tony Wood on John Tutino, The Mexican Heartland. Historic struggles of central Mexico’s campesinos postulated as relay-switch for capitalism’s expansion in Latin America and beyond.

Dark Mirrors

Fine-grained reading of the films of Andrei Zvyagintsev, from the abstract allegories of his earlier work to the unsparing portrayals of contemporary Russia in Elena and Leviathan, exemplary of a new social turn in post-Soviet cinema. Reflections of class polarization and fables of power, with Orthodoxy as its prop.

Lives of Jughashvili

Tony Wood on Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, Volume I and Oleg Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator. Contrasting portrayals of the ‘man of steel’.

Reserve Armies of the Imagination

Tony Wood on Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen. Dilemmas of representation—aesthetic and political—in the age of the super-abundant image.

Collapse as Crucible

While Russia’s anti-Putin demonstrations have prompted talk of a civic awakening—led by a flat-pack middle class—the country’s overall social landscape remains largely unmapped. Tony Wood surveys its shifting structures since the Soviet collapse, and the consequences of marketization’s advance through the USSR’s ruins.

Silver and Lead

Tony Wood on Anabel Hernández, Los señores del narco. The structures of political complicity and corruption that have fuelled Mexico’s drug wars.

Good Riddance to New Labour

As the British general election approaches, a balance-sheet of New Labour’s thirteen years in office. The record of Blair and Brown—imperial wars abroad, subservience to the City at home—as so many reasons to cheer their downfall.

Latin America Tamed?

Tony Wood on Michael Reid, Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul. A revised neoliberal gospel for the region, courtesy of the Economist.

Contours of the Putin Era

Responding to Vladimir Popov, Tony Wood examines the geographical and social distribution of Russia’s recent economic growth. What are the priorities and outlook of the emerging business-state elite—and whom will Putin’s ‘stabilization’ benefit?

Celluloid and Plasma

Tony Wood on Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second. How has the digital era changed the cinematic viewing experience—and the spectator? Freeze-frame fetishism and narrative disruption from Lumière to Kiarostami, via Hitchcock and Rossellini.

Annals of Utopia

Tony Wood on Andrey Platonov, Happy Moscow and Soul. Recently discovered works by the neglected giant of twentieth-century Russian letters. The singular language and multiple ambiguities of Platonov’s style, and heroic impasses of his life and times.

The Case for Chechnya

Eager to embrace Putin, Western rulers and pundits continue to connive at the Russian occupation of Chechnya, as Moscow’s second murderous war in the Caucasus enters its sixth year. Traditions of resistance, popular demands for sovereignty and Russia’s brutal military response, in Europe’s forgotten colony.

Vanishing Acts

Tony Wood on Corinne Diserens, ed., Gordon Matta-Clark. Dissections of architectural space in the 60s and 70s, and their meaning in contemporary criticism. Did Matta-Clark’s disappearing art works leave behind a radical grin?

A Futurist Ark

Tony Wood on John Bowlt et al., eds, Nikolai Khardzhiev, A Legacy Regained. Matchless archive of art and writings from avant-garde Russia, and an old man at the mercy of the West.

Tropical Vanguards

Tony Wood on David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910–1990. Painters, writers and political upheavals in Mexico, Cuba and Nicaragua.

Metamorphoses of Prince M

Tony Wood on G. S. Smith, D. S. Mirsky. A Russian–English Life. White Guard officer, Eurasian exile, and repatriated Marxist—the prince who rewrote Russian literary history.

A Suprematist Cinema?

Tony Wood on Margarita Tupitsyn, Malevich and Film. The reasons why Russia’s greatest avant-garde artist preferred Dziga Vertov to Sergei Eisenstein.

The Poet of Decembrism?

Tony Wood on T. J. Binyon, Pushkin: A Biography. Scouring the crust of patriotic myths from the image of Russia’s greatest poet.

The Ecstatic Spiral

Tony Wood on Jacques Rancière, La Fable cinématographique. From Eisenstein to Deleuze, luminous snapshots of the cinema that would substitute a single regime for historical periods.

Bering’s Syndrome

Tony Wood on Aleksandr Etkind, Tolkovanie puteshestvii. Rossiia i Amerika v travelogakh i intertekstakh. Russo-American literary–political relations, from Pushkin to Ayn Rand, in an ingeniously conciliatory mirror.

Woe to the Victor

Tony Wood on Laurence Kelly, Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran. The strange career of Alexander Griboyedov, Russia’s satirist playwright and predator envoy to Persia.

Putin’s Colonial War

Tony Wood on Anna Politkovskaya, A Dirty War. Putin’s campaign of colonial repression in Chechnya, and the contradictions of a courageous journalist’s response.

A Guest from the Past

Tony Wood on The Diaries of Nikolai Punin and N. N. Punin, Dnevniki. Pis’ma. The life and times of Russia’s leading theorist of the visual avant-garde, in times of war and revolution.

Mellon in Magnitogorsk

Tony Wood on Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: the Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. USSR and USA as alternative models of mechanized happiness in the inter-war world—and their outcome at the end of the Cold War.

Time Unfrozen: The Films of Aleksei German

Virtually unknown in the West, Aleksei German is regarded by Russians as their most radical and original film director. Tony Wood considers his techniques of disorientation, and the craft of induced paranoia in his latest movie about the Doctors’ Plot of 1953—its title taken from Beria’s triumphant shout to his chauffeur.