HIGHLIGHTS
past events

How does architecture interact with people's everyday lives; and how does is it deployed (and manipulated) by political and economic power brokers? The one day Politics & Architecture: Palaces, Paradoses and Purgatories workshop with Michal Murawski explored these questions, focusing in particular on the relationship between politics and architecture in Eastern Europe during and after the socialist period.

Former music critic for The Guardian and The Sunday Correspondent, David Nice, held the one day workshop, Soviet Music of the 1920s. The new Soviet scene was quick to catch up after its own fashion. So much has been written about the move to socialist realism under Stalin, and how Prokofiev and Shostakovich managed to circumvent that up to a point. Yet the state absorption of individual groups, which at first seemed like a good thing, didn't happen until 1933.

Expert fashion stylist, Natasha Vinnikova, hosted a three-week masterclass series on Russian Fashion Through the Ages at Pushkin House. The series, coincided with London Fashion Week 2019, and focused on how Russian fashion icons gained their popularity. The masterclasses explored Russian fashion before and after the Soviet Union, highlighting how Russian fashion might endure as we move into the future.

From the Russian Revolution to the beginnings of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the 1980s, Communist Party propagandists waged war on all the gods. Drawing on decades’ worth of vivid, alarming, and rarely-seen anti-religious propaganda illustrations directed against what Karl Marx had once called “the opium of the people”, author Roland Elliott Brown unfolded the strange tale of Soviet atheist ideology, from its origins in 19th-century radical thought to its implosion along with the USSR and its legacy in Putin’s Russia, in the Godless Utopia: Soviets Against Religion! one day workshop at Pushkin House.