CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
Latest editorial
Lest we forget
Massive emotional tribute to anti-Nazi heroes
Brest Fortress Memorial
[Lena Armstrong/Creative Commons]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Brest Fortress Memorial, Belarus
ON SEPTEMBER 18, 1971, just over 30 years after the momentous if doomed defence of the Brest fortress by the Soviet Red Army against Nazi invaders, a memorial to its defenders was unveiled by the 19th-century star-shaped citadel that sits astride the Mukhavets River and faces the River Bug.
On the present boundary between Belarus and Poland, within the latter’s borders before WWII it served as one of its places of internment for socialist activists.
Two weeks after Nazi Germany’s treacherous attack on Poland on September 1, 1939, Joseph Stalin ordered the Red Army to advance west and secure territories up to the River Bug, including the Brest fortress. Permitted under the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of August 1939, it was a move designed to keep German armies at arm’s length.
Similar stories
CJ ATKINS commemorates one of the most dramatic moments in working-class history
Despite an over-sentimental narrative, MICHAL BONCZA applauds an ambitious drama about the Chinese rescue of British POWs in WWII
MARJORIE MAYO, JOHN GREEN and MARIA DUARTE review Sudan, Remember Us, From Hilde, With Love, The Road to Patagonia, and F1
LYNNE WALSH tells the story of the extraordinary race against time to ensure London’s memorial to the International Brigades got built – as activists gather next week to celebrate the monument’s 40th anniversary