USSR
Bone Music
Musician Stephen Coates joins us from the UK with the fascinating story of how some people in the former USSR got around the ban on western music using X-Rays clandestinely obtained from hospitals. Audio
Wind of Change: Did the CIA write a power ballad to bring down the USSR?
The Berlin Wall had just fallen and the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse when German band The Scorpions released their 1990 song Wind of Change. The power ballad became the soundtrack to a… Video, Audio
The extraordinary story of Nazi evil sewn into family armchair
World War II historian Daniel Lee's new book, The SS Officer's Armchair, came about by chance after he met a woman whose mother had taken an old armchair for reupholstering in Amsterdam. What happened… Audio, Gallery
DIY diplomacy: Spacebridge
It's a far out true story featuring New Age thinking, The Space Race, dream telepathy, the Grateful Dead, and ESP. With the world living under the threat of nuclear attack, the idea was to bypass Cold… Audio
Chris Herwig's Soviet bus stops - a journey and an obsession
Canadian photographer Chris Herwig's books, Soviet Bus Stops 1 & 2, reveal the stunning and unexpected architecture of the bus stops peppering the Soviet landscape from Latvia to Russia. A snap… Audio, Gallery
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Thomas Goss looks at Prokofiev's return to Soviet Russia after a successful career in Paris. Audio