Preserving the Cold War in Sunny California

We are looking for a museum of Cold War history that has a collection of everything from East German blueprints to Soviet artwork.

Soviet Wizard of Oz at the Staatsballett Berlin

A new ballet is being performed in Berlin that is based on the Soviet version of the “Wizard of Oz.”

The post-communist generation

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For some living in what was once the Eastern Bloc, the anniversary of bringing down the wall brings little cause for celebration. The last twenty years have brought freedom but also hardship and uncertainty – especially for the youngest generation who have grown up without Communism. Laura Lynch visited a high school in Budapest, Hungary. Download MP3

• Laura Lynch’s story on the first breach of the Iron Curtain in 1989
• Susan Stone reports how young Germans remember East Germany
• The World’s Gerry Hadden revisits the former East German border
• The World’s Alex Gallafent on owning a piece of the Berlin Wall

World Books Review: A Crown of Thorns for Mandelstam

“The Stalin Epigram” is offered as a novelist’s homage to Osip Mandelstam, the poet who embodied both a new era in Russian poetry and the martyrdom of Russia’s intelligentsia under Stalinism. But the book turns out to be a crown of thorns, a posthumous offense to a poet who has few defenders at the ready to fence for his honor.