SOVIETS are coming under scrutiny in a fascinating course which should attract history lovers.

Starting in January, the seven-week course on Russian history offered by the Petersfield branch of the Workers’ Educational Association will cover Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the Stalin years, the 30s with its collective farms and terror, and on to Putin.

“Russian is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” said Winston Churchill in October 1939, speaking at a time when Russian’s intentions towards Nazi Germany were unclear.

Since then the vast country has been through much change – the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’, and the present day return to autocracy.

Teaching the course is one of the WEA’s most distinguished tutors, Roger Facer who is a historian specialising in Russian history.

He says of the course: “The Soviet Union inherited from Tsarist Russian an amalgam of vast new territories populated by many peoples. How did it cope and, following its collapse, what does history tell us about the state over which Putin now rules?”

For more information contact committee member Nan Biles on e-mail [email protected]