Index asked intellectuals, writers and dissidents to explain Russia. Instead, they raised a raft of interesting questions about the country.
Reinventing Russia
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CATEGORY: Magazine
Time to move on?
Index on Censorship challenges the received wisdom: is it time to liberate Germany from the crippling burden of guilt? Do we have the courage to move on?
Torture: A user’s manual
Torture is back in fashion it seems; in the face of the terrorist threat, we are told, a little refined torture is a very good thing. Index argues: Thou shall not
Does God love democracy?
More intimately than at any time since the Middle Ages, and from the USA to China, the world’s religions are back in the thick of politics. To what effect and with what consequences?
Writing on the walls
Index on Censorship magazine looks at lives disrupted by man-made borders and the social, political and economic havoc they wreak on communities.
The lying game
Index looks at a world in which truth segues almost perceptibly unto untruth, politicians come, sincerely, to believe their own lies.
Apocalypse: The truth about AIDS
Index attempts to unmask the lies, denial, discrimination surrounding HIV/AIDS – and points the finger at the chief culprits
Law on trial
Index attempts to unmask the lies, denial, discrimination surrounding HIV/AIDS – and points the finger at the chief culprits
Rewriting America
Index looks at America the beautiful, the most powerful country in the world through the words of the people who know it best
Double crossings: Migration now
In this issue, Index tries to distinguish between the rhetoric and the reality on migration and start a debate shorn of the vicious language of tabloid headlines.
A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.
The brainchild of the poet Stephen Spender, and translator Michael Scammell, the magazine’s very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year.
The magazine continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet censors, but its scope was far wider. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere – it was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The winter 1979 issue, for example, reported on a controversy in the United States in which the Public Broadcasting Service had heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and then gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version. Learn more.