Towards the end of the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg's Life and Fate, a long scene in director Lev Dodin's daring if necessarily selective adaptation of Vasily Grossman's epic novel brings many of the actors together after a sequence of painful monologues and one-to-ones.

Hands both sensitive and surgical are needed to guide a reader into the heart of the 20^th century’s second biggest genocide and out again. Anne Applebaum is the right person for a queasy and difficult task, never turning away from the horrifying details of the man-made famine that caused nearly four million deaths throughout Ukraine in 1932-3 but also giving it a context of before and after that ends on a positive note for the nation’s sovereignty.

Revolution - New Art for a New World film starts well: the opening shot (main picture) is of young women painting white letters onto a red banner. “We all knew what to paint,” says the voice-over. “Bread, Work, Vote, but the message was ‘Women of the World Unite!’” 

"There is no murder in paradise" is the official line of the authorities in 1950s Russia, but nevertheless Child 44 is the blood-drenched tale of a hunt for a mass-murdering paedophile in Stalin's deathly shadow. The source novel was the first in Tom Rob Smith's trilogy about Russia during and after the Great Dictator, and Smith based it on the real-life killer Andrei Chikatilo, the "Rostov Ripper".

Russian prisoner Gavriil is telling his psychiatrist a story about a strange and frightening dragon who demands a female sacrifice from the local townsfolk every year. When Gavriil gets to the end of his hot-breathed tale, his doctor drily remarks: "Almost hard to believe that Stalin had a problem with it." The time is 1978 and we are in the USSR, a place where fiction is censored, writers are frequently imprisoned and real life is even more fantastical than fiction. 

When Dostoyevsky was asked why he wrote Crime and Punishment he famously replied, “To further my career and get shortlisted for book prizes.” He didn’t, of course. I made that up. But what artist/writer/actor creates a piece of art/writing/acting without at least a bit of shallow consideration for their career? (What?! Just me?) The opening of my play Making Stalin Laugh at JW3 in London has been a joyous reminder that there’s so much more to writing than getting good reviews and checking the number of Twitter followers you have once an hour.

Southwark Playhouse's new production of The Love Girl and the Innocent is London’s first in over 30 years, and there’s a reason Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s play rarely reaches the stage: it’s a lumpy mammoth of a script, demanding a cast upwards of 50, with stage directions that would be monumental if interpreted literally.

The Belarusian director Sergei Loznitsa recently made an impact with the powerful In the Fog, a delicately balanced examination of the pressures at play in World War II Russia. Before that, his international calling card was My Joy (2010), a first venture into fiction. Both form part of a prodigious body of work otherwise dedicated to non-fiction. The release of the documentaries Blockade, Landscape and Revue in one package gives non-Russians a first chance to sample what dominates his output.

Blockade (2006) takes archive footage of the Leningrad Blockade of 1941 to 1944, when the city was sealed off by German forces with support from Finland. Loznitsa’s unvarnished chronological account of what was going within the city and the effect on its citizens is harrowing and at times difficult to watch. Revue (2008) is lighter and takes clips from Fifties and Sixties state-sanctioned propaganda films to show Russia as it was meant to be. Although sometimes funny, the insight into how the individual was subsumed into the collective is precious. Landscape (2003) is a contemporary portrait capturing the villagers of Okulovka as they wait for a bus with a constantly circling camera. Although comparable to the observational films of Chantal Akerman, it goes further by revealing who these people are with snippets of their conversations. When the bus finally comes, the resultant mêlée means all interaction is abandoned.

Loznitsa’s major preoccupation is what makes Russia and its people tick. Whether through fiction or fact, through the contemporary or historical he explores how Russia is defined, both by its individuals and the agencies delineating what the country actually is – or is meant to be. Naturally, he asks who he is as well. All three films are enthralling, intense, subtle and sympathetic. Above all, they are humanistic. As with In the Fog, Loznitsa keeps his distance and lets what’s seen tell its story.

This trio posits Loznitsa as a successor to Dziga Vertov, the director of Man with a Movie Camera (1929), the classic depiction of city life in Russia. This collection is highly recommended.

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Overleaf: Watch Sergei Loznitsa discuss Revue

The Bolshoi left it till last to be most itself, to dance a ballet that is truly of its blood, its seed - its closing on Alexei Ratmansky's The Flames of Paris will leave much happiness in the memory to override the problematic productions of classics, the unidiomatic Balanchine and the awful backstage events. Here at last, in a work by the most gifted of recent Bolshoi directors, you met on stage young people who dance, who act, who love the theatre, fresh in their performing, skilled in their means, open-hearted in reaching the audience, and loved right back.

Take note of the title, with its “could”, not “must”. “The word ‘must’ is not to be used to Princes,” quoth Good Queen Bess as echoed in Britten’s Gloriana. Yet that was the verb used by New York writer Scott Rose, guest-posting on Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped Disc blog. He declared that hit-and-miss superstar soprano Anna Netrebko, having proved fair game for the drive against Putin’s Nazi-rulebook laws in Russia by aligning herself politically with the regime as a named supporter of his re-election campaign, “must state her position on gay rights in Russia”.