BBC Commemorate Anniversary

It's 50 years since Boris Pasternak's novel Dr Zhivago was published, and the BBC have a new radio adaptation.

It's also 75 years since Stalin starved several million Ukrainians to death. If there are any BBC documentaries on this subject, they're keeping pretty quiet about them on the website.

Only two Western journalists exposed the famine - Malcolm Muggeridge in some unsigned Guardian pieces, and a young Welshman called Gareth Jones, who was almost certainly killed by the NKVD two years later.

You can't blame the BBC bigwigs for this lack of focus. After all, when they were at university only right-wing lunatics like Robert Conquest claimed the USSR was responsible for millions of deaths. Turned out he was right all along.