Introducing: Thursday Screening

A new video recommendation series from Son of a Diplomat

Welcome to Thursday Screening! Each week I’ll be curating a few videos about conflict (both historic and contemporary) that I think you’ll enjoy. Son of a Diplomat has been growing steadily and I’m excited to be building a community of people just as interested as I am in following along with the interweaving threads of history and modern conflict. My hope is that as this Substack grows, this space becomes a sort of communal movie theater where we can discuss what we just watched in the lobby comments after.

PBS: Inside Gorbachev's USSR with Hedrick Smith; Looking for Perestroika (1990)

I talk to my parents from time to time about the years they spent in Moscow during the late 1980s. They paint a bleak picture of a country that could barely sustain itself—peasants working in the surrounding fields with equipment from the stone ages, stores with nothing to sell, a total lack of fresh produce. But it’s hard to conceptualize just how awful the USSR was during the Cold War without seeing footage from directly behind the Iron Curtain. PBS sent Hedrick Smith in 1990 to interview soviets from all walks of life and the documentary they produced is pretty stunning:

VICE News: Inside Wagner: The Rise of Russia's Notorious Mercenaries (2023)

I have mixed feelings about VICE News but they do undeniably good work when it comes to sending foreign correspondents to global hotspots. Last December they published exclusive footage from a trip to the Central African Republic as part of a feature on the Wagner Private Mercenary Company. Wagner may be getting rolled into the Russian Ministry of Defense's portfolio but their legacy will continue to plague Africa for years to come:

Thanks for checking out Thursday Screening! Regularly scheduled Son of a Diplomat will return on Monday.