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When will Russia stop trying to re-write history?
The Russians are ganging up on the historians again because the regime doesn't want truth to tarnish the legend
Sir John Keegan, left, and Antony Beevor Photo: Martin Pope/Geoff Pugh
By Antony Beevor
7:23PM BST 06 Aug 2015
To hear on the very same day that the great historian Robert Conquest had died and that my books and John Keegan’s were being removed from libraries in Siberia, produced a sinister frisson from the past. The Russian authorities were once again accusing me of repeating Goebbels’s propaganda about the Red Army, stereotyping its soldiers as rapists. It is perhaps worth mentioning that any such criticism is now a crime under Russian law with up to five years imprisonment on conviction.
Ever since my book, Berlin – the Downfall, was published in 2002, senior Russians and the Kremlin-controlled media have fulminated against the passages dealing with the mass rapes committed by Red Army troopsduring their advance on Berlin. The fact that the information comes principally from Soviet sources is deliberately ignored. The state archives of the Russian Federation have numerous reports on the subject passed to Beria and Stalin, to say nothing of the diaries and accounts by Soviet officers and journalists in other archives. On the other hand, perhaps the files themselves are now being weeded to remove the evidence.
Even though a quarter of a century has passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian sensibilities have hardly changed. If anything, they are again paranoid about the idea that the world is ganging up against its barely concealed intervention in Ukraine. As the May 9 celebrations of the victory in 1945 over “the Fascist Beast” demonstrate each year, the defeat of Germany is regarded as sacred. Nothing must be allowed to tarnish the legend, which is why the truth about the rapes has proved so uncomfortable.
The Russia Day parade celebrates victory in 1945 over “the Fascist Beast”. Photo: EPA
But it remains a mystery why the books of the masterly John Keegan, who was long the Telegraph defence editor, have also been targeted. Apart from the panoramic view in his general history of the Second World War, he hardly wrote about the Red Army. I owed John a great deal, having studied under him at Sandhurst and been encouraged by him later. And every one of us acknowledges the importance of the book which made his name, The Face of Battle, a work which led to the revolution in the writing of military history. John believed that historians should not shy away from controversial aspects of the past. But that also means governments should not try to control history, whether in fostering nationalist myths or in attempting to ban discussion.
If there were any logic in this Russian purge, then Robert Conquest’s books would have been the first to be burned. He was a very courageous man. He published his most famous work, The Great Terror, in 1968, producing howls of outrage from the Left and vicious personal attacks. Those Lenin called “the useful idiots” – the fellow-travellers in the Cold War who tried to justify everything the Soviet Union had ever done – treated him as a liar and a fanatical anti-Communist propagandist. But Conquest never lost his nerve, and continued his research and writing, which included The Harvest of Sorrow in 1986, the most detailed account so far of the Ukraine famine unleashed by Stalin.
Robert Conquest's 'The Great Terror' altered our view of the communist experience. Photo: Charles Hopkinson
Nobody can agree on the figures of those who died being worked to death in the Gulag, or who died from famine and disease as a result of forced collectivisation, but when the Russian archives finally opened in 1992, Conquest’s account was triumphantly vindicated. His friend Kingsley Amis suggested that when The Great Terror came out in a new edition he should change the title to: I Told You So You F---ing Fools.
No doubt the Russian authorities removed Conquest’s books on Stalin’s crimes a long time ago, but perhaps they should also look at Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic poem Prussian Nights, which he translated so well. It included the following lines about the rapes which Solzhenitsyn himself witnessed in East Prussia as a lieutenant of Red Army artillery:
“A moaning, by the walls half muffled:
The mother’s wounded, still alive.
The little daughter’s on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it?
A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl’s been turned into a woman,
A woman turned into a corpse.”
The mother’s wounded, still alive.
The little daughter’s on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it?
A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl’s been turned into a woman,
A woman turned into a corpse.”
That, I repeat, was Solzhenitsyn, not Goebbels.
