Anthony Beevor banned

[Thanas]

...Yekaterinburg, Russia

Russian region bans British historians' books from schools

Authorities in Yekaterinburg tell schools to ‘prevent access’ to works by Antony Beevor and John Keegan, claiming they promote Nazi stereotypes

A Russian region has called on schools to remove the works of two British historians from their library shelves, saying they promote Nazi stereotypes.

The authorities in Ekaterinburg region circulated a letter to schools telling them to search for books by historians Antony Beevor and John Keegan and ensure any copies are removed. Beevor’s work has caused outrage in Russia, particularly his book on the fall of Berlin in 1945, which contains extensive material about rapes carried out by Soviet soldiers against German women.

Beevor also wrote a long work about the epic battle of Stalingrad, a Soviet victory which came at enormous human cost and is seen as a key turning point in the war.

“In some ways I am amazed that it has taken them so long,” Beevor told the Guardian. “What depresses me the most is that once again we are faced with a government trying to impose its own version of history. I am fundamentally opposed to all such attempts to dictate a truth, whether it concerns denial of the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide, or the ‘sacred victory’ of May 1945.”

A letter from the local ministry of education that had been circulated to all schools and colleges in the region was published by a news website on Wednesday. Dated 31 July, it is signed by the deputy regional education minister, Nina Zhuravleva, and says the ministry has “received information that the libraries of some educational institutions may contain books published by the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation) which propagandise stereotypes originating in the Third Reich”.

The letter goes on to specify that librarians should check for books by Beevor and Keegan, and “take steps to prevent access to them” by the end of August.

Calls to the department of education went unanswered on Wednesday, but the regional authorities said they supported the ban.

“Many history scholars believe that these authors mistakenly interpret information about the events of the second world war, contradict historical documents, and are imbued with the propagandistic stereotypes of nazism,” a spokesperson for the regional governor told Kommersant newspaper

The Open Society Institute is one of a dozen foreign organisations to be placed on a provisional list of “undesirable organisations”, and could be banned from operating in Russia. The upper house of the Russian parliament has asked the justice ministry, prosecutor’s office and foreign ministry to investigate whether the organisations should be kicked out. An article in Izvestia newspaper last month mentioned the publishing of history books and suggested it was all part of a plot to sow discontent in Russia.

Many Russian historians were critical of the Ekaterinburg decision. “Beevor is an author with a particular ideological viewpoint, you could call him anti-Soviet,” Alexander Dyukov of the Historical Memory Foundation told Kommersant. “But there is no glorifying of nazism in his books. I think banning history books is a bad idea. Today it’s one book, tomorrow it will be another book, and it will become difficult to stop.”

As the conflict in Ukraine has developed over the past year and a half, the legacy of the second world war has become ever more contested in the region.

This year has seen lavish celebrations marking the 70th anniversary of victory in the war, known as the great patriotic war in Russia. Millions of Soviet citizens died fighting the Nazis on the eastern front and the war has personal resonance for most Russians, but information or viewpoints that diverge from the official, glossy version of history have become less welcome as the drive increases to celebrate the patriotic past.

In a lavish military ceremony on Red Square in May to mark 70 years since the victory over the Nazis, Putin slammed recent attempts “to create a unipolar world”, and the language of the second world war has often been invoked to describe the fight against “fascism” in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian authorities, meanwhile, have banned a number of Russian films which they say distort history, and have introduced controversial new laws outlawing all signs and symbols of the Communist period and honouring nationalist Ukrainian fighters who collaborated with the Nazis for part of the war.

I'm not even sure one could call Beevor anti-Soviet. But hey, GLORIOUS RUSSIAN SOLDIER DOES NOT RAPE.

I can somehow understand the ban of communist symbols in Ukraine (look up Holodomar) even though I think it is stupid and should stop, but this does not serve any purpose at all. It cannot even be excused with past wrongdoing fueling some sentiment.

[K. A. Pital]

I think that Beevor's claims and poor scholarship were already dissected, no? Of course, no reason to ban the sucker - we don't ban tripe like Pipes' anti-Russian books, so why Beevor? But hey, no reason to keep his books in schools either. David Irving and Jürgen Graf should not have their books in schools too.

Shame that Jürgen Graf lives in Russia. A better idea would be to deport the fucker rather than removing Beevor from schools.

[Thanas]

I don't think Beevor is anywhere on the level of Graf and Irving. No thinking person would say that.

[K. A. Pital]

I don't think Beevor is anywhere on the level of Graf and Irving. No thinking person would say that.

I did not say he is "on the same level". But if we are choosing school material, why should Beevor even be considered? His popularity with westerners means nothing.

See, I think removing his books from schools is not a good idea, not worth it and should not be done.

Does that now mean I care deeply if he is no longer in the school library? No. The school is going down the drain anyway, as is the whole country. Beevor is not helping, a useless foreign pop-history writerr is all that he is. I mean, he offers a totally British view of the war. That is all.

[Edi]

Russia has also changed the history curriculum back to bullshit about the "Shots of Mainila" having been fired by Finland and all the other shenanigans related to their invasion during the Winter War. So this is nothing more than reflexive pro-Soviet propaganda bullshit and the normal denial that Russia/Soviet Union could ever have done anything bad.

So it's more than just Beevor that this touches, he just happens to be a well recognized name, so it makes headlines.

[K. A. Pital]

I would assume so. There is a law that was considered - it was accepted in a very watered-down version (prohibition of rehabilitation of Nazism), but the original project included sentences like "prohibition of saying the action of nations of the anti-Hitler coalition are criminal".

This did not pass, but the intent is there.

My personal opinion - it's enough to explain how bad the Third Reich was. No need to try to paint yourself perfect in the process. An imperfect winner is still a winner.

[Mange]

Nevermind...

[Thanas]

Beevor responds:

Over the past 24 hours I have been receiving slightly ironic congratulations by email from fellow historians. They were prompted by the order from the Ministry of Education in the Yekaterinburg region of Russia to withdraw all my books from schools and colleges. They are to be removed “from the access of students and teaching staff”. (It is interesting that teaching staff are not to be allowed to make up their own minds.) I am accused of “promoting stereotypes formed during the Third Reich” and developing the “propaganda myth” of Joseph Goebbels that Red Army soldiers committed mass rapes of German women.

In some ways I am amazed that it has taken them so long. Thirteen years ago, in 2002, when my book Berlin: The Downfall was published, the Russian ambassador in London, Grigori Karasin (now deputy foreign minister), accused me of “lies, slander and blasphemy against the Red Army” and then invited me to lunch. “A vodka lunch, just the two of us,” he proposed, rather to my surprise. I was glad to accept and we discussed the treatment of the past. He made the valid point that the horrors and hardships that the Soviet people had undergone over at least three generations – the first world war, the revolution and civil war, the famines, the purges and the unspeakable suffering of the Nazi invasion – meant that even those opposed to Stalinism saw the victory in 1945 as “sacred”. By including the mass rapes I would be causing great offence.

This was clearly true, but to pretend that they did not happen would have been a Soviet propaganda myth. The sources in a number of Russian archives could hardly be plainer. General Tsygankov, the head of the political department of Marshal Konev’s First Ukrainian Front, reported to Moscow on the mass rapes by Red Army officers and soldiers committed against young Soviet women who had been deported for forced labour in Germany. Tsygankov urged that the female victims should not be allowed to spread negative stories about the Red Army when they were repatriated.

Reports from NKVD rifle divisions in East Prussia covered the suicides of German women who could not face any more assaults. These were sent to Lavrenti Beria, the head of the NKVD, and to Stalin. The diaries of Soviet war correspondents and officers recount what they saw. One female journalist described the troops as “an army of rapists”, but that is going too far. Not all raped, and many devout communists were appalled by the behaviour of fellow soldiers. A number of accounts also indicate that Jewish officers, who might have far greater reasons for revenge, did what they could to save women from attack.

It was extremely dangerous for officers to attempt to install discipline, as those who had drunk alcohol to give them courage for “the evening hunt” could just as easily turn their guns on their own commanders. We think of the absolute control of Stalinist society; and yet the Red Army, with huge numbers of men drafted in at the end of the war without training to replace the fallen, was astonishingly ill-disciplined. Soldiers simply wandered off to loot and rape almost at will whenever there was no fighting.

What depresses me most is that once again we are faced with a government trying to impose its own version of history. I am fundamentally opposed to all such attempts to dictate a truth, whether it concerns denial of the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide, or the “sacred victory” of May 1945. When Sergei Shoigu was minister for emergency situations back in 2009, he tried to bring in a law to criminalise anybody who criticised the Red Army in the second world war. He said it was “tantamount to Holocaust denial”. Shoigu, who is now minister of defence and widely tipped as a successor to Vladimir Putin, has managed to have the law passed by the Duma with penalties of up to five years’ imprisonment. So in Russian terms I am technically a criminal, and yet I am still getting invitations from the current Russian ambassador. Churchill was right about Russia being “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”.

[Ritterin Sophia]

So the Cold War is back on, eh?

[The Romulan Republic]

Its been apparent that things are going that way, if not already their, for at least a year or so.

[Metahive]

I'd like to remind everyone here that the actual Cold War had the constant spectre of mutual nuclear annihilation looming over the world, a situation that this right now isn't at all comparable to, no matter how loudly Czar Putin is rattling his rusted saber.

[Ritterin Sophia]

I'd like to remind you that the Cold War didn't start with the specter of nuclear war looming but with a Soviet advance across Europe, nukes didn't come into the matter until nearly half a decade after it had started. Give it time.

[K. A. Pital]

The Cold War started in Yalta with influence zone delineations and the Hiroshima bombings. Everything else is just the development of these events.

[Adam Reynolds]

So is Beevor any good? I thought he was at least decent for a pop-history writer. I recall Thanas and Sea Skimmer both mentioning him in a positive manner.

On a related question is Williamson Murray any good? I was looking through A War to be Won and it appeared somewhat interesting as an operational big picture history of WW2. Though even just glancing through it I already noticed an error with the Battle of Midway, besides largely repeating the American torpedo squadron myth*, it mistakenly mentions cruisers rather than carriers as the Japanese losses in the battle. It makes me wonder what other similar mistakes they made.

* It is commonly believed, though incorrectly, that the sacrifice of American torpedo bombers(the infamous VT-8 from the Hornet) over Midway allowed American dive bombers a clean shot. This was also mentioned in the 1976 film Midway(both being based on Fuchita's reports). The problem with this argument is one of timing. There was enough time for the Japanese combat air patrol to regain altitude between the last torpedo attack and the dive bomber attack. The reason that they were unsuccessful was because American fighters(from the Yorktown, which were actually backing up their torpedo bombers like they were supposed to) were in the picture.

[K. A. Pital]

So is Beevor any good?

For a modern British take on the war, he maye be good, and while not terribly accurate in some details. Other than that?

Off-hand comments that broadly portray the Soviet soldiers as brainwashed idiots with human wave tactics that fought they Nazis just because the ruthless commissars shot the in the back, with an inescapable fleur of racism (he has some kind words for the Russian soldiers, who, for a second, were at that time taking on the entire war strength of the Reich-occupied Europe, but casually dismisses other Soviet nationalities as almost useless). Errors are there, as are unsourced or poorly sourced statements, but the general picture, I guess, is the same: a book written by a First World European. Racist. Imperialist. As usual. Beevor likes to talk about a propaganda-free picture, but he spends way more time on describing the suffering of Nazis caught in the cauldron in Stalingrad (you can really feel the empathy) than he ever does for the civilian and Red Army victims of the Nazi invasion. Haven't read his latest book, though.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I have read Beevor's book. On some level I suspect he takes delight in describing the macabre with great detail.

[Mange]

So is Beevor any good?

Yes, I think he is. Kapital has yet to point out why he's not "terrible accurate".

[K. A. Pital]

So is Beevor any good?

Yes, I think he is. Kapital has yet to point out why he's not "terrible accurate".

Jochen Hellbeck's "Stalingrad Protocols" (Die Stalingrad-Protokolle, 2012) is a much better read, and in this document-based book (unlike Beevor's "Stalingrad" which doesn't really make a distinction between rumor, hearsay, fact and - finally - documented evidence).

My personal opinion on Beevor? A fucking British racist shitbag.

Russian T-34s, some carrying infantry like monkeys on the back of elephants, lurched across the steppe.

Nuff said. Beevor's claim to have several dozen thousand HiWi (hope no need to decipher the term?) in Paulus' Sixth Army is false. Just as the "knives" thing that I believe was discussed once in History on this forum. I mean, I once myself held a higher opinion on Beevor (I'm like 30% through his "World War II" book)... and that's what I said back in the day

Beevor's Stalingrad reeks of Wehrmachtofeelia. That is the "oh noes, poor Germans, lots of them, died in Stalingrad in very cold conditions" position. I never could understand anyone who says "German tragedy at Stalingrad" or even hints at empathy towards Germans at Stalingrad. Germans at Stalingrad were soldiers. No civilian Germans were present at Stalingrad. Stalingrad was deep on the Volga, where no one called the Germans to come.

[Mange]

So is Beevor any good?

Yes, I think he is. Kapital has yet to point out why he's not "terrible accurate".

Jochen Hellbeck's "Stalingrad Protocols" (Die Stalingrad-Protokolle, 2012) is a much better read, and in this document-based book (unlike Beevor's "Stalingrad" which doesn't really make a distinction between rumor, hearsay, fact and - finally - documented evidence).

My personal opinion on Beevor? A fucking British racist shitbag.

Russian T-34s, some carrying infantry like monkeys on the back of elephants, lurched across the steppe.

At most an extremely poor analogy, but hardly racist (he doesn't refer to the Russian soldiers as "monkeys").

Nuff said. Beevor's claim to have several dozen thousand HiWi (hope no need to decipher the term?) in Paulus' Sixth Army is false.

It's absolutely correct that hiwis made up a sizeable portion of the Sixth Army: On November 13, 1942, the divisions of the Sixth Army reported that they had altogether 30,765 hiwis (another 21,015 soldiers of "Zugeteilte Einheiten", has later been interpreted as being wholly or partly made up of hiwis though this is far from certain). Manfred Kehrig went over this already in 1975 in his book: "Stalingrad: Analyse und Dokumentation einer Schlacht". The "hiwis" question was of course a very sensitive one in the Soviet Union (and most were executed or sent to the Gulags regardless of which capacity they had served in, a fate which also many former POWs and forced labourers suffered).

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

At most an extremely poor analogy, but hardly racist (he doesn't refer to the Russian soldiers as "monkeys").

Eh. I don't think you fully comprehend how mainstream certain vibes of British racism can be. And quite frankly, I question why you are even trying to weasel out a very clear allusion here.

[K. A. Pital]

At most an extremely poor analogy, but hardly racist (he doesn't refer to the Russian soldiers as "monkeys").

He did in fact compare them with monkeys. That's a typical European (or, broader, First World) attitude. "Savage", "monkey" etc. Can't hide it, the choice of words reveals it. Kind of like Irving with his "I'm a baby Aryan" rhyme. I think Beevor also called the Soviet Army a "mongol horde". Like I said - British historiography is mostly racist, and Beevor is just an example. There are worse offenders, of course, like Niall Ferguson, but Beevor is of the same school.

It's absolutely correct that hiwis made up a sizeable portion of the Sixth Army: On November 13, 1942, the divisions of the Sixth Army reported that they had altogether 30,765 hiwis (another 21,015 soldiers of "Zugeteilte Einheiten", has later been interpreted as being wholly or partly made up of hiwis though this is far from certain). Manfred Kehrig went over this already in 1975 in his book: "Stalingrad: Analyse und Dokumentation einer Schlacht".

I'd like to be more specific: the hiwi who fell into the cauldron. There were many hiwi in the Sixth Army, but most of them were cut off from the other units when the cauldron closed. But I was wrong: there were still a lot of them surrounded, 19 to 20 000.

[Thanas]

His Normandy book is much better IMO. Still he shouldn't be banned and that one allusion more resembles a circus troupe to me than anything overtly racist.

[K. A. Pital]

Banning anything from schools is wrong. No matter the quality. I mean, with proper context anything is useful, even Mein Kampf.

If they really cared, should have simply put Beevor's books in a time and place context.

Besides, discounting the personal opinion on his character and taking his school into account, the books are not too bad.

But - again, I'll mention the "Stalingrad Protocols" and Beevor's utter incompatibility with documentary evidence. Beevor says that 13 500 soldiers were executed for deserting during the Stalingrad battle in its early phase to quell the panic. In reality, the number of executed soldiers in the Stalingrad Front was around 300, in the Don Front - around 500. Even combining all the executions together one would get around 1200 soldiers executed during the battle. I would think that making a tenfold error is enough to disqualify the book from serious research.

[Zinegata]

Beevor's work isn't to be trusted for Order of Battles either. Tetsuya Nakamura didn't trust him while designing Storm Over Stalingrad and was vindicated when his game proved to have a more accurate OoB than Beevor's.

[Mange]

At most an extremely poor analogy, but hardly racist (he doesn't refer to the Russian soldiers as "monkeys").

He did in fact compare them with monkeys. That's a typical European (or, broader, First World) attitude. "Savage", "monkey" etc. Can't hide it, the choice of words reveals it. Kind of like Irving with his "I'm a baby Aryan" rhyme. I think Beevor also called the Soviet Army a "mongol horde". Like I said - British historiography is mostly racist, and Beevor is just an example. There are worse offenders, of course, like Niall Ferguson, but Beevor is of the same school.

I think you read too much into it (but I don't remember the "mongol horde" passage or its context). Still, I don't think the analogy was good and words that can be misinterpreted shouldn't be used when describing the heroic struggle of individual Soviet soldiers at Stalingrad.

It's absolutely correct that hiwis made up a sizeable portion of the Sixth Army: On November 13, 1942, the divisions of the Sixth Army reported that they had altogether 30,765 hiwis (another 21,015 soldiers of "Zugeteilte Einheiten", has later been interpreted as being wholly or partly made up of hiwis though this is far from certain). Manfred Kehrig went over this already in 1975 in his book: "Stalingrad: Analyse und Dokumentation einer Schlacht".

I'd like to be more specific: the hiwi who fell into the cauldron. There were many hiwi in the Sixth Army, but most of them were cut off from the other units when the cauldron closed. But I was wrong: there were still a lot of them surrounded, 19 to 20 000.

That sounds like a reasonable estimate.