Archiv článků: leden 2012

26. 01.

Meeting A Veteran of World War One

Adrian Wheeler Přečteno 2506 krát

Robbie Burns was a Cameron Highlander who joined up as a teenager and survived the Western Front. A friend of mine knew him and arranged a meeting at the Special Forces Club in London. Mr Burns was 103 years old.

I was full of questions which – boiled down – amounted to: ‘What was it like?’ Mr Burns was lucid, smart and in full possession of his faculties; he was also charming. But he didn’t want to answer my questions. He politely changed the subject to one that really interested him: his career in cinemas since 1918.

My friend had foreseen this outcome and gave me a facsimile copy of Mr Burns’ autobiography: ‘Once A Cameron Highlander’. Signed by the author, it is a treasured heirloom. The book has since been published and is available from Amazon. Modestly and without dramatics, it tells how a Scotsman just out of school dealt with the mad world into which he was flung.

Robbie Burns’ reluctance made me wonder how people deal with memories of events which are abnormal - so far outside anyone’s ordinary expectations. I thought of my paternal grandfather, who had fought on the Somme and at Ypres: he said nothing at all to his grandchildren about the First World War, but instead taught us to recite ‘Three Blind Mice’ in Hindi.

For him, there was little worth remembering about the battlefields but much worth passing on from his days in India. He had been a ‘rough rider’ with the Royal Horse Artillery, breaking in new horses. This was what he loved – just as Robbie Burns loved cinemas – and he would talk for hours about horses he had known.

My mother’s father also survived World War One in the Canadian infantry. He said little about it, but spent the post-war years designing military cemeteries in northern France. This told us how he felt about his experiences in the trenches.

His daughter spoke not a word about her activities in World War Two. In her eighties she admitted that she worked at Bletchley Park, where thousands of code-breakers had all been sworn to absolute secrecy. With hardly any exceptions they took it seriously, even decades later.

My father talked about his RAF experiences non-stop. World War Two had interrupted his youth and changed the course of his life, as it did for millions, but it also provided him with a storehouse of yarns and quirky tales. He, too, said next to nothing about the war itself; he gave the impression that it was one long string of amusing incidents.

I have met many other ex-service-people – teachers, friends, colleagues – who have shown the same reluctance to re-visit their experiences of battle in conversation. It’s probably necessary, for most of us, to bury such memories or edit them into a form we can live with in later years.

Fortunately, there are exceptions: the authors, the writers of memoirs, and the old soldiers who consent to being interviewed for radio and TV. Without them we might be led to believe, yet again, that war is noble and heroic.




09. 01.

Response to 'Josef Stalin' correspondents

Adrian Wheeler Přečteno 3190 krát

I hope I will be forgiven if I attempt a collective response to some of the points and challenges raised by my recent post on Josef Stalin.

To begin with the ‘statistics’: the figure of 20 million appears to be the consensus among professional historians. This includes victims of the collectivisation famines, people executed in the purges, people who died in the camps, people who died while being deported, and those who were simply killed or otherwise disappeared during Stalin’s three decades at the helm. It does not include casualties of the Civil War, the attack on Poland, the Spanish Civil War, the Finnish escapade or the Great Patriotic War. Figures as high as 40 million are sometimes quoted but these seem to be regarded by experts as inflated.

Yes, Mao is ‘credited’ with as many as 50 million victims, which would make him (easily) the leader in this league table. What sets both Stalin and Mao apart from other contenders – Attila, for instance – is that they disposed of unimaginable numbers of their own people.

Britain did indeed provide military support to Stalin following the Nazi invasion. Some 3,000 British sailors died on the Arctic convoys. Millions of tons of aircraft, tanks, trucks, guns, food and kit were shipped to Russia from British and American factories. This factor was erased from Soviet accounts of the war. Oddly enough, Britain was the first foreign country to recognise the Soviet Union (1924). The USA held out for another ten years.

Churchill’s integrity in this and other affairs of state has been questioned. His antipathy to Stalin (and vice versa) is a matter of record. He explained his apparent volte face by saying that, if Hitler invaded hell, he would at least make a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons. Less witty is his notorious ‘back of an envelope’ division of post-war Europe into spheres of influence during a private discussion with Stalin, who allegedly ticked the sketch-map in blue pencil. Churchill took this to signify agreement; all it actually meant was that Stalin had read it. The story does neither man much credit. If we are charitable, we can probably say that Churchill was hoping to ensure free elections in Poland, whose independence was the proximate British casus belli. If we are Czech, we would probably not be charitable.

From the Czech point of view, Neville Chamberlain’s performance in Munich and Berlin must seem outrageous – as it does to many Britons. While Daladier knew exactly what was going on, and was mortified by the episode, Chamberlain imagined that his great personal gifts as a statesman had saved Europe from war. Churchill described him as ‘a pinhead’. Hitler was even less impressed: ‘If that man comes here again I will jump on his stomach’. His description of Czechoslovakia as a ‘far-away country of which we know nothing’ was deplored by many, if not most, Britons, including my parents. British readers may like to note that the highest-scoring fighter ace in the Battle of Britain was... Czech.

My contention that Stalin’s military contribution was negligible has been questioned. It is based on post-war accounts of surviving Soviet military leaders – whose point of view may well be biased – in which Stalin is accused of irresolution, strategic ignorance and meddling. Curiously, this is exactly the same charge which Hitler’s generals levelled at his military leadership post-1942 (likewise in post-war autobiographical accounts). On the other side of the coin, it is undeniable that Stalin’s drive for industrialisation (a hundred years in ten) gave the USSR the productive means to beat back the invader. Here again, we might ask: who were the real heroes in this enterprise? Possibly the men and women who laboured, suffered and often died in achieving the impossible.

The central paradox about Stalin’s military competence was that he seemed to do almost everything he could to render the Soviet Union vulnerable to attack from its erstwhile ally. It has been suggested, and not just by his admirers, that he was buying time (rather as Chamberlain’s defendants allege with reference to his sell-out in Munich). The question remains: would a pre-emptive attack by the Soviet Union have thwarted Hitler’s plans? Could the war on the Eastern Front have been averted, or some kind of condominium achieved, with the consequent saving of millions of lives? Probably not, but it is one of the more interesting ‘what-ifs’ of Second World War discussion.

The imperial policies of the British in the days of their Empire have been referred to, presumably on the basis that a pot is calling a kettle black. As far as I can tell, the inhabitants of the Empire who condemned Britain for exploiting other countries’ people and resources tended to refrain from condemning the way in which the exploitation was conducted. Judged by the generally accepted standards of the time, and with a number of exceptions, the British seem to have gone about their empire-building in a relatively humane manner. The subject has been examined in depth by Niall Ferguson and Jeremy Paxman, among others. The key conclusion seems to be that Britain used its military and naval force to facilitate trade above all other considerations – servants, rather than masters, of commercial interests. It has been observed that, in so doing, Britain acquired its empire in a fit of absence of mind.

It has been pointed out by a correspondent that Stalin signed the death-warrants without emotion. He was a natural bureaucrat, so – melancholy though it seems - this is very likely to be the case. I had assumed that a man who took such evident pleasure in humiliating others would obtain real satisfaction from extinguishing them.

About accuracy: I am asked if the quotation... one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic... is authentic. I don’t know; it appears in a biography of Harold Truman and is said to have been Stalin’s response to Churchill’s prevarication on the timing of the Second Front. It does not appear, as the correspondent says, in any non-Western source.

I am reminded that the correct spelling of ‘vice-like grip’ is ‘vise-like grip’. True: this is one of the many differences between International English and British English. In British English the spelling is ‘vice’ for both the workshop implement and the opposite of virtue. This homonym gives rise to numerous English puns.

I would like to thank the correspondents who have taken issue with my opinion of Josef Stalin, the smaller number who have agreed with it, and those who have contributed a point of view. I would also like to thank Mr Stejskal for his interpolations.




06. 01.

Stalin

Adrian Wheeler Přečteno 3588 krát


What makes Stalin notable is that he brought about the deaths of more human beings than anyone else in the 20th century, and probably more than anyone else in history, with the possible exception of Mao. Yet he is still regarded as a hero by many people in the former Soviet Union and by ‘useful idiots’ elsewhere. His vice-like grip on all the means of mass communication accounts for much of this false memory. Yet even in the west, the dotty idea of ‘Uncle Joe’ lives on, a cartoon fantasy of Stalin’s underlying virtue: gruff, severe, but ultimately kindly. Someone you could talk to. Someone you could deal with.

I think differently, and I lay at the door of this sinister man not only the 20 million deaths that he directly ordained but also the atmosphere of fear in which everyone in the post-war generation, on either side of the ‘iron curtain’, grew up.
It is nearly 60 years since his death, so from this distance we can consider his nature and his acts, and close the book forever on the idea that he was in some way – in any way – a force for good. He was not. The fact that he presided over the extraordinary feat of the Soviets in vanquishing their German invaders is beside the point: the Soviet people and their military leaders deserve all the credit for this victory, won at such enormous cost in blood, destitution and misery. Stalin’s contribution was negligible at best, negative in any clear-eyed analysis.

He was brought up to be bad. His father was a drunk who beat his son – who knows why? – with a venom that would have him put behind bars today. His mother presumably loved Josef but also beat him. On one of Stalin’s rare visits during his ascendancy he is reported to have asked her why she had treated him so cruelly. The answer is not recorded. His parents evidently taught him to love no-one, to trust no-one and to believe that violence was a normal solution. He became suspicious, probably deranged. From the earliest days of his career he was noted for his administrative ability but also for deviousness, deceit and misanthropy. Even Lenin, on his deathbed, warned that Stalin was not to be trusted with power.

He may have understood something useful about the psyche of people crushed and trampled over the centuries by exploitative masters. He transferred his seminary ideology lock, stock and barrel to the Bolshevik revolutionary creed. Yet from day one, as a terrorist, he used precisely the techniques of the class-enemy to compel obedience from the people he pretended to liberate: comply or die.

Stalin posed as a man of culture, with a library which he prized and a close interest in the work of writers, composers and performing artists. Between signing death-warrants he would peruse scripts and demand minuscule alterations to bring the work in line with his own version of the communist credo. Soviet writers, composers and performers tended to adopt his suggestions: the alternative was a slow death from starvation and exposure in a labour camp – not just for the victims but also for their family and friends.

The same fate awaited anyone whom Stalin suspected might be an opponent, or just a thinker. To survive in Stalin’s Soviet Union you had to be a slave, invisible or lucky. His successive Cheka variants had quotas: they didn’t really care whether or not you were opposed to the regime, they simply needed people to kill. They would drag you from your bed at 4 am, beat you, extract a confession, then make you kneel in a corner while one of them shot you in the back of the neck. They were doing away with 200 innocent people a night during Stalin’s purges. He knew all about it; he signed the documents and kept lists, which he annotated with keen interest.

Stalin’s performance during the Second World War has been described as inspiring, forceful and visionary. It could also be described as lamentable. He purged the Soviet armed forces just as the Germans were planning Operation Barbarossa, thereby crippling his own country’s defences while convincing the enemy that they had nothing to worry about. He insisted that his pact with Hitler was gold-plated, even going so far as to order that a German defector, who gave details of the next day’s onslaught, should be shot. He dithered and interfered during the Germans’ lightning invasion of 1941, preventing his remaining generals from doing their work and having them executed when they failed to carry out his half-baked instructions.

The Soviet Union – or Russia, as it became known for propaganda purposes – only began to win when Stalin stepped back and let the generals organise military strategy. As the Soviet armies gradually overwhelmed the invaders – at incredible cost - Stalin preened himself on the international stage, establishing a creepy friendship with the dying Roosevelt, who was completely taken in. Churchill wasn’t: he had judged the Bolsheviks as malign in 1917 and had not changed his opinion. But his negotiating strength was undermined by allegiance to an obsolete empire, which in 1943 was both bankrupt and militarily irrelevant.

Khrushchev thought that Stalin became drugged by power; the more he had the more he wanted. His memoirs record Stalin as inflicting petty, school-room humiliations on his closest confederates: Khrushchev was made to drink vodka until he was hardly able to stand, then to dance like a bear and then to sit still while Stalin tapped out the ashes from his pipe on Khrushchev’s bald head. We may think it couldn’t have happened to a nicer man... but the incident gives us an insight into Stalin’s peculiarly malevolent personality.

He is famously quoted as saying that one death is a tragedy but a million is just a statistic. I don’t believe he felt one death was a tragedy at all: he refused to rescue his son, Yakov, from a German prison-camp, thereby condemning him to death; he may have murdered his own wife; he was happy to see his comrades – especially those from the early days – disappear into oblivion, show-trials and the Gulag. It seems that he took pleasure, of a hideous nature, in causing death and anguish. But on the plus side... well, there isn’t one.

His treatment of Czechoslovakia is infamous. He made a show of supporting Czech resistance against Hitler’s fabricated claims on the Sudeten region, but also made it conditional on France taking the first step – knowing that the French government of the day was paralysed. In 1945 he encouraged the Czechs to rise up against the Germans - knowing that the 1st Ukrainian Front was stalled around Ostrava and could offer no assistance. The result is recorded on countless memorials in Prague and elsewhere.

After the war Stalin watched as the Czechs elected a coalition government, with his communists in a strong position, though without a majority. He then pressed Gottwald to stage a coup, with the usual Soviet paraphernalia of pretend-trials, executions and secret police. His legacy in the Czech and Slovak lands, as it was everywhere else behind the ‘iron curtain’, was oppression, fear and lies; arbitrary control of every aspect of life by little men placed in positions of total authority. The reality of Soviet friendship later became apparent when Warsaw Pact tanks clattered into Prague.

Stalin died miserably: he suffered a stroke, alone, which robbed him of speech and bodily control. His minions were too frightened to call for help. The comrades eventually gathered round his incapacitated body. His daughter described his eyes as yellow with hate. We might approve of this tawdry end to an inhuman human being; on the other hand we might think of it as a statistic.

There is a saying that ‘power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. Josef Stalin is a warning from history: someone who gained absolute power and, sure enough, was absolutely corrupted by its possession.






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