good evening my name is Kayla McGee and I am a junior studying politics and journalism and it is my utmost pleasure to introduce our speaker this evening Anthony beaver who is a military historian and a visiting professor at the University of Kent and at Birkbeck College University of London he served in the British Army as a regular officer in the 11th hussars a formerly Snow's lecturer at Cambridge University and chairman of the Society of authors he's a fellow of the Royal Society of literature and of the Royal Historical Society he is a recipient of the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing and the historical associations Norton Medlicott medal for services to history in 2016 he was made commander of the Order of the crown in Belgium and he was knighted earlier this year he's the author of numerous books about World War two including Stalingrad the fateful siege 1942 to 1943 please join me in welcoming Sir Anton Weaver [Applause] [Music] thank you very much the poets Fyodor Jovanovic to chef famously said once that Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone certainly Putin's Russia today cannot be understood without a knowledge of the Second World War or the Great Patriotic War as stalin called it according to a Levada poll in June of this year 63 percent of Russians think that the USSR could have been victorious in the Second World War without any help from allies that figure that figure has held fairly steady for roughly the last 17 years interestingly when Putin came to power what is interesting is that the percentage of Russians who think that Stalin was most to blame for the very high Soviet casualties in the war has fallen from 37% in 1997 to 12% now the rehabilitation of Stalin has indeed been gathering speed today it's very hard to appreciate the historical forces which killed some 60 to 70 million people when we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims we try and fail to absorb the reality of all of their statistics of national and ethnic tragedy the poles lost almost 6 million people almost 1/5 of their population estimates of total Soviet losses now range from 24 to 26 million dead Stalin knew in 1945 that they exceeded 20 million but he tried to conceal this as David Reynolds the professor of international relations at Cambridge University pointed out he settled for 7.5 million as a figure that sounded suitably heroic but not criminally homicidal so less than a third of the true figure according to the widely respected calculations of the Bundeswehr smilla target reserves for shrooms and best to say that when you haven't had too much wine the Red Army affected 4 million and 66 thousand fatal casualties on the velm out of which 363,000 were prisoner of war deaths this represents 76 percent or just over three-quarters of the total Vermont death toll of five million three hundred eighteen thousand it is largely on this basis that the USSR and now the Russian Federation claimed that the Red Army which break the back of the ver mark and not the British or the Americans but of course Putin like Stalin refuses to acknowledge their contribution to save its survival and ultimately allied victory the total warfare on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1945 was quite clearly the culmination of the ideological process which accelerated during the 1930s mass militarization combined with mass indoctrination both Hitler and Stalin utterly dehumanized their enemies through propaganda and their complete control of the media in June 1941 the mark preparations for the massive assault on the Soviet Union with three million men prompted hopes of rapid victory forests of birch and fur along the nazi-soviet frontier concealed vehicle parked 28th headquarters and signals regiments as well as all the fighting units officers German officers briefed their men reassuring them that he would only take three or four weeks to crush the Red Army the unnatural alliance of the molotov-ribbentrop pact was over early tomorrow morning wrote a soldier in a mansion division were off thanks be to God against our mortal enemy Bolshevism for me a real stone has fallen from my heart finally this uncertainty is over and one knows where one is I am very optimistic and I believe that if we can take all the land and raw materials up to the Urals then Europe will be able to feed itself and it would not matter how long the war at sea lasts a signals NCO in the SS Division Das Reich was even more confident my conviction is that the destruction of Russia will take no longer than France and then my assumption of getting the eve in August will still be correct I'm sure everyone here is well acquainted the story of the invasion which Stalin refused to believe was coming but I would like to emphasize a couple of points there have been suggestions that the postponement of Operation Barbarossa in 1941 from may to the 22nd of June was due to Hitler's invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece called Operation Morita some regard this as a critical factor in the firm Ark's failure to reach Moscow six months later yet almost all historians now attribute the postponement to other factors such as the delay in distributing Metro Transport principally vehicles captured from the French Army in 1940 all problems of fuel distribution or the difficulty of establishing forward air fields for the Luftwaffe due to the very heavy way rains in that in the end of the spring but one consequence of which there is little doubt was that the way that Operation Morita helped convinced Stalin that the Germans thrust south meant that they were focusing on the capture of the Suez Canal from the radiation not on an invasion of the Soviet Union the question of French military transport it's also important since the supposedly mechanized German army relied on no less than 600,000 horses the French Army's surrender in 1940 completely upset Stalin's plans for he had expected it to grind down the fur Mart and then it emerged that almost 80% of the neutral transport of German infantry division's in Operation Barbarossa was French because the French army had failed to destroyed this was one reason why Stalin was so fiercely prejudiced against the French until in December 1944 he perceived during General de Gaulle's visit to Moscow that he might prove useful wildcard for him within the Western alliance the other point I'd like to make here quickly is that conspiracy theories mostly neo-nazi ones that claim that Stalin was preparing his own preemptive strike against Germany are frankly rubbish they are usually based on a contingency planning document of the 11th of May drawn up by a general Zhukov than the chief of the General Staff and other senior officers who were aware of Nazi plans to invade and they believed that the only way to stop it in some ways was with the spoiling attack in any case the Red Army it was in no position to carry it out and also Stalin was terrified of provoking Hitler on the 22nd of June 1941 news of the Nazi invasion prompted disbelief immediately followed by outrage right across the Soviet Union a fierce sense of relief also affected Soviet citizens that this treacherous attack had released them from the unnatural molotov-ribbentrop alliance with Nazi Germany the young physicist Andrei Sakharov who was later was later greeted by an ant in a bomb shelter in during a Luftwaffe raid on Moscow for the first time in years she said I feel like a Russian again Stalin sensing this surge of patriotism did not appeal to save its citizens to fight to save communism he would be saved by the very national i nationalism that he pretended to despise just on 300,000 citizens of Leningrad joined the armed forces in another 128,000 the militia these battalions of alarmed cannon fodder were expected to slow German Panzer divisions with little more than their bodies they had no uniforms no transport no medical services any half of them had rifles Soviet losses were appalling in the Leningrad strategic defensive operations from the 10th of July to the 30th of September 1940 the Red Army and militia has suffered 214,000 irrecoverable losses out of 517,000 men this represented a fatal casualty rate of 42 percent this war of annihilation as Hitler called it was pickiness the Russian is a tough opponent read a German soldier we take hardly any personals and shoot them all instead when marching forward some took potshots for fun at crowds of Red Army and prisoners being herded back to makeshift camps where they were left to starve or freeze thousands of Soviet citizens died in the bombing of the cities of Belarus particularly Smolensk and Minsk survivors fared little better in their attempts to escape eastwards as Arthur Army Group centre advanced along Napoleon's route to Moscow after Minsk began to burn a journalist noted blind men from the home for invalids walked along the highway in the long file tight to one another with towels Army Group South commanded by general field marshal von Rundstedt advanced into Ukraine also capturing hundreds of thousands of prisoners in great encirclement battles Generalfeldmarschall ritter von Leeb Army Group north meanwhile advanced out of East Prussia through the Soviet occupied Baltic States apart from a sudden counter-attack near Lake Ilmen German progress was slowed only by the terrain of marsh and thick birch woods almost half a million Leningrad civilians were sent to dig a nearly a thousand kilometers of earthworks and 645 kilometers of anti-tank ditches none of these precautions saved the city from its first great disaster on the 8th of September 1941 the day that the Germans took the fortress town of shlisselburg on the southern shore of Lake Ladoga thus cutting off Leningrad Luftwaffe bombers targeted the food ghettos in the south of the city columns a thick smoke arising high Vasiliy truck in written history horrified at the implications it's about a F steep route deeper his burning fire is devouring six months food supplies for the whole population of Leningrad the failure to disperse the stores had been a major error rations had to be drafted dramatically reduced right from the start in addition little had been done to bring in forward for the winter but the greatest mistake was the failure to evacuate more civilians fewer than half a million leningraders have been sent East before the mosque a railway line had been cut by the German advance when the siege or blockade began the civilian population of Leningrad stood at more than two and a half million people including four hundred thousand children Hitler decided that he did not want his troops to occupy the city instead the vow marked word bombarded and seal it off to that the population starve and die of disease in fact more than 800,000 civilians died once reduced the city itself would be demolished and the area handed over to Finland he wanted to eradicate the cradle of Bolshevism Stalin refusing to believe that the Germans could have broken through so easily suspected sabotage he ordered general Zhukov to take over trusting in his ruthlessness Zhukov flew from Moscow as soon as he received the order on arrival he drove straight to the military council in the small D Institute where he claimed to have encountered defeatism and drunkenness he soon went on went even further than Stalin in his readiness to threaten the families of soldiers who surrendered he ordered commanders of the Leningrad front I quit make it clear to all troops that all the families of those who surrendered to the enemy will be shot and they themselves will be shot upon return from prison clearly Zhukov did not realize that his order if carried out to the letter would have meant the execution of Stalin himself because the Soviet dictators own son leftenant Yakov rubbish Willy had been captured in answer and Stalin was not entirely worried by shoo coughs decree he just admired his listeners and when Moscow was threatened in November Stalin was severely tempted to strip leningrad of troops to save the capital he had the full sympathy for what he saw as a city of the intelligentsia who despised Muscovites and were suspiciously fond of Western Europe the battle for Moscow in November and December 1941 and above all Hitler's declaration of war on the United States on the 11th of December is I think now generally recognized as the geopolitical turning point of the Second World War fact the only moment when Hitler could have won the war outright was actually at the end of May 1940 when British troops retreated to Dunkirk and Churchill was under pressure from Lord Halifax to inquire about peace terms that might be described as the as the very first turning point in the Second World War but from December 1941 with Hitler halted before Moscow and the United States a belligerent Nazi Germany simply could not win the psychological turning point however did not come until nearly a year later when the encirclement of the German 6th army at Stalingrad demonstrated to the world that the Third Reich was entirely doomed and it was in the autumn of 1942 that both the Vermont and the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy reached their cumulative point that is to say they had lost both momentum and the initiative through overreach but allied victory was not yet even close and the majority of the deaths in the Second World War still lay ahead Stalin and Hitler were both prepared to waste the lives that are in men and ensure their total compliance through terrifying disciplinary measures which they copied off each other Stalin took the idea of punishment battalions from the Germans and even kept the German word RAF as in straw for tea punishment companies Hitler impressed by the way the Red Army held on when he had expected it to collapse nature decided to copy Soviet techniques including the commissar or political officer in the Val mark this later became the National Socialist leadership officer Hitler also borrow the Saviour idea of blocking units to prevent retreat in his case using SS and Feld from da Murray at Stalingrad the blocking units and the execution squads did play a crucial role albeit on a totally excessive scale the figure of 13,500 Soviet soldiers executed during the Stalingrad campaign by their own side is perhaps one of the most horrific statistics in modern warfare but would any Western army have managed to hold on to Stalingrad in September and October 1942 against what was thrown at it I think not Western armies retained a notion that suffering had a limit at which point you could surrender the Red Army far more under Stalin's thumb than the ver mark was under Hitler's had knew such qualification one can never expect the army of a liberal democracy to fight as ruthlessly as that of a dictatorship soldiers on the Eastern Front were afraid base of their enemy and of execution by their inside this put them under a terrible psychological pressure they and save it civilians were crushed pitilessly between the two regimes Red Army snipers at Stalingrad for example were ordered to shoot starving Russian children who had been tempted with crusts of bread by a German infantryman to fill their water bottles in the Volga even surrender was not necessarily an escape for German soldiers on the Eastern Front there was no Geneva Convention nonsense of sticking to name rank or number I'll never forget one protocol of interrogation by the chief of intelligence of the 62nd army at Stalingrad working through an interpreter at the bottom of the page it was a scribbled note to say that the interrogation had been terminated because the subject had died of wounds it is however images from the fighting in Stalingrad itself that will endure perhaps most in the memory this represented a new form of warfare concentrated in the ruins of civilian life the detritus of war burnt-out tanks showcases signal war and grenade boxes was mixed with the wreckage of family homes and bedsteads lamps and household utensils while this battle in the urban landscape was going on general Zhukov and Vasilevsky were planning the great country attack operation Uranus to encircle and destroy general palaces six army but even shook off who had sent virtually unarmed militia battalions to their certain death against German Panzer divisions in 1941 had no idea of the most cynical sacrifice of all in November 1942 which was carried out in his name while operation Uranus the great plan to encircle the six army was being prepared another offensive a huge diversion took shape much further north on the Kalinin and western fronts against the german ninth army this was called Operation Mars the main objective of Mars was to ensure that not a single German division could be moved from the central part of the front to the southern part the six Soviet armies sent into battle as a diversion had virtually no artillery support while the Stalingrad operation received plenty and this imbalance alone suggested a staggering disregard for human life on the part of Stalin the cording to general pavel sudoplatov of the NKVD the ruthlessness went far further he described how details of operation Mars were deliberately passed in advance to the Germans the NKVD and GRU military intelligence had prepared something called Operation monastery an infiltration of the German up there which is their German military intelligence Alexander Damian off the grandson of the leader of the kuban cossacks had been instructed by the NKVD to allow himself to be recruited by german military intelligence since his family was well known in white heavy grey circles the Germans had already identified him during the nazi-soviet pact as a possible agent for them in early November preparations were well advanced for operation Uranus around Stalingrad and for the diversionary attack of Operation Mars near reserve Alexander demyanov was now instructed by his NKVD controllers to give the Germans the details of operation Mars the disinformation planted through Alexander wrote a general sudra plot of the NKVD chief of administration for special tasks was kept secret even from marshal Zhukov and was handed to me personally by general federal fedorovitch Kuznetsov of GRU in a sealed envelope shook off not knowing that this disinformation game was being played at his expense paid a heavy price in the loss of thousands of men under his command this was an understatement this diversion cost the Red Army two hundred and fifteen thousand six hundred and seventy-four casualties just about the same as the total allied casualties for d-day in the whole of the Battle of Normandy it was one of the most heartless sacrifices known in the history of war all this time Stalin of course was harping on about social casualty as heavy casualties to Churchill and to President Roosevelt demanding a second front and cross-channel invasion of northern France but neither Britain nor the US were in any position to launch an attack without massive losses Churchill then backed the development of what became the strategic bombing campaign or bombing offensive in an attempt to persuade Stalin that this was a second front and in fact in a way it was on the 30th of May 1942 our chief Marshall Harris of the RAF launched his first thousand bomber raid on Cologne this was basically a grand gesture aimed to impress the Americans and Stalin yet coming at a time when Churchill was under heavy pressure this was Britain's only substitute for the second front British Bomber Command casualties 55,000 673 killed out of a total of 125,000 aircrew interestingly another 44 percent death rate were also a part payment of the blood debt owed to the Red Army which was suffering the vast bulk of the casualties but although Harris's obsessive idea of forcing Germany to surrender through bombing alone proved totally misplaced Churchill rightly saw that the strategic bombing campaign would play a major part in the eventual Soviet victory on the Eastern Front Hitler's rage over the attacks on German cities soon forced Hermann Goering to withdraw more and more fighter squadrons and 88-millimeter and hit aircraft guns from the Eastern Front to defend the Reich by 1944 there were just 1,200 heavy anti-aircraft guns left for the whole of the Eastern Front yet more than 7,000 were back in Germany and of course if these 88 millimeter anti-aircraft guns which were also the most devastating anti-tank weapon of the whole war had not been withdrawn from the Eastern Front one Canadian speculated how many more Soviet soldiers would have died the withdrawal of Luftwaffe fighter formations leaving only a 27 percent of Germany's total fighter force on the Eastern Front by April 1943 led to red army aviation achieving air superiority for the very first time during the latter stages of the huge battle of kursk Savior our superiority also meant that German reconnaissance aircraft could no longer roam at will over Soviet lines and when in 1944 the Red Army adopted its great muskie Hrothgar or deception operations the Germans were taken Atlee by surprise for example in Operation Bagration which destroyed the Germans Army Group centre and liberated the whole of Belarus and took them all the way up to the gates of Warsaw one of the subjects on which most Russian historians are reluctant to dwell is allied support to the Soviet Union they do not want to acknowledge that large areas of the Soviet Union was saved from starvation even famine in the winter of 1942 by American wheat and American tin supplies some 4.5 billion tons altogether soldiers in the Red Army knew its provenance because we're not opening a tin of spam in their rations they used to joke let's open the second front but Soviet civilians had no idea of us support because the Soviet authorities over stamped the markings on the sacks of American grain to make it look as if it was produced in the USSR most Russian historians will not mention the total of seventeen point five billion tons of goods shipped by the United States to keep the Soviet Union fighting American steel went to Chelyabinsk in the Urals known as tanker grad where it was turned into the most practical tank and mass-produced armored vehicle of the whole of the Second World War the t-34 one could also argue that the four hundred and thirty thousand trucks and jeeps provided to the Red Army transformed its mobility to such an extent in 1943 and 1944 that without them the Red Army would never have reached Berlin before the Americans in 1944 say via propagandist such as Ilya Ehrenburg made disdainful remarks in their press claiming that the Western Allies in Normandy were fighting the dross of the German army but this was true only of a few infantry divisions the British during Operation Epsom in Normandy found themselves up against 7 Panzer divisions including two SS Panzer Corps the greatest concentration of often SS since the Battle of Kursk although statistics are hard to compare between the Western and the eastern France the average cavalry casualty rates per division per month appear to being higher in Normandy quite a lot higher in Normandy than in the East German losses on the Eastern Front averaged just under a thousand per division per month in Normandy the average figure was around 2,300 per division per month German soldiers who had experienced both fronts were shaken by the fighting in Northwest France nevertheless the conditions under which men fought on the Eastern Front were so desperate that today we can hardly imagine how they survived even many who were there look back in amazement one red army officer Vladimir Ivanovich Julian F said recently nowadays I can't believe that we were able to live in the trenches in the open field in the snow in the cold never taking off our shoes or clothes with no water or source of heat how on earth did we survive all that between 1941 and 1945 some Red Army soldiers those who survived the battles along the way Fortin marched for more than 7,500 miles in January 1945 Stalin pretended he had saved the Americans in the Ardenne by launching his great winter offensive earlier this needless to say was totally untrue the German offensive had been halted by Christmas Day 1944 and the Allied contra began on the 3rd of January 1945 Stalin did not launch his great offensive along the Vistula and into East Prussia until 10 days later in fact Stalin should have thanked the US Army because the back of the German Panzer on had been smashed in the are dere so when the Red Army's winter offensive began in mid-january in 1945 the German army was a shadow of its former self was incapable of resisting the headlong charge of four Soviet guards tank armies all the way from the river Vista to the oder nicer line in less than two weeks in fact Stalin did have a very practical reason of why he had advanced his offensive in that January it was because forecast meteorological forecasts predicted a big thaw towards the end of January and that would have meant that his tanks would not have been able to advance at the same rate sailed from that point of view of this one was purely a decision based on his own needs the Red Army's ultimate objective was Berlin what Soviet propaganda called the lair of the fascist beast the Battle for Berlin in April and the beginning of May 1945 was the long predicted climax of the war on the Eastern Front but once again thousands died for vain symbols on both sides - Red Army divisions were thrown against that massive and well defended building the Reichstag to raise the red banner of victory Stalin had actually picked the Reichstag even though it hadn't been used ever since 1933 with the rice tag far but he wanted to have a particular symbol which he could produce competition amongst his own troops because they were told that the first person to get a flag up there would receive the top Soviet award the the hero of the Soviet Union the ghost but on the German side Hitler a devotee of the cinema visualized his gutter day Moroni in Berlin amid blazing monuments crashing down war between the two totalitarian states of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union it's not just a war of ideologies it was also a war between two monstrous vanities the drama continued albeit in a different way after the Reich's Chancellery was captured by the Red Army on the 2nd of May 1945 and a SMERSH detachment under general Vardis took over the Fuehrer bunker Stalin urgently wanted to know what had become of Hitler SMERSH Soviet country intelligence had turned heard from surrendering German generals and officials but the Nazi leader had committed suicide but nobody could find the body eventually it was discovered by smash operatives on the 5th of May buried in a shell hole along with the body of Ava brown and his adored Alsatian German Shepherd dog blondi but Stalin didn't want anybody to know not only did he use this as an opportunity for accusing the Americans of having hidden Hitler in Bavaria he also wanted to put pressure on his own army commanders he rang marshal Zhukov on two occasions to taunt him with the supposed failure to find Hitler when he knew all the time that smash had carried out its own autopsy on the body and had identified it this may beggar belief but marshal Zhukov the commander in chief in Berlin did not discover for twenty years not until 1965 that Hitler's body had in fact been found this was all part of the Byzantine world of Stalinist politics stalin feared the popularity of shukoff and later had him accused of bonaparte ism my colleague of the last twenty-three years dr. Luba Vinogradova remarked to me once in a go archive I think we deserved Stalin I felt bound to disagree if any because one can never say that a whole people deserved an appalling leader it is in any case one of the terrible chicken-and-egg questions of history whether a leader like Stalin or Hitler are the product of their country's history or the shaper or both on many occasions I've been asked you know who was the greater criminal Hitler or Stalin and it's an interesting philosophical question Stalin was almost certainly responsible for more deaths especially those of his own countrymen and women but can one say which crime is worse racial genocide or political genocide the question of the definition of genocide is raised in an apple bombs important new book read famine about Stalin's determination to crush the peasantry and nationalism in Ukraine Andrei Sakharov the great scientist and savior dissident once observed there although Stalin killed more people Hitler had to be defeated first and he was undoubtedly right a Nazi victory over the Soviet Union in 1941 would have been so terrible that there is no other answer in fact the mass starvation and enslave and enslavement which the Nazis plan for the population of the occupied territories up until up to the archangel Astrakhan line could have dwarfed even the horrors of a holocaust The Hunger plan set out by Helmut Bakker and approved by Hitler envisaged the death by starvation of 30 million Soviet citizens after years of Soviet propaganda it is very hard for Russians to face the implications of their country's past horrors he means questioning just over 70 years and mainly futile sacrifice and countless millions of wrecked lives and broken families parents sent to the gulag and their children forced into cruel state orphanages for Russians therefore it is more difficult in a way to re-examine their history than for Germans faced with a 12-year aberration and the Soviet victory in 1945 which even anti-stalinist celebrate makes it makes it even harder to question before my book Berlin the downfall was published in 2002 the Russian ambassador in London explained to me privately why his country found it hard to question the past you must understand the victory is sacred he was right but it was the only the terrifying loss of life which made it sacred and this is why Russians have such trouble with the subject and not just Stalinist dinosaurs once Grigory crazy in the Ambassador had read the book he then publicly condemned me for lies slander and blasphemy against the Red Army an interesting crime in its formulation now I'm technically liable to up to five years imprisonment if I get back to Russia because the book contained rather powerful evidence from Russian archives about the mass rapes perpetrated by members of the Red Army now this is because Sergei shoigu the Minister of Defense introduced a new law to the Duma demanding this penalty for anyone who insults the reputation of the Red Army in the Second World War yeah sure i gu had said that the offence was equivalent to holocaust denial a very curious idea we see more and more evidence that under Putin admiration for Stalin is cultivated in schools and the Kremlin controlled media a survey in June nominated Stalin as the most outstanding person of all time even well ahead of Lenin and now the Russian state itself is imitating Scotland s xenophobia and a Stalinist reversal of truth the greater the lie the greater the effect this is particularly the case in its dealings with a penance by perverting the system of justice for example one of the brave campaigners of Memorial Yuri meet chef who has been revealing the extent of Stalinist crimes during the Great Terror is now in prison falsely accused of child pornography more than 30,000 people have signed the petition to restore legality and justice in his case Demetrius real crime was three decades studying the mass killings of the NKVD at Sun Dome or near the Finnish border and the Salah vet ski islands where the gulag began memorial itself is accused of being in league with foreign agents state television accused memorial of helping those whose aim is to destroy the Russian state the search for historical truth is therefore defined as the kin to treason things have got natively worse since the Russian annexation of the Crimea and its military involvement in Ukraine but to return to my first comment on the Levada poll which stated that 63% of Russians believe that the Soviet Union could have won the war without allies this ignores the fact that the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who certainly knew the truth along with Stalin did acknowledge the debt I would like to express my candid opinion he wrote in his memoirs about Stalin's view on whether the Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi Germany and survived the war without aid from the United States and Britain first I would like to tell about some remarks Stalin made and repeated several times when we were discussing freely and quotes among ourselves he said he bluntly that if the United States had not helped us we would not have won the war if we had had to fight Nazi Germany one-on-one we could not have stood up against Germany's pressure and we would have lost the war marshal Zhukov said basically the same thing when writing in 1963 a version of his memoirs which of course was not published at the time and couldn't be published until after the fall of the Soviet Union today some say the Allies didn't really help us but listen when cannot deny that the Americans shipped over to us material without which we could not have equipped our armies held in reserve or been able to continue the war so 63 percent of Russians today have fallen free totally false idea strongly encouraged by Putin's Kremlin and repeated again during this year's Moscow victory celebrations on the 9th of May thank you very much [Applause] he has agreed to sign copies of his book Stalingrad following this lecture we now have time for a few questions please raise your hand and the microphone will be brought to you do I see a question over here no yes no one over here please oh okay all right let's start that first Thanks hey there how could the Germans have succeeded in operation typhoon and would that have led to the downfall of the Soviet Union if not that how would the Germans have won the war after would have happened and fall 1941 thank you well there being a number of counterfactual novels and in Robert Harris's wonderful fatherland and all the rest of it but as with many counterfactual novels you can't really take them too seriously if you're going to look at it in a sort of literal way of what actually did happen typhoon was unlikely to work for the simple reason that even if they captured Moscow and of course Moscow was a center for communications as well as the arms industry it would not necessarily have meant the end what is very striking is that in october stalin summoned the slaloms in such a funk at this particular time that he has summoned the bulgarian ambassador bulgaria was actually an ally of Germany and the Bulgarian ambassadors coming off I think was probably more sympathetic to the fellow slaves of the of Russia and he actually gave advice to Stalin he simply said you know you're crazy you know even if you even if you have to retreat all the way to the Urals you'll still win in the end because what he recognized and what Stalin had failed to recognize and what Hitler refused to recognize was that if you take the sino-japanese war and the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 Japan which had a far more sophisticated army far better equipped a far better trained thought that even though it was in a minority it could easily defeat the incompetent and badly equipped and badly led chinese nationalist armies in fact was simply defeated by the sheer size of the country and if you have a major landmass into which you can withdraw then the chance of victory even for the sophisticated the well-equipped army like the vel Mart is reduced very dramatically indeed in fact there were officers of the upper of the German intelligence who argued very strongly that the only chance they had of winning in Russia against the Red Army was by arming a million Ukrainians and using them as an army and creating basically a civil war in Russia but Hitler with his obsessive racial views would not want any Slav to be dressed in fair marked uniform and refused the idea ironically Himmler did not worry quite so much he had Ukrainians dressed up and he called them cossack troops because hitler didn't think that cossacks were Slavs for some reason and he also had his Galician divisions which he called Galician of SS who in fact of course were Ukrainians too so it was really only Hitler's sort of obsession that which stopped them from using far more local troops and that actually was their only hope of winning at the time of Operation typhoon the advance on Moscow at that particular time I I just wanted your opinion on what would have happened if Roosevelt and Churchill refused to let the Soviet Russia keep control of Eastern Europe if they had not been able to come to an agreement about that what do you think would have happened well I don't know if you know the story about operation unthinkable operation unthinkable was when just after the end of the war in this is already into mein 1945 Churchill was so appalled at the way that Stalin was ignoring any of the agreements of elections in Poland and was deliberately in fact they had given safe contact passes to polish political leaders and then probably arrested them and then murdered quite a few of them in prison and Churchill was so angry about this that he summoned the British Chiefs of Staff and said will you please study the possibility of doing an about-turn and pushing the Russians putting pushing the Red Army back we'll try and get the Americans to come in on our side and all the rest of it now when can mum might have understood his emotions and frustration but actually this was madness what unfortunately happened was that a message and was sent to Field Marshal Montgomery in Germany saying collect up all the fairmark weapons we might be rearming the Germans to push back the Russians unfortunately unfortunately a British spy can cross pick this up in some of the classified material and warn the Russian so you could imagine the Soviets this confirmed every single one of their worst suspicions which we actually were untrue that the British and the Americans want to do a secret deal with the Nazis against the Soviet Union but this was one of the disastrous consequences of that not surprisingly the Americans quite rightly realized that any way they wanted to finish the war in Japan they want to get their troops out and all the rest of it and this actually horrified Churchill but he hoped that Truman who was sharing a rather more realistic view towards Stalin and say Bruce Abell had that he would change his view but unfortunately Truman certainly was persuaded by Davis the former US ambassador to the Soviet Union during the trying time of the show trials was sort of loved Stalin and thought he was wonderful and persuaded Truman not to listen to Churchill which is probably a good thing because frankly Churchill's plan was madness I mean any idea of say telling the British army that you're nug and fight the Russians when they thought they were all about to go home and after they'd been told that actually millions of or tens of thousands of British lives had been saved by the sacrifices of the Red Army and they'd seen all of the newsreel films basically extolling the sacrifice of Red Army you know I think they would have downed weapons and there might even have been a mutinous they would be integrally disastrous if it's gonna add anyway fortunately at the British Chiefs the staff came back and said sorry Prime Minister operation unthinkable is truly unthinkable so that was that was the end of that one but I'm afraid that's why people go on about sort of you know was the ultra betrayal and all the rest of it actually the trouble about Yalta was in many ways Yalta was the political consequence of the military decisions taken at the Tehran conference once you had made the decision and agreed with Stalin that you were going to invade through northern Europe and you were not going to go into Central Europe which is what Churchill wanted to do then afraid the outcome was more or less inevitable in that in that way Stalin was not going to give up give up Poland once he had his hands on Poland he had occupied the country there was no way he was going to give it up because as far as he was concerned a he hated the pose as a result of the humiliation he'd suffered in 1921 during the Russia Russian Soviet polish war and he always hated he had sort of visceral hatred of the poles and there was no way that he was going to allow them to be independent in any way so I don't think that there wasn't very much that could have perhaps changed at the end of the war this question goes back to the latter part of your discussion I recently had a very interesting conversation with a young Russian in Chicago who grew up in Russia Moscow and is now a venture capitalist with a European company and he's spent a good time bit of time in Germany and he said he was impressed that when he was in Germany of how the Germans have quote repented for their sins and quote of identifying themselves as having been perpetrators of terrible crimes that they do not wish to repeat again but he said he as a Russian he has never heard anything like that and there just seems to be no willingness to accept the fact that they have erred in the past and he thinks it's actually swinging back to a more nationalistic fervor under under Putin do you do you see them as well I agree absolutely I think that's an entirely right no I think it is very impressive the way that sort of you know Germany has faced the far past in the way that it had it wasn't always a very straightforward process it must be said interestingly it was in January in 1979 that the first real emotional change happened in Germany in terms of war guilt over the second world war and it was when that Hollywood miniseries Holocaust with Meryl Streep was broadcast in Germany and that had a huge effect that was when all the young suddenly started interrogating their parents saying what did you know about it at the time and it almost sort of caused an intergenerational civil war in in in in Germany but he did certainly wait things up but I mean on the other hand let's face is always going to be a minority as we saw with the recent elections of ifj and there have been times and there was a time in for example in 2002 when suddenly Germans started seeing themselves as the victims of 1945 partly because of the mass rapes the total the huge ethnic cleansing of Germans from Central Europe and all the rest of it so the world number who saw themselves as victims there but I mean when you compare to the Japanese who've never really apologized or ready faced up to their guilt and as for the Austrians who always regard themselves as the first victims of Nazi Germany unless my German friends used to say very well there's no Nazi like an Austrian Nazi say you know you you really do you know you the important thing is you must never generalize and if the history teaches is anything it's it's not not to generalize in that particular way but yes as in Russia your Russian friend was absolutely right there's very little hint certainly and I'm afraid within the historical community apart from one or two very courageous young Russian historians they are they will stick to the Kremlin line apart for anything else near perfectly well that if they do rock the boat they won't be allowed inside the archives again so you know that that sort of Korea Korea death from the historians point in point of view there it's in Russia you don't take unless you're pretty brave you don't take on your then take on the state I was wondering if you had any thoughts on since you've written extensively on the Battle of Stalingrad on vastly Grossman's novel life and fate mm-hmm you know he presents the two systems as kind of mirror images of each other and this he was very thirsty did it yeah yeah yeah and it seems to me it's one of the more powerful historical novels to come out of the Soviet experience but how true do you think that novel is to the you know in its account of Stalingrad and what it reveals about the nature of the Soviet system in particular I think it's I think it's very accurate in that particular sense I mean with Luba we did a book together called a writer at war with all of Grossman's jottings from his notebooks which weren't censored like a lot of the articles afterwards and there are different versions of life and fate I mean the way that that novel which makes people I mean it was a deliberate it's faces it was a deliberate act of homage to Tolstoy by calling it life and fate it was it was definitely the Stalinist era war and peace and it is a major novel it's one of the probably one of the greatest novels certainly coming out of Russia of the whole period as Solzhenitsyn and everybody else acknowledged unfortunately it's not had the effect that the influence that it should have done in Russia a rather bad transfer rather bad sort of version of it came out just before the fall of communism and then this came slightly back to what the other John was saying that you know this thing we're about Russians didn't want to look at the past not if it's uncomfortable and that's why I'm afraid he's sort of fallen into not disregard rather than disrepute while in places like France and I'll swear Grossman is regarded with huge admiration and as probably the most important novelist coming out of coming out of Russia and more important even than than sort of many of his contemporaries certainly Arenberg who is actually also a great friend but you know even even even more than some of the some of the battle name ones hi there considering the current Stalinist conduction of the Russian government how does that behavior affect the situation between the United States and North Korea and what are some ways the United States can maintain and build up the turns versus Russia today I don't often agree with Vladimir Putin but I fear that he was right when he said that North Korea will be made to eat grass rather than give up their nuclear program and I'm afraid that it has got to a stage where they feel or persuaded themselves that there any hope to ward off an American attack is through actually having a nuclear weapon which means that there's no way that sort of negotiation I think is going to achieve very much in that way as far as Putin is concerned I've been hearing rumors and stories they haven't yet been confirmed at all that quite a bit of the technology has actually come from Russia that Putin wanting to basically tweak the American Tiger's tail was actually the reason why that the there's been such an extraordinary acceleration in the development of the nuclear weapons in North Korea is due to apparently to Russian help I've been hearing so that I think is pretty scary in its own particular way and it's also that sort of theories say that present relations with China mainly over trade that I mean that has a wider wider influence in its in fashion means that I didn't think we're going to see very much in the way of China helping to keep North Korea under control so very very hard to say and I think that Russia has not got over the humiliation of that period immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union it was something I remember and even when we were in the Ministry of Defence archives of sort of Oba booshka saying isn't it wonderful that race had Gorbachev is dying of cancer I hope she's dying in pain because he betrayed the Soviet Union and all the rest of it so you can imagine this is sort of the mentality of the way that the West won the Cold War by a trick and I didn't think that we any of us sort of really handle things in a very full sighted way by encouraging some of the or allowing the sort of the sudden jerk into capitalism in the sense that it was a form of gangsta capitalism which took over rather than any form of sort of Western development of a free enterprise so there was a huge bitterness and I remember at the time of the way that when you had sort of war widows and veterans from the Second World War begging in the Metro and all the rest of it this produced real anger and bitterness and so I don't think that we can expect very much in the way of real friendship coming out of Russia and anything I think that Putin can do to inconvenience or embarrass the West were probably going to see more off so I'm afraid I'm not terribly optimistic in that particular in that particular way thank you very much for your time tonight in one of his letters Winston Churchill noted that in a typical Churchillian phrase that the English lion was trapped in between the Russian bear and American Buffalo but was the only one that knew the way and the context being Americans specifically Roosevelt's dealings with and views of Stalin versus his own Churchill's in what ways did Roosevelt and Churchill differ in their views and handling of Stalin and the Red Army I think that Roosevelt who had great charm but was also pretty cynical in many ways and quite often used his charm in a fairly cynical way thought that he had charmed Stalin and he thought he could make Stalin into a friend well I think as any Savior diplomat of the era or anybody who knew the Soviet Union well knew perfectly well that Stalin did not make friends certainly not with foreigners and who he detested this cruelly and not even with not even with I'm sure we say his in his in people so from that point of view I think that Roosevelt was actually in some ways curiously rather naive in believing that he could sort of bend Stalin to his own will Churchill who I think that you know I've always suspected slightly there might have been an element of bipolar in Churchill because he was the black dog he was up and down in many oceans I mean there was the famous case of that when he had to go I think it was I'm Fred sorry I can't remember top my head is October 42 whenever it was when he had to go and explain that was going to be no cross-channel invasion and there wasn't even likely to be the new follower year and Stalin was absolutely in a fury and bitter to Churchill and all the rest of it and Churchill was so appalled that he told Sir Archibald Clark Carr the British ambassador that he was going to fly back the next day and all the rest of it and Clark car thank God calmed him down enough and was radiant and then the next day Stalin was sweetness and light and invited Churchill into his private apartment in the Kremlin and brought in his daughter Svetlana and all the rest of it and they had a sort of family dinner together and Churchill was completely bowled over say it wasn't as if although he knew deep down what Stalin's character was like he was still susceptible to flattery and should we say superficial friendship in that particular way but when it came to Yalta I think that was where already the real split was coming I mean Roosevelt was only interested in the United Nations that was to be his legacy and all the rest of it and that was why he was prepared to basically Excel the polls which horrified Churchill at the time and also the fact that he was sort of making jokes with Stalin against Churchill trying to prove to Saul in that you know he was independent of the British and so forth but the the the British were certainly horrified at the idea that there was absolutely no common front between the Western Allies and Stalin in that particular crucial moment so you know very very hard to tell anyway church will always loved using animal metaphors my favorite one course is Churchill on the go when he used to describe the girl who's looking like a female llama surprised in her bath a member and when one thinks of subtlety goes very a courtier attitude which did look slightly like a sort of camel or a llama it was the perfect description anyway thank you all very much indeed [Applause] [Music]
