Russia.

I've always been intrigued by the history of Russia having recently read books about Catherine the Great & Prince Potemkin and Robert Service's "History of Modern Russia".

Latterly I have completed "The Whisperers" by Orlando Figes and "Absolute War" by Chris Bellamy.

For whatever reason I have been fascinated by the war on the Eastern Front between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the second world war. (Of course from the Russian perspective it was the Western Front!) The sheer scale of the conflict and its ideological nature between two equally odious totalitarian regimes makes it utterly unique in modern history. "Absolute War" as a title reflects the total nature of this staggering theatre of war; it was a battle to the death of two peoples, two giant economies and two ideologies on a scale never before witnessed.

A quarter of the entire Russian people (as opposed to the other Soviet peoples) are said to have perished in the war so it is not surprising that "The Great Patriotic War", as the Russians call the 1941-45 conflict, still casts a huge shadow over the Russian psyche and probably explains why the Russians are still very sensitive about national security. This scale of casualties of young men caused a major demographic shift; in some towns women outnumbered men by two to one and in some places it was as much as three to one! This altered demography was such that it would not correct itself within one generation but would take several.

The war on the Eastern Front has been well documented from the German perspective but it is only in recent years that the old Soviet archives have been opened up and their contents studied in depth. This has turned up some surprises such as the fact that the Soviet generals detested each other with a passion! There are intriguing hints that the Russians were preparing for a surprise attack on the Germans in 1942 had they not been beaten to the punch! "Absolute War" also casts doubt on certain commonly held fallacies; I had always thought that the Battle of Kursk in 1943 was the largest tank battle in history but according to Bellamy it was no larger than other encounters and was much more ambiguous in its outcome - it sounds like the protagonists traded blow for blow, but maybe the important point is the Russians could afford the losses where the Germans couldn't. Certainly the Germans perceived the battle as a defeat and perhaps that is what really counts.

In Alan Clark's "Barbarossa" there is a fascinating account of the 'sniper duel' in Stalingrad between Vasily Zaitsev and a German officer sent to eliminate the Russian ace - this was the storyline of the movie "Enemy at the Gates" - interestingy Bellamy could find no evidence of such a duel ever having taken place. Also there is no evidence for the suggestion put about by Beria that Stalin had a nervous breakdown when the Germans invaded in 1941. Speaking, please note, after Stalin's death in 1953 Beria said that the dictator was reduced to a catatonic state by events but Bellamy demonstrates that Stalin actually worked tirelessly throughout those initial calamitous days and indeed made some ultimately war winning strategic decisions, such as evacuating the industrial economy beyond the Urals and away from German interdiction. Stalin may have been many things but he wasn't stupid or indecisive.

An interesting question is 'why did the Russian people fight so hard for Stalin?' The reality is they didn't. The Nazis regarded the Slav people as 'untermensch' who were to be eradicated or enslaved; whatever illusions the Russian people might have had of the German army as liberators from the Stalinist regime were quickly dispelled as the Nazis imposed their brutal rule. The "absolute" nature of this war became self evident. It is also a curious fact that even the Gulag prisoners felt that they had a stake in the war-effort and believed that they had a valuable contribution to make toward their Motherland's ultimate victory. Prisoners released to fight on the front line would find, paradoxically, a sense of personal freedom and liberation even in the fiercest fighting. At least here people could be their true selves and didn't have to lead a double life as they might have to in civilian life sloganising in public but being someone else in their private thoughts.

The book is a great stonking read marred in places by some ghastly typos; instead of "lend-lease" there are several lease-lends and even lease-lands! There is also at least one reference to the Soviet Black Sea Fleet which logically ought to read Arctic Fleet. Despite these defects it is well worth a read.

"The Whisperers" is about private life in Stanlinist Russia when there was a concerted effort by the state to eliminate the notion of the personal and substitute the communal as a basis to society. To that end communal apartments were created with shared facilities and family life discouraged by means of quickie divorce. Children were to be raised by the state rather than being "indulged" by families into "bourgeois" thinking that they are uniquely loved, thus causing them to become "egoists". The window this book gives on a gigantic social experiment is breathtaking and has a lot to tell us about our own age as it too engages in a massive social experiment which jettisons the family and society atomises rather than becomes more cohesive.

Where "Absolute War" looks at the big scale "Whisperers" looks at individual stories and is heart rending in its ability to communicate the sense of personal loss as the Messianic state machine arrests and deports to the Gulags innocent, uncomprehending people. School children raised by the system to idolise Stalin and who find role models in the likes of Pavlik Morozov (who betrayed his own father to the state) become obsessed with denouncing 'class enemies' and fuel the paranoia indulged in by Stalin. Wholesale arrests and deportations on a quota basis crush individuals and ruin lives but this human sacrifice serves the Stalinist 'Five Year Plans' by providing slave labour for a crash programme of industrialisation. The enterprising peasant culture is overthrown in favour of farm collectivisation.... resulting in famine. I believe that Christianity gives value to the individual but given the collective mentality of the Soviet state the highest 'good' was that the state was served; all other considerations were secondary at best and more likely to be considered suspiciously deviant. Individual justice was 'bourgeois' and outdated in this Modern Age and a failure in food production could only ever be explained in terms of 'sabotage' - the state's farm collectivisation policy could not possibly be wrong by definition. Enterprising, prosperous peasants were denounced as 'Kulaks' (tight-fisted) and were persecuted - thus driving the 'work ethic' out of Russia's agricultural system. Even Kulak parents might consider their own values as outdated and would abdicate responsibility for their children to the state in a vain attempt to help protect them, but the collective presupposition was such that relatives, including the children, of 'enemies of the people' were just as guilty by association. These children would attempt to conceal their tainted biographies and become model Soviet citizens ever fearful of being unmasked. Whole people groups - Volga Germans, Chechens, Crimean Tartars etc - could be condemned in toto.

The persecution is not confined to the countryside, any problem (real or supposed) within the new industries is rationalised as sabotage by 'enemies of the people'. The most pathetic tales are those of die-hard Communists who find themselves denounced and yet who connive in their own downfall as a way of still yet serving the state! One daughter despairs of her Communist father who is released from the Gulag after many years and who still thinks that the system is just, "you can't talk to a believer!" she says.

The title of the book "The Whisperers", refers to the privately spoken thoughts of everday people in Stalin's Russia and refers not just to the victims point of view but also the many people who make whispered accusations to the secret police. Most of these remain unrepentant to this day and are still convinced that those they caused to be arrested, tortured, imprisoned or shot were indeed 'enemies of the people'. (How else can they live with themselves one might ask!). The police state provided ample opportunity to cause the removal of the irkesome neighbour, a love rival or the occupant of a job one coverted. The system either crushed you or corrupted you. Many individuals brutalised by years and years spent in the Gulag system find that they cannot make the transition back into normal family life again. Yet some relationships prove more resilient. "The Whisperers" is a haunting, heart rending read but well worth it.

In case anyone is under the illusion that Stalin deviated from a gentler version of socialism which might have prospered had Lenin not died in 1924 (only seven years after the Russian Revolution) please refer to Robert Gellately's "Lenin, Stalin & Hitler: Age of Social Catastrophe"! Stalin merely built on Lenin's legacy, he didn't pervert it.

A sensitive man like the poet Konstantin Simonov, who wrote the famous poem "Wait for Me", has a dubiously upper class pedigree and so remodels himself as a proletarian by putting himself through a 'factory school' and consciously suppresses any reservations he has about the regime. Perceived injustices are dismissed as mere bourgeois sentiment; as such he makes an interesting case study of how a sensitive man turns himself into a thorough-going Stalinist. You might think that this may have little to tell us - but from a Christian perspective it is all very familiar Romans chapter 1 territory, how people suppress the truth and are destroyed by what they idolise. It is telling that those individuals who do retain their humanity are those who have an alternative mental framework from which they can draw moral values critical of the all pervasive Messianic state ideology. Only those who had a moral compass of their own could avoid being sucked into the accepted values of their dominant society. Tellingly the odious phrase 'you can't make omelettes without breaking eggs' is a constant refrain of those state functionaries who try to rationalise their own part in wholesale injustice.

It is interesting that Simonov appears in both these books; during the "Absolute War" he was a correspondent reporting directly from the front-line. As the Red Army crosses the eastern borders of the Third Reich Simonov joins in the call for vengence to be visited on the German people in the form of murder, rape and pillage: events described in Antony Beevor's book "Berlin: the downfall 1945" as the German 'holocaust'. Please note these events were not spontaneous acts by unruly soldiers, this was a 'top down' directive promulgated as a patriotic duty! Simonov has misgivings about the vengence policy but again rationalises and suppresses these reservations as bourgeois sentiment and writes the neccesary articles for the army newspaper. As a Christian both these books describe a reality which chimes with the Christian worldview. "Evil" is not perpetrated by in-human 'monsters'': evil turns out to be a very human trait indeed. (I would argue that the word "inhuman" is the most mendacious word in the English language!). Current liberal conceptions of "evil" fall drastically short of the mark; for the present day Humanists all evil has to be 'other' than human! (If only it were that simple!) Yes, we do have our own ideologues don't we? People who try and make reality fit their worldview and "otherise" evil as something remote from themselves.

Perhaps the ghastly nature of Stalinism seems obvious now but in the mid 20th Century many Western intellectuals and trend setters looked on the Stalinist state with profound admiration and saw in it the way of the future. The horrific realities of life within the Soviet state were dismissed by gullible onlookers as western propaganda. In my own lifetime, after the "Khrushchev Thaw" was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev's reassertion of Stalinist principles, and when the Soviet state once seemed a permanent feature on the world stage, I heard many people speak out in defence of the USSR as a force for good. Lenin described such people as "useful idiots". Humans have a capacity for self delusion and our cultural elite are certainly no exception. Given that humans look to themselves for salvation there is no reason - no reason at all - why history should not repeat itself!