Something has changed in the way historians write about violence, terror and atrocities. In the past, the terrible things people have done to each other have been left in the margins, even swept under the carpet. But over the past decade, terror has moved centre stage.
Three photographs in recent history books give a flavour of this shocking new realism. The first is in Orlando Figes's history of the Russian revolution, A People's Tragedy (1996). It shows a naked man, apparently a Polish officer, killed by the Reds during the Russo-Polish war in 1920. According to the caption, "The naked man was hanged upside-down, beaten, cut and tortured until he died." The Russians surrounding him watch, some impassive, others amused.
The second photograph is from Adam Hochschild's book King Leopold's Ghost (1998). It shows two African youths in the Congo Free State between 1900 and 1905, both with stumps at the end of their right arms. It was common practice at this time for European officers to seek proof that bullets they had issued had been used to kill someone, not "wasted" in hunting or saved for possible use in a mutiny. "The standard proof," writes Hochschild, "was the right hand from a corpse." Or occasionally not from a corpse. "Sometimes," said one officer to a missionary, soldiers "shot an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a living man."
The final photograph is from Antony Beevor's Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002). It shows a woman and two girls, presumably her daughters, lying peacefully, apparently asleep, on a wooden floor. The mother's hands lie on her abdomen. The girl to her right lies with her arms outstretched. On close inspection, there is some dark substance spattered on the girl's arm and face. They are a German family who, according to the caption, committed suicide "before the arrival of the Red army."
Each photograph is shocking, bearing witness to unspeakable cruelty, from the Congo to the eastern front. They are all from bestselling history books, published in the last ten years. Together, these books are part of a dramatic new turn in historical writing: an eloquent coming to terms with atrocity and terror as one of the great subjects of modern history.
Take a passage from Figes's book, describing the "savage war" between Russian peasants and Bolsheviks in 1920. He doesn't just give us figures, some of them astonishing enough, but one graphic description after another of what peasants did to Bolsheviks and landlords, what Bolsheviks did to peasants and priests, what Reds did to Whites (and vice versa), what Russians, Poles and Ukrainians did to each other, and what everyone did to Jews. This is one of at least two dozen such passages in Figes's book: "Thousands of Bolsheviks were brutally murdered. Many were the victims of gruesome (and symbolic) torture: ears, tongues and eyes were cut out; limbs, heads and genitals were cut off; stomachs were sliced open and stuffed with wheat; crosses were branded on foreheads and torsos; Communists were nailed to trees, burned alive, drowned under ice, buried up to their necks and eaten by dogs or rats, while crowds of peasants watched and shouted."
Then there was the Cheka: "In Kharkov they went in for the 'glove trick' - burning the victim's hands in boiling water until the blistered skin could be peeled off: this left the victims with raw and bleeding hands and their torturers with 'human gloves.' The Tsaritsyn Cheka sawed its victims' bones in half. In Voronezh they rolled their naked victims in nail-studded barrels. In Armavir they crushed their skulls by tightening a leather strap with an iron bolt around their head."
Contrast this with EH Carr's account of the Cheka in volume one of The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923. Carr lists a few mass shootings and then writes, "These bald records undoubtedly conceal horrors and brutalities committed both in the heat of battle and common to all parties, though specific accounts of them rarely carry conviction. Such occurrences... are the invariable concomitants of war and revolution waged with the fanatical desperation which marked the struggle unleashed in Russia by the events of October 1917." Carr is aware that beneath the "bald" statistics lie "horrors and brutalities." He leaves it at that. Figes, here and elsewhere in A People's Tragedy, puts these at the centre of his book. This is not a point about two individuals. The interesting comparison is between two generations, two radically different attitudes to writing about cruelty in history.
Antony Beevor's accounts of the horrors of Stalingrad and the Soviet invasion of Germany in 1945 have sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Both books are part military history and part horror story, thick with the details of medical experiments, the mass murder of prisoners of war, deserters and Jews, and the rape and murder of civilians on the losing side. In Berlin: The Downfall 1945, Beevor describes Soviet soldiers reaching a German maternity clinic and orphanage in Dahlem. His description is brief: "Nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were all raped without pity." There are dozens of stories of comparable brutality in the books.
In Norman Davies's Europe: A History, published in 1996, the same year as Figes's book, he writes about the "death-factory" at Jasenovac in Croatia during the second world war: "Sensational stories abound. But shooting or gassing might have been regarded as a blessed reprieve from death by mass clubbings, by immersion in boiling cauldrons, or by decapitation with saws." On the previous page Davies writes about what French republican officers in Nantes did to rebels from the Vend?e during the terror. They "had so many rebels from the Vend?e to kill that they didn't know how to do it. They had unleashed the 'infernal columns'; they had starved and massacred their captives; and they had been shooting batches of prisoners by the thousand. But it was not enough. They then hit on the idea of drowning... By sinking a loaded hulk in the river at night, and then refloating it, they devised an efficient and inconspicuous system of reusable death chambers."
It is hard to find comparable writing in the leading histories of Europe written only 20 or 30 years ago. George Lichtheim's Europe in the 20th Century has a page full of statistics about Russian and German casualties in the second world war but has none of Beevor's graphic detail. Norman Stone's Europe Transformed, 1878-1919, contains an exemplary 60-page essay on pre-revolutionary Russia, including a powerful paragraph on the violent peasant uprisings of 1902-03, but there is nothing comparable to Figes's account of the violence of everyday life in pre-revolutionary Russian villages. Why are so many of the best historians today drawn to the burnt village, the torture cellar and the firing squad?
The turning point came in Simon Schama's acclaimed history of the French revolution, Citizens, published in 1989. The book's first words set the scene, a letter from Camille Desmoulins to his wife from prison. Desmoulins writes, "Je n'ai pu croire que les hommes fussent si f?roces et si injustes." Ferocity is one of the great themes of Schama's book. As he writes in the preface, "the book attempts to confront directly the painful problem of revolutionary violence." He goes on, "historians have erred on the side of squeamishness in dealing with this issue. I have returned it to the centre of the story... In some depressingly unavoidable sense, violence was the revolution itself."
Violence is at the heart of Schama's account of the French revolution and, unlike most previous historians of the subject, he wants to confront it directly. It is a point he returns to at a number of crucial points in the book, taking issue with historians' "egregious record of silent embarrassment" when faced with atrocities. Discussing the 1792 September massacres, Schama renews his polemic: "Disturbed by its horror and poorly trained in their professional discourse to contemplate it, historians at this point tend to avert their eyes and dismiss the event as somehow incidental or 'irrelevant' to any serious analysis of the dynamics of the revolution." He accuses one French historian, Pierre Caron, of "intellectual cowardice and moral self-delusion," and "the scholarly normalisation of evil." Schama goes on to attack "a selective forgetfulness practised in the interest of scholarly decorum," before describing in vivid detail some of the worst moments of the September massacres, when "one half of all the prisoners in Paris died." The Princesse de Lamballe "was hacked to death in minutes." Schama continues, "her head was struck off and stuck on a pike. Some accounts... insist on the obscene mutilation and display of her genitals, a story which Caron dismisses with the cloistered certainty of the archivist as intrinsically inconceivable."
After Schama, there has followed a number of big books on 20th-century history, thick with vivid descriptions of atrocities: Figes, Davies, Hochschild, Beevor's books on Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin. All are bestsellers, superbly written, concerned with the inhumanity of the events they describe.
It is not only bestsellers that have taken up this question of violence. Modris Eksteins's Walking Since Daybreak (1999), is a fine account of the story of modern Latvia. Eksteins quotes Ernst von Salomon's account of the battles between the Latvian army and German soldiers a year after the end of the first world war: "We hunted the Letts across the fields like hares, set fire to every house, smashed every bridge to smithereens and broke every telegraph pole. We dropped the corpses into wells and threw bombs after them. We killed anything that fell into our hands, we set fire to everything that would burn." Rudolf H?ss, later commandant of Auschwitz, was a veteran of this campaign. In his cell in Krakow in 1946-47, H?ss reminisced, "The battles in the Baltic were more wild and ferocious than any I have experienced either in the world war or in the battles for liberation afterwards. There was no real front; the enemy was everywhere. And when contact was made, the result was butchery; to the point of utter annihilation... In those days I could still pray and I did."
What has changed? Why do contemporary historians focus on these atrocities in a way their predecessors did not? It is no coincidence that many of these books are about Russia and the eastern front. Since the collapse of Soviet communism, western historians have followed Robert Conquest's pioneering work and have rediscovered the scale of human devastation from prewar pogroms to the Russian civil war, from collectivisation to Katyn. New archives have revealed the enormity of what happened, but also the detail. Carr and Stone did not have access to the information that Figes and Beevor had.
Some of the worst horror stories come from the east European frontier areas, caught between the Red army and the Nazis. Many of the most savage moments in these books - Figes, Davies, Eksteins and Beevor's two bestsellers - are about these areas and the people caught in the middle, Poles, Jews and Ukrainians, German civilians in Pomerania and Silesia and prisoners of war. Again, there is new information after the fall of the iron curtain. There is also a new receptivity to this information.
The rediscovery of modern east European and Russian history has coincided with the explosion of interest in antisemitism: the Holocaust, of course, but also the longer history of pogroms and antisemitism before the second world war. Some of the darkest moments in Figes's history of the revolution and civil war are his descriptions of pogroms during the civil war: "In the town of Fastov the Cossacks hung their victims from the ceiling, releasing them just before they choked to death: if their relatives, who watched this in terror, could not pay up the money they had demanded, the Cossacks repeated the operation. The Cossacks cut off limbs and noses with their sabres and ripped out babies from their mothers' wombs. They set light to Jewish houses and forced those who tried to escape to turn back into the fire. In some places, such as Chernobyl, the Jews were herded into the synagogue, which was then burned down with them inside. In others, such as Cherkass, they gang-raped hundreds of pre-teen girls." Figes's accounts - and new statistics - are based on newly opened archives. They are also, surely, based on a new sensitivity to the issue of antisemitism.
It is also no coincidence that these books have coincided with the late 20th-century crisis of the left. Marxist historians write of classes and social structures, the economics of capitalism and imperialism, but have been less drawn to the human casualties, the broken eggs which went into making so many omelettes. EJ Hobsbawm's memoir, Interesting Times (2002), for example, has curiously little to say about the victims of "the dream of the October Revolution."
Schama, Figes and Davies are openly scornful of the revolutionary project, whether in 1789 or 1917. Schama's Citizens ends with a madwoman, "a logical destination for the compulsions of revolutionary idealism." His book is a powerful polemic against revolution and Marxist interpretations of history. Part of the reason for its success was timing. The heyday of Marxist historiography had passed. Hobsbawm devoted an evocative chapter of his memoir to France. He called it "Marseillaise." For Schama, the Marseillaise evokes bloodshed, slaughter and utopian thinking gone mad. Like Schama and Davies, Figes has no time for revolutionary utopianism: he is too aware of the human costs. At times, Schama's account of the attacks by Jacobin squads on counter-revolutionary peasants in the Vend?e could be interchangeable with Figes's accounts of Lenin's attempts to impose war communism on Russian villages. Schama's is a late 20th-century version of the French revolution, informed by the atrocities of Nazism and Stalinism. There is little sense of revolutionary idealism in any of these books.
Figes and the others are creatures of their time in another respect. They have surely been influenced by what happened in Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. This recent experience of genocide and ethnic cleansing has changed the way we think about the past, as much as it has the way we think about the present. Together with the collapse of communism, the experience of genocide has challenged the optimism of a previous generation of historians. All those books about the rise of parliamentary government and the preconditions of industrial revolution were written during the postwar years of stability and affluence. The classic socialist accounts of the Russian and French revolutions were written during the heyday of the left. The tone was optimistic and triumphalist, not tragic. Think of the ending to AJP Taylor's English History, 1914-1945 (1965) or the last heroic words of EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963). They seem a world away from Schama's Nantes or Figes's Cheka squads.
Interestingly, the refugee intellectuals, writing in the 1950s and 1960s, were especially unwilling to explore the darkest experiences of recent history. Peter Gay, a Jew from Berlin, wrote numerous major works on 18th and 19th-century European history and ideas, but couldn't get past Weimar. Isaiah Berlin was born in Latvia and later became a refugee from revolutionary Russia. According to one of his former students, Larry Siedentop, Berlin liked to venture out into the Romantic irrational by day, but always returned to the Enlightenment at nightfall. His recently published letters barely refer to Nazism or the fate of his relatives in Latvia. Stalinism is hardly mentioned at all. GR Elton, a German Jew, spent his life studying Tudor government, and Lewis Namier, a Jew from Poland, wrote the definitive mid-20th-century accounts of 18th-century English politics. The atrocities they escaped left their mark, but as a series of haunting absences. There are exceptions, most obviously George Steiner, but the point is that they are exceptions to an interesting rule.
A younger generation of historians, nearly all born and brought up in Britain and America, have none of the optimism or reticence of their illustrious predecessors. They have been drawn to the darkest episodes of modern European history, in their most terrible details. The result is history of the highest standard: compelling, humane and without illusions.
They have also conducted an unspoken argument against trends in academic history writing. These books have none of the more narrow academic preoccupations with epistemology and postmodernism. One way of getting away from that narrowness is to go for big stories and for realism. And there is nothing more real than our bodies and what other people can do to them. These books are unashamedly about great subjects - wars, revolutions, colonialism - and direct human experiences, focusing whenever possible on individual stories to tell a larger story.
In his preface, Schama wonders whether this kind of history might be attacked as too sensationalist. Is it too drawn to the head on the pike, the torturer's cellar, a Tarantino history-writing? Is it, like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, symptomatic of a culture that is too much at home with blood and violence? If, in recent years, it has become more acceptable to depict graphic violence, is this new history just part of a larger cultural trend?
This criticism misses the point. The new history is highly moral. It uses violence to make the point that wars and revolutions have appalling costs. They have often ended in the scenes Schama describes in Nantes, or that Beevor describes in eastern Germany as the Red army arrived. History is not just kings and queens, Georgian country houses and Bloomsbury memoirs. Violence and atrocity loom large.
Finally, these writers tell us new things about the past. They have helped break down a cultural iron curtain, reminding us of the importance of Russia and eastern Europe, telling us extraordinary things about previously unfashionable subjects such as Latvia or the Ukraine. They have given due emphasis to sexual violence by men against women, especially during revolutions and wars, and to racial and ethnic violence by white Europeans against Africans and central and east Europeans against Jews. Atrocities, they make it clear, are not confined to the battlefield.
After reading Beevor, Eksteins and Davies we realise that the borderlands are often where the worst things happen. Eksteins opens up important continuities between Latvia after 1918 and central and eastern Europe during the second world war. Schama, Figes and Davies introduce haunting new statistics. According to Schama, "just under a quarter of a million" people died in the Vend?e, Loire-Inf?rieure and Maine-et-Loire during the terror; according to Figes, more than 150,000 Jews may have been murdered during the pogroms of the civil war; according to Hochschild, there was "a population loss estimated at 10m people" in the Congo under King Leopold.
The figures and the graphic descriptions of violence in these new history books have changed the way a generation think about the great events of modern history: the French and Russian revolutions, late 19th-century imperialism, the second world war. Perhaps they also tell us a great deal about what is happening in our culture today: a concern with ethics, cruelty and the fragility of human life, not utopias and grand narratives.
