If I ruled the world: Antony Beevor

As world ruler, I would prevent countries from attempting to control history. One saw the way the historian David Irving, who in 2005 was sent to prison by an Austrian court for denying the Holocaust, could make himself out to be a victim and a martyr. Then there was former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who tried to outlaw the denial of the Armenian genocide in 2012. It was opportunistic and designed to get the Armenian vote. This is a state attempt to control history, which is something I oppose on principle.

The issue has also come up in Russia. In 2013, Sergei Shoigu, the country’s Minister for Defence, passed a law that he had been trying to get on the statute books since 2009. It would imprison anyone, in theory for up to five years, who criticised the Red Army’s conduct during the Second World War. (I have to declare an interest: I am a target of this law because my 2002 book Berlin: the Downfall also covered the mass rapes committed by Russian soldiers in 1945.) Shoigu described the “crime” of criticising the Red Army as tantamount to Holocaust denial. It’s interesting, considering that Joseph Stalin himself was, in a way, the first Holocaust denier. He refused to allow that the Jews should have any special category of suffering.

After the publication of my book, the Russian Ambassador to Britain, Grigory Karasin, accused me of lies, slander and blasphemy against the Red Army. Karasin is now Deputy Foreign Minister. I don’t know to what degree I am still in the firing line because I still get invitations to the Russian Embassy. Vladimir Putin does like to come up with totally contradictory positions to confuse his opponents. Rather like the way he accuses Ukraine of fascism and then proceeds to support fascist or neo-fascist parties in western Europe. His real goal is the attempt to control Russian history. In March, while planning celebrations for Russia’s victory in the Second World War, Putin said: “Today we unfortunately see not only attempts to misrepresent and distort events of the war, but cynical, open lies and the brazen defamation of a whole generation who gave up everything for the victory.” He continued: “Their goal is clear: to undermine the power and moral authority of modern Russia and deprive it of the status of a victorious nation.”

It didn’t occur to me until after writing Berlin that the reason Russians found it so painful to acknowledge the mass rapes—including those who suffered in the Gulag and hated Stalin—was that for them the victory over Nazi Germany was a moment of which they could all feel proud and which unified the country. In fact Karasin warned me—before he knew exactly what was in the book—that “what you have to realise is that the victory is sacred.” It is seen almost as the defining moment of the Soviet Union and therefore cannot be tampered with.

That any state has to rely on legislation to defend this idea is deeply depressing. They have even set up the Russian Military Historical Society, whose aim is to foster patriotism and resist attempts to distort military history. There have been some very brave Russian historians, some of whom have lost their positions, simply by questioning the party line of today, which is that there were only a few cases of rape and of course all of those were prosecuted. We know this is absolute rubbish: the numbers were far greater. Trying to foster patriotism through history is something that many regimes have done in the past, and they tend to be undemocratic in one form or another. During the Russian victory celebrations on 9th May the orange and black St George’s ribbon was being used everywhere. This symbol from the past is being used in eastern Ukraine to represent Russian heroism today.

History needs to be debated openly. You can ban certain symbols—as Germany has done with the swastika—and you can even ban certain political parties. But it is quite wrong to suppress a counter-argument in history. For example, the great Jewish historian of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg put the number of deaths at a bit over five million, rather than six million. Did that make him a Holocaust denier? It’s a grey area. If you want to do something about real Holocaust deniers you could prosecute them under hate laws—but not on the grounds of falsifying history.