British historian Antony Beevor draws up a parallel, in an interview with “world”, between Russia of the October revolution and that of today.
Interview by Marc Semo
Recognized historian of the Second World War, the British Antony Beevor offers, with his new work, Russia. Revolution and civil war, 1917-1921 (Calmann-Lévy, 568 pages, 25.90 euros), a dive into the October 1917 revolution and the Russian civil war, whose resonances with Russian aggression in Ukraine are obvious .
The atrocities committed by the Russian forces in Ukraine show the persistence of a story of violence and terror which has its roots in the 1917 revolution?
The 1917 revolution and even more the civil war, which lasted until 1921, killing between 6 and 10 million dead, were indeed marked by extreme violence in both camps. If the worst examples of a perverted humanity were in the white [Russians], the ruthless inhumanity deployed by the Bolsheviks has remained without equivalent. It was Lenin who invented the gulag, the Cheka, the KGB, with their cohort of torture, assassinations, massacres. Opposing Lenin’s methods to those of Stalin is a fable. This tradition of total contempt for human life continues: we see it today with aggression against Ukraine, as during the two wars in Chechnya, the invasion of Georgia or Russian intervention in Syria. One of the explanations is in daily violence that is practiced within the Russian armed forces, and the way today, as in the Tsarist or Soviet era, the officers treat their men, beaten, humiliated. The latter take revenge on young army recruits, but especially on civilians, especially women, when they are in operation.
This culture of violence is therefore even older …
No country can escape the ghosts of its past, Russia less than any other. It has been marked by the persistence of recurring fears for centuries, that of encirclement and threat to its borders. Also weighs the memory of Mongolian invasions with their procession of massacres and mass rapes, considered since, in the imagination of a good part of Russian society, as part of the natural practices of war. Oppression and blood permeate Russian history. Atrocities were certainly committed in Europe during the wars of religion; But, since the Age of Enlightenment and the accent put on the concept of humanity in the 19th e century, the West got rid of these practices. Not Russia.
were the revolution and civil war were the matrix of the brutalization of European history in the last century?
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