British military historians banned in Russia
THE works of two of Britain’s most distinguished military historians have been banned in a region of Russia over suggestions that they misinterpret the events of the Second World War and are “imbued with Nazi propaganda”.
According to a directive leaked to local journalists, schools and higher education institutions in the Ural mountains region of Sverdlovsk will be banned from giving students or teachers access to books by Antony Beevor and Sir John Keegan, two of Britain’s most respected authorities on the Second World War.
Mr Beevor’s books about Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin, and the battle for Normandy have made him amongst the most widely read English-language historians writing on the 1939-45 war.
Sir John Keegan, who died in 2012, wrote more than two dozen volumes of military history, including The Face of
Battle and A History of Warfare, and was for the last 25 years of his life The
Daily Telegraph’s defence editor. While it is unclear which of Sir John’s works incurred the ire of the Sverdlovsk authorities, Mr Beevor’s books have been bitterly attacked in Russia for their unvarnished portrayal of the Eastern Front, including atrocities committed by Soviet forces. His 2002 book Berlin: The Downfall
1945, has attracted particular ire for its accounts of the mass rape of German women by Red Army troops at the end of the war. Criticism of the Soviet Un- ion’s role in the Second World War is treated extremely seriously in Russia, where Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin has used victory in 1945 as a central plank of its efforts to promote national unity.
Russian media have often invoked the struggles against fascism for propaganda purposes throughout the current confrontation with the West over Ukraine. In May last year Mr Putin signed a law banning “wittingly spreading false information about the activity of the USSR during the years of World War Two”.
Critics said the law would effectively ban criticism of Stalin or a free discussion of atrocities that may have been committed by the Red Army, including mass rapes in Germany at the end of the war. The deputy regional education minister, Nina Zhuravleva, did not cite that law when she ordered the ban on Mr Beevor’s and Sir John’s works in a directive dated July 31, which was published by a local news website, Ekaterinburg Online, on Tuesday.
The document says the ministry “has received information that educational institutions’ libraries have publications … that propagandise stereotypes formed during the Third Reich”.
The directive orders school librarians to check their shelves for any books by Beevor or Keegan and “take measures to remove them from access to students and educational workers”.
A spokeswoman for the office of Yevgenny Kuivashev, the governor of Sverdlovsk region, confirmed the order but played down the prospect of books be- ing banned. “The education ministry does not have that power,” Yulia Voronina said.
The government of Sverdlovsk region said in a statement: “Many historians, both Russian and foreign, believe that books by authors like John Keegan and Antony Beevor wrongly interpret information about the events of the Second World War, contradict historical documents, and are imbued with Nazi propaganda stereotypes.”
Several Russian historians, including those who have been critical of Mr Beevor, condemned the move.
Alexander Dyukov, the director of Historic Memory, a foundation, said Beevor’s ideological viewpoint “could be called anti-Soviet. But there is nothing at all that glorifies Nazism.”