HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/topic/russia-ukraine Sat, 21 Mar 2026 10:46:04 GMT en hourly 1 Why does Putin blame this infamous Russian revolutionary for Ukraine’s independence? https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/putin-blame-lenin-for-ukraine-independence/ Sat, 21 Mar 2026 10:45:29 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/putin-blame-lenin-for-ukraine-independence/ More than a century after the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin’s decision to organise the Soviet state around national republics continues to shape political arguments about Ukraine When Vladimir Putin speaks about the origins of the war in Ukraine, he often reaches back into history for his justifications. In speeches and essays, the Russian president has repeatedly argued that modern Ukraine is an artificial construct that was effectively created by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution of 1917 – and above all by their leader, Vladimir Lenin.

According to this interpretation, Ukraine has never been a serious, distinct nation from Russia, but a political idea that emerged when the new Soviet regime reorganised the territories of the former Russian Empire into a federation of republics. In Putin’s view, by granting Ukraine formal status as a Soviet republic, Lenin unintentionally laid the groundwork for Ukrainian independence decades later.

It’s a disputed version of history, to say the least.

Many historians argue that Ukrainian cultural and political identity long predated the Soviet Union. Ideas of a distinct Ukrainian language, culture and political community had been developing since at least the 19th century, alongside nationalist movements across Europe.

But it’s impossible to understand Putin’s version of history without coming back to Lenin. Historian Dr Lara Douds reflected on Lenin’s life and legacy on the HistoryExtra podcast – and explained how he’s become Putin’s bogeyman.

Lenin’s revolution

“The boy who would become Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in a provincial town in the Russian Empire,” explains Douds. The town was Simbirsk, about 400 miles east of Moscow on the Volga river. Simbirsk was a modest administrative town in the interior of the empire, far removed from the political centres of St Petersburg and Moscow.

At the time of Lenin’s birth, the Russian Empire was one of the largest political entities in world history. It stretched from eastern Europe across Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. Its political system remained rigidly stuck in the past.

“The context he is born into is one of a Russian empire characterised by autocracy,” Douds says. The tsarist regime was “absolutist and repressive,” with political power concentrated in the hands of the emperor. The Romanov dynasty had ruled Russia since the early 17th century, and the tsar governed with barely any constitutional limits.

Nevertheless, Russia had begun to reform in limited ways. “Economically, it’s coming out of serfdom, but very slowly,” Douds explains. A small noble elite controlled land and political power, while most of the population were peasants.

By the late 19th century, these tensions were producing political opposition.

“In the couple of decades before Lenin’s birth we see the development of a revolutionary movement in the Russian empire,” Douds says.

When he was born in 1870, in many respects, Lenin’s upbringing was privileged.

“It seems as though Lenin had a wonderful, almost idyllic childhood,” Douds explains. He grew up in a close-knit and intellectually engaged family. His father, Ilya Ulyanov, was a state official who had risen steadily through the imperial bureaucracy. Originally a teacher, he eventually became a school inspector.

“He’s promoted to the point that by Lenin’s birth he has the right of hereditary nobility in the Russian empire,” Douds says. This status placed the family within the educated professional class rather than among Russia’s peasantry.

The family was socially ambitious and culturally active. “It’s a family on the make in many ways.”

The household included six children – three boys and three girls – with Vladimir in the middle. “They all play together. They are very cultured. They enjoy reading, music, painting, walking in nature,” Douds says. Lenin himself was an exceptional student. “He has glowing school reports.”

Vladimir Lenin sits outdoors in a coat and cap, looking to the side during a public event.

The Ulyanov family tragedy

In 1886 Lenin’s father died suddenly while still relatively young. The loss was devastating for the family. And an even greater shock followed the next year when Lenin’s older brother, Alexander Ulyanov, was arrested in St Petersburg.

Alexander had become involved in an underground revolutionary organisation known as Narodnaya Volya – ‘The People’s Will’. This organisation had already gained notoriety for assassinating Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The group believed that eliminating key figures in the tsarist government could trigger a broader uprising.

Their next target was Alexander III.

After being identified as an involved member in this latest plot, “Alexander Ulyanov becomes one of the young people, aged about 20, to be hanged at the Peter and Paul Fortress,” Douds says.

“It’s a hugely traumatic moment in the life of the young Vladimir Ulyanov,” she says. “The family is shunned by polite society, which they had been part of up until that point,” Douds says.

Lenin himself rarely spoke publicly about his brother’s execution. In his writings he preferred to present his political commitments as the result of careful intellectual analysis rather than personal trauma.

But many historians suspect the episode left a profound mark.

“It is very much a moment that defines Lenin’s feelings about tsarism,” Douds explains. Beneath the rational framework of Marxist theory, she suggests, there may also have been “a lot of repressed anger that defines his career”.

Whatever the exact psychological impact, Lenin immersed himself in revolutionary politics and socialist theory, which would eventually bring him to the leadership of the Bolshevik movement. The Bolsheviks were a radical faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party that advocated for a tightly organised revolutionary party to overthrow the tsarist regime.

The making of a revolutionary icon

After Lenin led the Bolsheviks to power during the Russian Revolution, his image was carefully cultivated by the new Soviet state. In November 1917, Bolshevik forces seized power in Petrograd, overthrowing the provisional government that had replaced the tsar earlier that year.

In subsequent decades, Soviet propaganda presented him as the founding father of a new socialist society.

“The cult of Lenin had taken over Soviet society in many ways,” Douds explains. Schoolchildren learned stories about ‘Grandfather Lenin’, portrayed as wise, compassionate and morally flawless. “It reached a sickening degree.”

It was only after many decades that that narrative began to change. “After the collapse of communism there was a great appetite to criticise him,” Douds says. His status as a leading figure of Russian political intellect had faded.

Lenin’s political return

Now, ire directed toward him has returned.

“We can see Putin recently blaming Lenin for the creation of Ukraine,” Douds says.

But why?

The Bolsheviks reorganised the former Russian empire into a federation of national republics after the revolution. In 1922 this structure became formalised as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), composed of multiple Soviet republics including Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

These republics – including the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic – were formally granted limited autonomy within the new Soviet system.

In Putin’s interpretation, this arrangement artificially created Ukrainian statehood within the Soviet framework. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, those republics became independent states, including modern Ukraine. Lenin’s decision to structure the Soviet Union as a federation of republics did indeed shape the political map of eastern Europe for much of the 20th century.

In that sense, it’s Putin’s stated view that Lenin bears much of the responsibility for the conflict between the two countries.

Danny Bird was speaking to Laura Douds on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

]]> Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed" https://www.historyextra.com/membership/kavita-puris-hidden-histories-social-taboos-are-violated-a-parent-must-decide-which-child-to-feed/ Fri, 23 May 2025 08:00:08 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/kavita-puris-hidden-histories-social-taboos-are-violated-a-parent-must-decide-which-child-to-feed/ Kavita Puri on the urgent need to commemorate historical famines During the Second World War, Deaths related to hunger matched or outnumbered military losses. Famines afflicted regions including the Soviet Union, China, India, Vietnam and Greece. Yet those who perished are rarely remembered in the same way as fallen soldiers.

Starvation is not relegated to the past. The latest UN Hunger Hotspots report identifies places of highest concern as Haiti, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan and Palestine. Sadly, the list of countries where hunger persists is much longer, with violence and conflict the key drivers.

Professor Alex de Waal, research professor at Tufts University and a leading expert on famine, explains that part of the reason famines are not remembered and memorialised is that the experience is so painful to recount, and so full of shame, that people want to forget it. In extremis, social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed; a neighbour refuses to give food to a neighbour; forbidden foods are eaten; people sell their bodies to survive; some profit from scarcity. The authorities who engineered a famine, or who neglected the population, have no reason to remember it, either.

In Ireland, it wasn’t until some 150 years after the start of the Great Famine, which began with an outbreak of potato blight in 1845, that victims were widely memorialised. Around a million people died – from a population of fewer than 9 million – and close to 2 million emigrated in a bid to survive.

An expression of remorse by the British government of its role in the famine came only as recently as 1997, though there is still debate about whether the statement issued on behalf of then prime minister Tony Blair constituted an apology. Monuments to the victims and those who fled the country are now dotted around Ireland, Northern Ireland and Britain – though none are in London. There are also significant memorials in places to which Irish people emigrated, mostly the US, Canada and Australia.

A memorial in the shape of a cross, with an angelic figure cut out in the middle

In Ukraine, many millions died during the 1932–33 famine known as the Holodomor (literally ‘death by hunger’), the result of Stalin’s policy of forced agricultural collectivisation. Under the Soviet regime, the subject was taboo; after independence in 1991, though, the famine became central to Ukraine’s nation-building project. There are now Holodomor memorials across Ukraine as well as in the countries in which its diaspora settled, including the US and Canada.

Starvation as a weapon of war was not criminalised in the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which governed the treatment of combatants and civilians during conflicts. The first step to revise that was an additional protocol introduced in 1977 stating that “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited”. Just over two decades later, an article in the Rome Statute of the International Court proscribed “intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival”, making it a war crime. To date, there have been no successful prosecutions for such acts.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, developed in 2004, identifies five phases of deprivation, with 5 being the most extreme, designated ‘Famine/Humanitarian Catastrophe’. The UN has voted that action is mandated only at Phase 5 – when families are at or beyond breaking point, when taboos have already been violated to find food, when widespread malnutrition has set in and mortality rates are high. Critics say that point is far too late.

Memorials to famines are, de Waal says, exceptions to the rule, yet he believes that there is a connection between remembering famines and preventing them. In this 80th anniversary year of the end of the Second World War, as we commemorate those who fought and died in the conflict, we could start by remembering those millions who also perished through starvation.

This column was first published in the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> What drives our addiction to war? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/richard-overy-war-causes-motives-history-resources-power-belief-ideology-security-what-means-21st-century/ Tue, 15 Oct 2024 16:26:41 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/richard-overy-war-causes-motives-history-resources-power-belief-ideology-security-what-means-21st-century/ War has been a constant of the human experience for millennia. The question that continues to trouble historians is: why? Richard Overy considers the major factors that have fuelled conflict since before the emergence of the state, and what that might mean for us in the 21st century Why war? Albert Einstein posed this question to the psychologist Sigmund Freud in a series of letters sent in 1932, at the prompting of the League of Nations Institute for Intellectual Cooperation. He was disappointed with the answer. Freud told him that all animals – humans included – possessed a destructive “death drive” that could explain why they fought and why they would continue to do so.

Since that exchange, many of the world’s brightest minds have sought an answer that explains our propensity for collective violence – both over the millennia of recorded history and in all parts of the globe. This line of thought prompts two more questions.

What is warfare? And for how long have we been fighting wars? These points have, unsurprisingly, sparked major disagreements.

What is the definition of ‘war’?

Historians and social scientists have tended to define war as something that is a product of the state as an entity. They have been fought in periods when, and in places where, they could be planned, armies raised and resources paid for – in other words, over the past 4,000–5,000 years in areas where states emerged. Any violence below the level of the state is not warfare but, rather, feuding or raiding or ritual contests.

Evolutionary biologists and psychologists, on the other hand, see the emergence of warfare as having occurred much deeper in the human past, when small groups of hunter-gatherers or fishers competed for food or resources and fought to protect their kin. Warfare in this early environment was almost certainly sporadic and brief, albeit potentially deadly, and has influenced behaviours into the modern era.

Cultural anthropologists have also suggested that warfare evolved before the state, both in the remote past and among tribal communities more recently. It was waged by pre-state peoples in a variety of ways – from ritual stand-offs to full-scale massacres – and was, in many cases, reinforced by a prevailing culture that endorsed violence when necessary and prompted the evolution of a warrior class and militaristic values that glorified war.

There are many examples of warfare among peoples who lacked state structures but fought from a variety of motives – over resources, land, booty and vengeance. The Māori fought with extreme violence among themselves to protect food supplies stored in special silos known as pa. Tribal chiefdoms in Neolithic Europe fought regular engagements against encroaching tribes or to safeguard trade.

In North America, too, tribal conflict often led to extreme violence. Take the massacre perpetrated in the first millennium AD in southern Utah. The skeletons of 92 victims, mostly male, were found at Wetherill’s Cave, displaying evidence that they had been bludgeoned to death, scalped and decapitated.

What evidence is there for ‘emergent warfare’?

Such bloodletting was not the same as modern organised war, but it is difficult to see the pre-state past as peaceable, given everything we now know about collective, war-like conflict. Evidence for this stage of ‘emergent warfare’ has been found in the archaeological record in the form of weapons, fortifications, iconography and skeletal remains scarred by bone damage indicating violence.

At Talheim in Germany’s Neckar Valley, marks on the excavated remains of 32 men, women and children who lived around 7,000 years ago suggest that they fell victim to attack by axes, clubs and arrowheads. The examination of Paleoamerican skeletons from between 8,000 and 7,000 years ago has revealed that more than half met a violent death.

Why have there always been wars?

Clearly, humans have been fighting each other since long before the emergence of the state. But this fact reveals little about why.

We are far more belligerent than any other species, and have evidently evolved that belligerence as one means of survival in the face of factors such as competition from other humans and ecological shocks. In short, warfare has become completely embedded in the human past.

But wars are not all the same, even if they are rooted in common causes. To make sense of the bewildering number of conflicts in the recorded past, certain recurring motives can be found: the need for resources; the imperatives of belief or ideology; the pursuit of power; and last, but by no means least, the search for security.

Motive for war #1: fighting over resources

The quest for, or protection of, resources has a long pedigree. Whether the aim was to preserve a hunting ground from trespassers, or to claim additional land, or to capture slaves, or to leverage payment of tribute, resource wars are identifiable. In many cases, ecological shifts caused by climatic change, overhunting or population growth have prompted the violent pursuit of resources.

The pressure of nomadic tribes on the northern Chinese frontier 2,000 years ago was driven in part by sudden climate shocks that reduced pasture land. And a prolonged drought in central North America in the late-13th century triggered waves of bloodshed as tribes struggled to find food in an arid land.

In the modern age, the drive to secure resources has been less obviously the primary motive behind acts of war. However, there is one notable exception to this rule: the Second World War. German aggression against the Soviet Union in summer 1941, and Japanese attacks on the US and on the British and Dutch empires later the same year, were unquestionably propelled by a thirst for material resources and land.

“What one does not have, but needs, one must conquer,” announced Adolf Hitler shortly before his troops invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.

That summer and autumn, he sparred with his generals, insisting – against their instincts – that German forces should first seize the coalfields and other rich assets of the Donbas rather than focusing on the capture of Moscow; their 1942 campaign was also intended to claim the oil and other resources of the southern Soviet Union. These would be needed if Germany were to become an economic superpower capable of holding off or defeating the British empire and the US.

Japan’s leaders also saw resources as vital to their war effort in China and their ambitions to be a major power. It was this imperative that drove their decision to launch the Pacific War. This, they hoped, would provide them with the material resources – the oil and minerals of south-east Asia – necessary to prevail over the western powers.

Motive for war #2: belief and ideology

Religion has also proven a powerful driver of conflict over the centuries. But should it be taken seriously as a cause in its own right? Or does it often, in fact, mask social and economic motives? Historians have debated these questions for centuries – and when they have, the medieval crusades launched by Christian powers against the so-called ‘infidel’ have rarely been far from their minds.

Though some historians have contended that economic gain and local power were the crusading knights’ true goals, it could be argued that this conclusion is a product of the outcome of these campaigns, rather than their cause.

Pope Urban II’s 1095 call for Christians to capture the Holy Land – and, in doing so, to win redemption from sins – was answered by thousands of people, both rich and poor. They overcame unimaginably harsh conditions and succeeded in the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, where they slaughtered the city’s Muslim and Jewish inhabitants.

Only belief made sense of the campaign and the contest to hold onto the new crusader kingdoms in the east. Belief also prompted Islamic leaders to unite in order to drive out the crusaders, with the promise of paradise for those who died fighting for the cause; by the end of the 13th century that campaign was complete.

The call to jihād – war in defence of Islam – has been revived in recent years, with strong echoes of a much earlier rhetoric. Longstanding Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s recent claim that Jerusalem will again be in Muslim hands echoes the 12th-century campaign to recapture the city from Christian control. Belief, then, is not so easy to dismiss as a cause of war.

Motive for war #3: pursuit of power

On the face of it, the link between war and the pursuit of power appears far less controversial. Few would argue with the contention that the quest for authority and control over others has always been a prime driver of conflict. Yet even this conclusion runs into problems, because people seldom fight for power for its own sake. Rather, conflict aims to gain power for something: seizing land, demanding tribute, controlling resources, enhancing security and satisfying honour.

Military power may be the means to achieve these aims, but it is the instrument rather than the cause. However, there can be little doubt that the desire for power was the motor that propelled some of history’s most famous (or infamous) figures – Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte and Hitler – along the road to conflict and conquest.

Whatever else drove these individuals to wage war, an insatiable appetite for personal power was clearly central. Napoleon was a classic case. Relentlessly driven to rise above the ordinary, he embarked on a military career at a young age. “The only thing to do in this world,” he told his brother Joseph in 1794, at the age of about 25, “is to keep acquiring… power and more power. All the rest is meaningless.”

Power for him was bound up with military success, which meant dominating as much of Europe as he could. And power brought with it a popular cult of Napoleon as saviour and ruler. ‘Saint Napoleon’ or ‘Napoleon the Great’ were epithets wielded to enhance his status.

Napoleon could brook no opposition to his power, which explains the constant conflicts in central Europe, Spain and, eventually, Russia, where his ambition reached its limit. The pursuit of power made possible other achievements, but it was also the sign of a man who didn’t know where to stop. That thirst for power warped Napoleon’s thinking even while he was incarcerated on an Atlantic island. Here, during his final exile on St Helena, the vanquished French emperor claimed that, if he had succeeded in Russia, he would have been “the greatest man that ever lived”.

Motive for war #4: security

Power and religious faith may have sparked numerous conflicts down the centuries, but the quest for security is surely the most common motive in all of recorded history for waging war. Modern security studies were born in the aftermath of the Second World War, and security of all kinds has become something of a modern obsession.

But security as an ambition has a much longer pedigree. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, writing in the 17th century, saw the defence of frontiers by a permanent “posture of Warre” as essential for security in the absence of a power to enforce peace and the lack of sufficient trust in others.

The anarchic nature of the international order is a major argument for why modern states must stay armed and prepared, even when there are institutional or legal constraints on resort to war, or a strong desire for peace. Linked to this, frontiers or borders have long been flashpoints. Indeed, most wars in the modern age have been fought between neighbours, and very often over issues of security around a frontier.

This is true today of the current conflict in Gaza and also of the Russia-Ukraine war, which was launched – or so Russian leaders claim – in order to create a secure frontier against what Moscow sees as the menace to security posed by Nato.

But it was also true of the Roman empire, whose long frontier, though seldom fixed in the way most of today’s borders are, had to be defended against a host of potential enemies to preserve the security of imperial territory. Rome’s frontier was a constant source of friction and war. It stretched over 5,000 miles around western Europe, the Middle East and north Africa, extending from Britain in the north to the Sahara in the south, and from Spain in the west to areas beyond Palestine in the east.

This border was porous, though great efforts were made to install watchtowers or outposts along its length in order to monitor entry and to safeguard against violent incursions. Hadrian’s Wall – the Vallum Aelium – is arguably the best-known example, constructed in an effort to keep the tribes of the Caledonians and Maeatae at arm’s length from the Roman province of Britannia.

The wall was connected by roadways to garrisons farther south, so that reinforcements could be rapidly marched in, and forts and watchtowers were set along its 73-mile length. At least 11 major raids by Celtic tribes were recorded between AD 160 and 400, but the wall served its purpose – preserving the security of the provincial territory.

By the fourth century AD, most Roman soldiers were stationed along the frontiers in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and the primary endeavour of the empire was frontier security – until it was overwhelmed by the tribal federations driven from Eurasia into the Roman heartland.

War in the 20th and 21st centuries

Some historians assert that, over the 16 centuries since the fall of Rome, the global order has become more peaceable. However, that argument has been thoroughly undermined by the fact that the 20th century witnessed the two largest and deadliest wars in human history.

Indeed, there has not been a single year in the 20th or 21st centuries when a war of some kind – state-on-state war, insurgency and counter-insurgency, civil war or resource war – was not being fought. Warfare is embedded in the way modern states think about their security, and that security seems once again at serious risk in the 2020s, as it was in the 1930s.

Today, war is not just history, and much academic effort has been devoted to assessing what kind of conflicts will emerge over the course of the current century. The concept of Power Transition Theory, developed by international relations experts during the Cold War, suggests that a challenge to a hegemonic power by a rising power creates the danger of war, either to defend a waning hegemony or to elevate the challenger.

It’s proposed that a potential war between China and the US would fit this pattern, though it remains a speculation impossible to predict with certainty.

More likely sources of conflict are the shrinking availability of resources – oil being a key example – and competition for their control. This is being exacerbated by the effects of climatic change, as climate shocks undermine resource availability – notably of water – or precipitate mass migrations in affected regions.

Cyberwar or war in space have also become potential arenas of conflict as militaries have come to rely on sophisticated electronic communication. Over the past 15 years, America has activated US Cyber Command and US Space Force to beef up its defences against new threats – and to enable it to launch counterattacks. These initiatives, and the long history of human belligerence that preceded them, suggests that we shouldn’t anticipate a warless world in anything but the remotest future.

War first emerged in the archaic past, evolving through the stages of village, tribe, tribal federation, state and empire into a universal phenomenon. As to why it did so? Well, there’s no single answer to that – much as Einstein might have wished for one.

**Richard Overy is honorary research professor at the University of Exeter, and author of Why War? (Pelican, 2024)

This article was first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> Historical echoes of the Ukraine war https://www.historyextra.com/membership/historical-echoes-of-the-ukraine-war-podcast-serhii-plokhy/ Thu, 08 Jun 2023 06:30:53 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/historical-echoes-of-the-ukraine-war-podcast-serhii-plokhy/ Serhii Plokhy discusses the historical backdrop that helps make sense of the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine More than a year in, the war between Russia and Ukraine has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, with repercussions on an international scale. It also continues to evoke parallels with a whole range of historical events, from the revolutions of 1917 to the breakup of the USSR in the early 1990s. Speaking with Matt Elton, Serhii Plokhy discusses the historical backdrop that helps make sense of the current conflict.

Serhii Plokhy is the author of The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (Allen Lane, 2023)

]]> When and why did the Soviet Union fall? Your history guide to the USSR https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/soviet-union-history-creation-what-countries-when-why-fall-collapse/ Wed, 30 Nov 2022 10:30:05 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/soviet-union-history-creation-what-countries-when-why-fall-collapse/ As part of our explainer series on history's hot topics, BBC History Revealed staff writer Danny Bird shares a guide to the history of the Soviet Union What was the Soviet Union and how did it come to exist?

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), more commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a vast country that spanned much of northern Eurasia. For most of its existence during the 20th century, it was a multinational federation of 15 Union Republics and numerous subdivisions, each based on ethnicity and culture. The largest by far was Russia, where the Soviet capital, Moscow, was located. As a self-proclaimed “socialist state”, the Soviet Union became the template for other such countries and served as the fulcrum for communism throughout the world.

The origins of the Soviet Union lay in the October Revolution of 1917 when Marxist leader, Vladimir Lenin, and his Bolshevik Party seized power in Petrograd (now St Petersburg). They named their new state the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (RSFSR), in honour of the organisations – the soviets (councils) – convened by workers, peasants and soldiers during the 1905 and 1917 revolutions.

Lenin deduced that Russia would be the tinderbox of an imminent worldwide socialist revolution, which would mark the demise of capitalism. However, the Russian empire’s implosion into civil war proved a greater priority, as ‘Reds’ (Bolsheviks and other radical leftists) and ‘Whites’ (groups loyal to Russia’s deposed tsar) fought each other across its immense terrain. 

The Bolsheviks conspired to establish kindred regimes in the former empire’s newly independent nations. By 1922, Soviet republics had been installed in Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasian Federation (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan). On 30 December, delegations from these republics and Russia ratified a treaty that unified them as the Soviet Union.

Yuri Gagarin

How was it governed?

In practice, the Soviet Union was a highly centralised state, with the Communist Party (which the Bolsheviks renamed themselves in 1918), controlling all aspects of Soviet politics, economics and culture. 

Its ideology was Marxism-Leninism, based on an adaptation by Lenin of Marxist theory to suit Russia’s specific circumstances, through which it aspired to realise a communist utopia. Leadership was exercised collectively between state officials, though the party’s leader, the general secretary, acted as de facto head of state. 

Marxism-Leninism rejected parliamentary democracy, considering it rigged to serve capitalist interests. Instead, the Supreme Soviet became the Union’s chief law-making institution in 1936, electing its collective leadership and assembling representatives of the Union’s nationalities at state level. Effectively, though, it functioned simply to rubberstamp party policy.

What was Stalin’s impact on the Soviet Union?

Following Lenin’s death in 1924, a power struggle convulsed the party from which Joseph Stalin, a Georgian Bolshevik, triumphed. Moving to demonise his rival, Leon Trotsky, he inaugurated a cult of personality and replaced Moscow’s commitment to world revolution with “socialism in one country”.

Through a series of five-year plans, Stalin sought to rapidly industrialise the Soviet Union and collectivise agriculture, bringing private farms under state control. These policies inflicted enormous suffering across the Union – notably in Ukraine, where a human-made famine, the Holodomor, killed up to 4 million people between 1932 and 1933. Stalin then launched the Great Purge in 1936, in the paranoid belief that officials in the regime were conspiring to supplant him. Old Bolsheviks were subjected to show trials, tortured into confessing, and summarily executed. Others vanished into a network of forced labour camps, known as gulags. His grip on power secured, Stalin ended the carnage in 1938.

What was the Soviets’ role in World War II?

In 1939, Stalin baffled communists around the world by signing a non-aggression pact with his ideological foe, Adolf Hitler. Together, they divided Poland, while the Soviet Union later annexed the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in 1940. Nevertheless, on 22 June 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his long-planned invasion of the Soviet Union. The speed of the German advance shocked Soviet leaders as vast swathes of territory were lost. Leningrad (formerly known as Petrograd) was encircled and endured a brutal siege lasting over two years. Moscow evaded capture. The turning point was the battle of Stalingrad, with Soviet soldiers repelling the Germans and finally reaching Berlin in April 1945. Losing over 27 million military personnel and civilians, the war proved a major formative experience for the Soviets.

The defeat of Nazi Germany is proclaimed by a Soviet soldier raising the ‘banner of victory’ over the Reichstag

How did the Soviet Union evolve during the second half of the 20th century?

After 1945 the Soviet Union emerged as a global superpower, which led to a nuclear arms race unfolding against the US. Meanwhile, Moscow nurtured socialist regimes across eastern Europe and welcomed nations like China and Cuba into the fold. 

Stalin’s crimes were denounced by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, after the dictator’s death in 1953. Nonetheless, anti-Moscow uprisings in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were suppressed in the ensuing decades.

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, followed by the first human being in outer space, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961. It was a coup for the Soviets in the Space Race and state propaganda acclaimed communist innovation and science. 

Yet the 1970s saw popular support for Marxism-Leninism wane as the promise of the Khrushchev years soured during Leonid Brezhnev’s tenure. Long queues for dwindling consumer products and the Soviets’ international status as a pariah, brought by the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, took their toll.

Why did the Soviet Union collapse?

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader. The first general secretary born after the October Revolution, he introduced a series of reforms designed to rejuvenate the Soviet Union: glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction). Ironically, these policies enabled long-repressed grievances against Moscow to spill out. In 1986, a disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in Ukraine, dealt a heavy blow to Soviet probity. Belarus, hardest hit by the fallout, felt aggrieved that Moscow could have so recklessly underestimated such awesome technology. From Poland to Romania, Soviet-backed regimes toppled in 1989, and Moscow withdrew its forces.

Mikhail Gorbachev

By 1990, Gorbachev’s reforms were yielding unintended consequences closer to home. Nationalism stirred in the Union Republics, with Lithuania becoming the first to declare independence in March. The other Baltic states soon followed suit.

Communist Party hardliners staged a coup in August 1991, hoping to prevent total collapse, but thousands of Muscovites thwarted its progress. Ukraine broke away later that month, and, in December, Russia denounced the 1922 Union Treaty and quit the Soviet Union. Gorbachev resigned via a televised address on 25 December and the Supreme Soviet dissolved the Soviet Union the following day.

What is the Soviet Union’s legacy today?

Recently, Russian president Vladimir Putin has blamed Lenin for implanting “artificial” national identities in lands that were long under Russia’s yoke. 

He has described the Soviet collapse as a “genuine tragedy” for Russia and consistently speaks of protecting “ethnic Russians” living across the former Soviet Union.

Ukraine has witnessed the destruction of Soviet-era monuments, such as this statue of Lenin

In 2014, Moscow annexed Crimea when Ukraine made its aspirations for EU and Nato membership known. This year (2022) saw an escalation of the invasion, with Putin denying Ukraine’s right to statehood while curtailing dissent in Russia. The Soviet Union’s legacy is still very much playing out.

Read more | Russia-Ukraine crisis: 9 milestone moments in history that explain today’s invasion

Watch | Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone, a series of films by Adam Curtis that explore what it felt like to live through the USSR’s collapse and aftermath, is now available to watch on BBC iPlayer

]]> Roger Moorhouse on the historical echoes of the war in Ukraine https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ukraine-conflict-how-echoes-parallels-ww2/ Fri, 07 Oct 2022 14:41:10 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ukraine-conflict-how-echoes-parallels-ww2/ Historian Roger Moorhouse writes on the ways in which recent developments in the Russia-Ukraine conflict echo the Second World War It was “an army of beggars”, one eyewitness wrote – a mass of soldiers seemingly as interested in plunder as in fighting. Another spoke of their outdated equipment, shabby uniforms and dilapidated vehicles, as likely to break down as to be destroyed in combat.

This description might adequately apply to Ukrainian reports of the Russian invasion of 2022. In fact, it is a portmanteau of reactions to the Soviet invasion of Poland more than eight decades ago, in September 1939. Every conflict, of course, calls up its own historical echoes, associated with the events themselves or the locations being fought over. In that respect, the war in Ukraine is no exception. Indeed, given that the Kremlin’s methods of subverting its neighbours appear largely unchanged from Soviet times – including false-flag operations, deportations, disinformation and so-called referendums – it would be hard for the historian’s antennae not to be twitching while watching the news from Ukraine.

The current Ukrainian counteroffensive in the northern Donbas, east of Kharkiv, is a good case in point. Kharkiv itself is redolent with brutal history from the 20th century. The city was fought over extensively during the Second World War, changing hands between German and Soviet forces four times between 1941 and 1943. The end result was that a city that once boasted a population of more than a million was reduced to a moonscape of refugees and ruins.

There are other similarities to current events. The second of those battles for Kharkiv, in May 1942, was largely fought along the line of the River Oskol around Kupyansk and Izyum – a line also reached by Ukrainian forces in September 2022. That earlier battle – a German victory – resulted in nearly 300,000 Soviet casualties. Russian and Ukrainian forces are today fighting atop their ancestors’ bones.

Yet Kharkiv has another, even darker resonance. Its central prison, run by the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (or NKVD), was one of the three main execution sites used in the 1940 Katyń Massacre in which some 22,000 captured Polish officers and policemen were murdered in cold blood by their Soviet captors. Starobilsk, site of the camp in which the prisoners killed in Kharkiv were held, is currently being contested between Russian and Ukrainian forces. Few in the west will recognise its significance, when – or if – its name flits across our television screens.

Failing morale

In a broader sense, the recent collapse of the Russian frontline is symbolic of a longer-term corrosion of Russian forces through institutionalised corruption and technological backwardness. It might be argued, of course, that corruption and backwardness are nothing new to Russian military culture, and that they can be adequately counterbalanced by coercion and propaganda. To some extent that is correct but, crucially, failing morale among Russian troops, coupled with the collapse of the Kremlin’s propaganda rationale for the invasion – and the expectation that Russian forces would be welcomed in Ukraine – has compounded those deeper ills. Many Russian soldiers, it seems, are no longer sure what they are fighting for. History has countless examples of how damaging a lack of faith in the cause can be.

That failing morale has hardly been helped, of course, by the evident crisis in supply in the Russian army. Russian and Soviet armies have rarely shown much concern for the welfare of their troops. Some Red Army soldiers invading Poland in 1939 did so lacking boots or even rifles – testament to a mentality that viewed the “ordinary” soldier as thoroughly expendable: a tool to be used and then discarded, replaced by another unfortunate.

The invasion of Ukraine shows us that little has changed in this regard. Ill-trained and ill-supplied, with long-range missiles hampering their support infrastructure and arms and fuel dumps, Russian soldiers in the field appear to find themselves more than usually abandoned to their fate. Images of the new wave of Russian reservists, often supplied with antiquated Soviet-era equipment, will do little to assuage their concerns.

Disturbing parallels

All of which suggests an army in a degree of disarray, as the partial Russian collapse in recent months might confirm. If we are being optimistic, we might suggest that it is reminiscent – albeit on a much smaller scale – of Operation Bagration, the Soviet summer offensive of 1944 that effectively destroyed German Army Group Centre and opened the very real probability of a German defeat.

It is a common maxim that history repeats itself. It doesn’t, of course, but it sometimes creates echoes. Some are coincidences with no real significance. Sometimes, however, those echoes can reveal a deeper truth. In the case of this war, both categories are present. Superficial coincidences abound, thrown up by accidents of geography or the simple fact that the return of armoured warfare to the European continent was always bound to call forth comparisons to the last time such horrors were seen.

Yet some of the echoes created by the Russian invasion of Ukraine are not accidental or superficial but instead betray the deeper truth of the Kremlin’s method of war. For those with an understanding of the history, those echoes are plainly evident in the arrogant rhetoric about “the Russian world” that opened the invasion, so redolent of the spurious “spheres of influence” that accompanied the war in 1939.

They are evident in the Kremlin’s mealy-mouthed mendacity in describing the war as a “special military operation”, just as the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland was officially not an invasion, the word “war” being forbidden. They are evident in the so-called referendums – another tactic from 1940 – called to supposedly legitimatise Russia’s conquests, the results having long since been pre-ordained.

They are evident in the forced deportations of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians to the Russian interior, a crime strangely under-reported in the western media yet instantly recognisable to the countless Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians whose forebears suffered the same grim fate in 1940 and after. And they are evident in the atrocities committed by Russian forces against civilian populations: the epidemic of rape grimly reminiscent of the Red Army’s brutal conquest of Berlin in 1945, the casual looting of everyday objects, and the victims of torture, bodies tossed into mass graves with genocidal contempt.

The echoes, then, can be overwhelming, but they shouldn’t deafen us to the real significance of what is happening today. The war in Ukraine is not a re-enactment or a greatest-hits medley. It is, instead, to a large extent a battle for the future of Europe itself. In that, Ukraine is attempting to write a new chapter in its own history, looking forward not back. And, though we are wise to be cognisant of the history, we would do well to recognise the significance of that fact.

Roger Moorhouse is an author and historian whose books include First to Fight: The Polish War 1939 (Bodley Head, 2019)

]]> Peter Caddick-Adams on genocide and the laws of war https://www.historyextra.com/membership/war-crimes-history-what-are-the-laws-of-war/ Tue, 19 Apr 2022 15:08:35 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/war-crimes-history-what-are-the-laws-of-war/ “Even if the possibility seems remote at present, there is no reason to think that the Russian politicians and military figures behind the awful events unfolding on a daily basis in Ukraine will not, one day, be brought to justice,” writes Peter Caddick-Adams The war in Ukraine has turned very dark in ways few of us expected. Credible reports are pouring in of abuse of civilians, including torture, rape, looting, and executions (which Russia denies). Unlike many recent hostilities, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied by Vladimir Putin’s official declaration of war, phrased in the language of a “special military operation”, but warlike in every aspect.

The international response has included a call from leading jurists, policymakers, and intellectuals to create a special tribunal to hold top figures in the Putin regime accountable for their crimes of aggression. However, even before the atrocities uncovered in Bucha and elsewhere, Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), had opened a wide-ranging war crimes investigation. This was in response to a referral by 39 countries, including the United Kingdom. This will be the first time that such a judicial process has opened while the conflict concerned is still in progress.

Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), visits a mass grave in Bucha, Ukraine

The ICC, an international body permanently established in The Hague, Netherlands, was established in 1998 and began sittings in 2002. It replaced the ad hoc courts which tried the Second World War aggressors at Nuremberg and Tokyo, and more recent trials against the perpetrators of abuse in Rwanda and Bosnia. In recent years, a total of 46 people have been indicted by the ICC, including individuals from Uganda, Sudan, Kenya, Libya, Ivory Coast, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

How is genocide proven in court?

Among the most difficult of charges to prove is ‘genocide’, which has two meanings. One, used by President Zelensky of Ukraine and multiple public figures, is a colloquial description of what is happening in Ukraine today. Politicians and writers have been stumbling over themselves to describe the many violent events in civilian areas of Ukraine as genocide.

However, there is also a precise legal definition, which requires proof of the kind that takes years to assemble and test in a court. Dr Iva Vukusic of Utrecht University, an expert on the warring militias of the former Yugoslavia, has observed: “The key thing that sets genocide apart from other international crimes is an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, one of four sectors of a population, whether national, ethnic, racial or religious groups.”

The testimony of the victims is not sufficient. A paper trail, voice recordings or similar, are needed to prove that there is a premeditated intention to exterminate a particular group within the wider population. It is “one of the international crimes that has the highest intent threshold,” according to Yasmine Ahmed, UK director of the charity Human Rights Watch (HRW). That is why it is so hard to prove.

The architect of the term, codified as an international crime by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, was Raphael Lemkin (1900–59). He devised the word from genos (Greek: γένος génos, ‘family, clan, tribe, race, stock, kin’) and -cide (Latin: -cīdium, ‘killing’). A polyglot who spoke nine languages, Lemkin was born in what is now modern Belarus and studied at Lviv (then called Lwów) and Heidelberg universities, specialising in international law and foreign languages respectively. Significantly, a posthumous paper of his – Soviet genocide in Ukraine, published posthumously in 2014 – was banned by the Russian Federation as an “extremist publication” the following year.

Raphael Lemkin

Another student of the international law faculty at Lwów (then called Lemberg, as part of Austria-Hungary), was Hersch Lauterpacht (1897–1960). It was he who inserted the indictment of “crimes against humanity” – murderous acts by a state against individuals, often its own citizens – into the 1945–46 Nuremberg trials. He helped draft many of the speeches of Sir Hartley Shawcross, the chief British prosecutor. These relate to events both in war and peacetime that, as part of a widespread systematic policy by a state, cause large-scale human suffering or death to a civilian population. Unlike war crimes, which can be committed by individuals, crimes against humanity are generally committed by a national organisation, like an army or a police force.

How are war crimes defined?

A third category of indictments that might be applied to Russian activities in Ukraine are ‘war crimes’. These are activities committed specifically against the series of international treaties and declarations that govern the way war is fought. They were adopted at international peace conferences in 1899, 1907, and 1954, held at the Hague, and became known as the Hague Conventions. They relate solely to acts committed by individuals in war and cover a range of atrocities, including killing civilians or prisoners of war, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, and sexual violence. The 1954 convention relates to the protection of cultural property in armed conflict.

War crimes are perhaps the easiest to define, as they run counter to the Hague Conventions just described. Such crimes also contravene the four Conventions and three additional Protocols which complement them, ratified at Geneva at different times, known collectively as the Law of Armed Conflict.

The first Geneva Convention was initiated in 1864 by what is now the International Committee for the Red Cross and Red Crescent (ICRC) and today they provide minimum standards of humane treatment and protection to war’s victims. They cover civilians, prisoners of war (POWs), and soldiers who are wounded or otherwise incapable of fighting. Although being charged with either of the above categories, international lawyers observe a sense that the headline-grabbing charge of genocide is ‘the crime of crimes’, though not set in any law as such.

Russia-Ukraine war: events in context

Thus, when President Zelensky accuses Russia of committing a genocide in his country, he might technically be referring to war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, which nevertheless fall short of legal genocide. This is why, when British prime minister Boris Johnson recently stated that the events in Bucha “do not look far short of genocide,” a Downing Street spokesperson then clarified that “the determination of genocide should rightly be made by a competent court, rather than by the UK government”.

And although initially cautious, US President Joe Biden on 12 April accused Russian forces of committing acts of genocide in Ukraine. He told journalists: “Yes, I called it genocide because it’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being Ukrainian.”

When it comes to bringing individuals to trial, with all the difficulties that might ensue in finding and removing someone from the Russian Federation, it is worth remembering that individuals can be tried in absentia. This means they are physically absent during the proceedings. International jurists generally recognise such a situation if the accused is aware of the trial, is in hiding abroad, or if an attorney is assigned to represent them.

Martin Bormann, a Nazi official and Hitler’s private secretary, was tried in absentia and convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trial of 1946. Changes of government and political will were also responsible for bringing the former Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević (who died during his trial); Bosnian Serb Army chief, General Ratko Mladić; and leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadžić, before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). When their crimes were committed, there seemed little likelihood of them ever being brought to justice. Eventually, of 161 indicted individuals from that war, 91 were sentenced.

Martin Bormann

Another option is internal investigations by the Ukrainian national judiciary, who at the time of writing have opened cases on 4,820 incidents of alleged war crimes by Russian forces in the country. By tradition, states have no authority to prosecute sitting heads of state, whereas the ICC can. This is why, even if the possibility seems remote at present, there is no reason to think that the Russian politicians and military figures behind the awful events unfolding on a daily basis will not, one day, be brought to justice.

Peter Caddick-Adams is a writer and broadcaster who specialises in military history, defence and security issues. He lectures at universities, military academies and staff colleges around the world and spent 35 years as an officer in the UK Regular and Reserve Forces. His next book, 1945: Victory in the West, is due to be published by Penguin in May 2022

]]> Genocide: what can we learn from history? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/what-is-genocide-lessons-from-history-ukraine-rwanda-bosnia-cambodia/ Wed, 13 Apr 2022 19:31:51 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/what-is-genocide-lessons-from-history-ukraine-rwanda-bosnia-cambodia/ US president Joe Biden has accused Russian forces of committing acts of “genocide” in Ukraine. Here, historian Donald Bloxham explains the meaning of the term and asks what we can learn from genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and beyond. He also considers why the international community has failed to halt mass atrocities in all but a few cases… Genocide is at least as old as recorded history, according to the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term during the Second World War. Lemkin was not solely concerned with the murder of European Jews by the Nazis and in his definition referred to cases from history – for instance the Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE and, in the Middle Ages, the Crusaders’ actions against the Cathars and the wars of Genghis Khan. The instances of genocide and related atrocities in modern times – from the the Holocaust to Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur – indicate that we have not learned how to rid ourselves of the scourge, even though we know more and more about the circumstances that cause it.

During revolution, as state and social structures are re-shaped, groups deemed to impede the revolutionary agenda are susceptible to destruction, as happened after the 1917 Russian Revolution or after the Khmer Rouge triumphed in Cambodia in 1975. Threats to the territorial integrity of a state by regional independence movements may trigger genocide, as seen by the Pakistani military’s actions in what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971.

War is a particularly potent context for genocide, as military conflict enhances feelings of group solidarity and xenophobia, and violence in the military sphere can extend to other spheres. The sense of a country’s existence being under threat may also stimulate attacks on groups perceived to be involved in the threat. Even the Nazi regime, despite its persecution of Jewish people from 1933 onwards, did not become genocidal until it was at war.

The acquisition of new territory can also raise the threat of genocide. For example, the indigenous Native American and Australasian peoples were dispossessed and killed, or had their way of life destroyed, by European settlers. In lands of expanding white settlement, the frontier societies, acting with the tacit consent of their own governments, perpetrated mass murder, as in Tasmania or California in the 19th century. The settler example shows that it is not only “totalitarian” states that have perpetrated genocide. Few political systems have shown themselves immune to fostering the destruction of other groups.

What is the definition of genocide, what does it mean?

According to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide comprises “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”. This is not the only definition of genocide in existence, but it is especially important in law and politics. Contrary to a common belief, the Convention does not create a legal obligation for external intervention in ongoing cases of genocide. The fear that acknowledging the existence of an ongoing genocide might create such an obligation was palpable during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. A US Defense Department discussion paper of 1 May 1994 noted the concern of the Legal Division of the State Department that a “Genocide finding could commit USG [the US government] to actually ‘do something’”. Ten years later, however, the-then US Secretary of State Colin Powell was surer of his ground. After stating that genocide had indeed been committed in Darfur and that the Sudanese government and the janjawiid militia were responsible, he asserted that “no new action is dictated by this determination”. At the same time, ‘genocide’ has become an important political mobilisation slogan irrespective of the strict legal issues involved. Claims of genocide by both Russia and Ukraine in the present conflict are evidence enough of this. The evocative, moral force of the ‘G-word’ explains the vigour with which states including Myanmar, Sudan, China, and Turkey contest its applicability to events with which they are concerned.

Rwanda

In Rwanda’s genocide in 1994, up to 800,000 people were murdered, mostly Tutsis but also some politically moderate Hutus. Genocide began shortly after the assassination of longstanding Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana on 6 April. That event was the latest in a radicalising sequence which included the crisis of legitimacy of Habyarimana’s single-party Hutu regime amid economic downturn in the later 1980s; the introduction of political pluralisation; and a war in 1990–93 between the Rwandan army and the Uganda-based majority-Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Pluralisation, the war, and the resulting Arusha Peace Agreement – according to which political power was to be shared between Rwandan political parties and the RPF – all threatened the place and privileges of Hutu elites who used the war and the assassination to propagandise about a “Tutsi” threat to all Hutus. These elites used their influence in Rwanda’s security services and violent militias established during the war to orchestrate the murder of political opponents and genocide against the Tutsi minority

States turn a blind eye

The 1990s saw horrific mass crimes committed in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and yet, despite some Nato intervention in the latter, it was clear that some countries were not interested in “the lessons of history” or even the evidence before their eyes. In 2000, the Canadian government established an International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty to examine when the international community should intervene in the affairs of states where civilian populations were under attack. The Commission found that it was not a want of information about violations of international humanitarian law that impeded action, but problems in translating data into policy and the determination to act.

General Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian who commanded the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda, emphasised the overriding significance of determination when cabling his superiors in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations in January 1994 about the likelihood of a slaughter of Tutsis. Requesting guidance, he signed off with peux ce que veux – “where there’s a will, there’s a way”. As he watched the genocide of the Tutsi unfold from April, his soldiers neutered by the terms of their peacekeeping mandate, Dallaire’s verdict would come to mirror that of James Gow (professor of international peace and security at King’s College London) on the international community’s failures during much of the murderous dissolution of the former Yugoslavia: a “Triumph of the lack of will”.

Canadian General Roméo Dallaire

Since Dallaire had first-hand information about the build-up of arms under extremist Hutu elements in the Rwandan governing structure and the likely deployment of the weapons in mass murder, it might be thought that whether or not anything could be learned from history was an irrelevance. By mid-April what need was there for, say, historical education about the Holocaust as ethical stimulus for international action against genocide when a predicted campaign of mass violence was underway?

What the historical record does highlight is the failure of the international community to halt mass atrocity in all but a few cases. Despite increasing concern with genocide and related matters from the late 20th century, less has changed than the authors of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention and UN Declaration of Human Rights, and the organisers of any number of Holocaust and genocide memorial initiatives, would have wished.

Shortly after the Rwandan genocide, neighbouring Zaire (from May 1997 the Democratic Republic of Congo) witnessed possibly the most deadly conflict anywhere since the Second World War. Millions of deaths occurred from 1996–2002. The situation in this vast state was always liable to be ignored by advocates of intervention elsewhere.

Though atrocities aplenty were committed, there was no outright instance of genocide to rally around. Most parties to the conflict were criminally culpable, including Uganda and the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan regime that had come to power by defeating the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, thus removing ‘easy’ distinctions of perpetrator and victim. The waters were muddied further by the presence of multinationals tapping Congo’s mineral resources.

In July 2005, Kofi Annan, the then Secretary-General of the UN, observed of the situation in Darfur that “we have learned nothing from Rwanda”. The conflict in Darfur in western Sudan, whose most intensively violent phase was from 2003 to March 2004, had its origins in the historical neglect of the region and clashes over land between different groups. Sudan’s government, which identified as Arab, gave carte blanche to armed Arab militias (janjawiid) to attack civilian communities in Darfur associated with insurgent forces. These were primarily the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa peoples. A brutal “counter-insurgency” campaign that deployed scorched-earth tactics resulted in at least 200,000 deaths along with the displacement of more than two million people.

Armenian genocide

At least one million Armenian Christians died in 1915–16 as a direct result of the policies of the ruling faction in the Ottoman empire, the Committee of Union and Progress. Many were murdered outright, especially by paramilitary forces, Ottoman gendarmes and some elements of the Ottoman army. Multitudes also perished amid the terrible conditions of privation, exposure, exhaustion, and abuse that prevailed in mass deportations marches from the Armenians’ ancestral homelands in and around Anatolia (roughly today’s Turkey) to the deserts in today’s Syria and Iraq. The immediate radicalising context for this slaughter was the empire’s existential struggle in the world war. The longer-term context was the territorial decline of the empire; as it lost extensive lands, especially European ones with large Christian populations, its political elites developed a pronounced hostility towards and suspicion of Christian populations in the remaining areas. During wartime, with the rump empire aligned against external powers who had periodically posed as protectors of the Ottoman Armenians, and with a government suffused with ethno-religious chauvinism, genocide was the way of solving the ‘Armenian question’ for good.

Bosnia

Around 100,000 people were killed and far more forcibly expelled – ‘ethnically cleansed’ – during the 1992–25 conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The major perpetrators were Bosnian Serb military and paramilitary forces operating with the assistance of the Yugoslav People’s Army, which was controlled by the leaders of the Republic of Serbia, the preponderant political force within the rump state of Yugoslavia. The war began after Bosnia followed the erstwhile Yugoslav Republics of Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia and declared independence. One of the major drivers of Bosnia’s drift towards independence had been fear of dominance within rump Yugoslavia by Serbia, which was under the stridently nationalist leadership of Slobodan Milošević. Now Serbia-backed Bosnian Serb forces followed a pattern established in Croatia in 1991. They murdered, terrorised and expelled non-Serbs in order to carve out expansive, homogenously Serbian territories that would remain politically close to the Serbian Republic. Where Croats had been the major victims of anti-civilian violence by Serb forces in Croatia, Muslims were the major victims in the dismemberment of Bosnia – around 65,000 in number, both soldiers and civilians. At points, albeit on a smaller scale, Bosnian Croat forces also targeted Muslims in abortive pursuit of a Croat political entity in Bosnia. In 1994–45 Croatian forces then linked arms with the Bosnian army to provide the increasingly successful ground-force operation against Serb forces that was the vital complement to the expanded Nato bombing operations in summer-autumn 1995. At the same time, victorious Croatian forces within independent Croatia ‘cleansed’ Serb civilians from formerly Serb-held territory there.

When does humanitarian intervention occur?

In response to the humanitarian failures in the 1990s and early 2000s, in 2005 the UN adopted the principle of the “international community’s… Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) civilian populations “from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity” in states that are incapable of or unwilling to exercise that responsibility themselves. The UN Security Council is the only body that may authorise interventions in accordance with R2P.

Clearly, intervention still may not occur despite the instance of the enumerated atrocities. Even given Security Council authorisation, which is by no means guaranteed, concern about losses can determine whether an individual state will contribute to UN military intervention forces, as opposed to peacekeeping forces with their different and generally less perilous mandate. Changing international norms may help stimulate action. So too the ‘CNN effect’ of visual exposure to human suffering can stimulate action, as was the case in 1995 with coverage of atrocities in Bosnia. But the idea of sacrificing citizens of one state to save those of another can deter politicians.

America’s provision of troops in Somalia in 1992–94 seemed to substantiate post-Cold War claims of a new humanitarian order. The intervention occurred against the backdrop of the collapse of the Somali state into warlordism and famine. Its remit was securing humanitarian relief by any means necessary. After initial optimism, Washington’s looming realisation of the complexity of circumstances on the ground and the combat deaths of 18 US troops in the battle of Mogadishu – losses magnified by the widespread broadcast of the soldiers’ bodies being dragged through the streets – were enough to force American withdrawal.

‘Mogadishu syndrome’ haunted the US through the Rwandan genocide and the crises in the former Yugoslavia. It helps explains why mainly air power, with its minimised risk to Nato personnel, was deployed against Serb forces in Bosnia in 1992–95 and against Serbia in the Kosovo crisis in 1999. The refusal to commit ground troops for armed engagement with Serb forces was one of the factors facilitating mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in the years up to the summer of 1995.

Moreover, though the widespread use of aerial bombardment in 1999 was important in forcing Milošević’s Serbia into accepting a settlement of the Kosovo issue, it had also been heralded by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as a way of stopping Serbian violence against Albanian Muslims in Kosovo. In fact, in the absence of ground forces, aerial attacks initially prompted an expansion of Serb atrocities, including ethnic cleansing.

In reality, intervention during mass atrocity, and especially the most comprehensive, boots-on-the-ground armed intervention, tends mainly to occur when intervention is consistent with the narrower economic or political interests of those intervening. There is an obvious and instructive discrepancy between the west’s determined and costly deployment of troops and material in the ‘war on terror’ and its response to mass death in Africa and beyond.

Over Rwanda, Dallaire was correct about the absence of will, but will tends to track self-interest in international affairs (and not just them). For the US or the UK there were just not enough interests at stake in a small African country. Conversely, when India invaded East Pakistan in 1971, its action against the murderous Pakistani military dovetailed with Delhi’s desire to weaken its neighbour and competitor Pakistan.

The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in late 1978 saved many Cambodian lives, but it was driven by the external hostility of the Khmer Rouge regime and the goal of establishing a pro-Vietnamese government in Phnom Penh. This is to say that in both the India-Pakistan and Vietnam-Cambodia cases some of the consequences of armed intervention were humanitarian even though the motives were not principally humanitarian.

It may be that, in general, this sort of confluence of particular motive interests and humanitarian consequences is the most that can be expected in terms of intervention during mass atrocity. Such a scenario means inevitably selective, inconsistent intervention leading to charges of double-standards. Double-standards are not to be ignored, but alleging or identifying them does not constitute a compelling argument against action in any given instance where that action is merited on the facts of the case and realistically possible.

Russia-Ukraine war: events in context

Read more about the history behind the war in Ukraine here

The wrong sort of intervention

If one limits one’s attention to the lack of will, one is apt to think only of acts of omission, ie what was not done that might have been done in this or that case. Thinking of acts of commission brings a range of different scenarios into view; scenarios involving pro-active behaviour that is anything but humanitarian.

One example of such behaviour is the vast industry of arms provision to regimes guilty of gross human rights abuses. Other examples include technical or intelligence assistance to such regimes or international diplomatic cover for them. In different permutations the US – the power to which so many look for leadership in international humanitarian affairs – was culpable of all these things during, say, its support of the Suharto regime that murdered hundreds of thousands of Indonesian leftists in 1965–66, or its support of brutal right-wing dictatorships in Latin America during the Cold War. While the Clinton administration was propounding intervention in Kosovo, it was downplaying mass human rights abuses in Angola owing to commercial interests.

Some states are so powerful as to have effective impunity to commit mass atrocities and to lend that impunity to others. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council – Russia, the USA, France, the UK, and China – have special power to act in such a way as to thwart collective action in the form of ‘substantive’ UN resolutions. Their vetoes can be used to protect their allies and themselves against actions resulting from largescale human rights abuse and infringements of international law. China’s and Russia’s diplomatic protection of North Korea is but one example. I invite readers to research the long list of other instances.

As to interventions in the affairs of other states and peoples, imperial interventions have historically been far more frequent than humanitarian ones. Imperial impulses and cynical great power politics are clearly still with us – they never left. Furthermore, interventions of a solely self-interested character have often been justified on humanitarian grounds. This was the case during the late 19th century ‘Scramble for Africa’, but it was also present when the Blair government presented its case for invading Iraq. The 2003 invasion harmed the cause of intervention that could more genuinely be called humanitarian.

Political games

Humanitarian concern has been alternately used and discarded for domestic and foreign policy agendas, as illustrated in the longer view by the history of the southeastern Balkans and the Ottoman empire. In the 1820s, Britain only supported Greek rebels in their campaign for independence from the “Ottoman yoke” when a range of economic and strategic concerns shifted the overall calculation. Previously the hope, again grounded in strategic priority, had been for a restoration of Ottoman control whatever the humanitarian concerns. After Greek independence, successive British governments returned to their policy of supporting Ottoman territorial integrity.

Half a century later, during the Bulgarian uprising against Ottoman rule in the ‘eastern crisis’ of 1875–78, Ottoman irregulars carried out mass slaughter of Bulgarians, razing whole villages and towns. As an opposition figurehead at the time, British politician William Ewart Gladstone’s forceful denunciation of these atrocities was designed as much to attack the Tory government and strengthen his position and that of his party domestically as to inspire action against the Ottomans responsible for the massacres. The United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli cynically downplayed news of the atrocities as “coffeehouse babble”, and both statesmen ignored the mass atrocities perpetrated against Balkan Muslims.

At the close of the crisis, Britain contrived to limit Ottoman losses, fearing Russian expansion in eastern Turkey in an area that might threaten Britain’s communications with India. This involved paying lip service to non-enforceable reforms for vulnerable Armenian Christians while ensuring Istanbul’s sovereignty over the same people.

During the First World War, London was wary of highlighting the mass murder of those selfsame Armenians in case raising the issue antagonised Muslims in the British empire – or at least this was the case until it was calculated that there was profit in publicising the killing to encourage American entry into war.

In more recent times, British governments have continued to take the line of least resistance in international affairs and refuse to challenge Turkey’s denial that Turkey’s predecessor state committed genocide. The same was true with the USA, whose strategic interests long aligned with Turkey’s, until both Houses of Congress passed a resolution on recognition of the genocide in 2019 and President Biden used the ‘G-word’ in 2021 on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, 24 April.

US president Joe Biden

Public condemnation

Public opinion was vociferous in contesting the US and UK-led justification for “acceptable intervention” in Iraq, as were other states on the UN Security Council. Many protestors took to the streets in demonstrations across Europe based on their suspicion about the real intentions behind the invasion.

The historical record shows growing international concern regarding abuses of human rights, and domestic public opinion has helped to shape this agenda. The evidence of Kosovo in 1999 and Ukraine in 2022 shows that when ordinary people are alerted to the cause of refugee crises, they will respond with a sympathy transcending calculations of national interest.

The public can be kept in the dark, or misinformed, or their attention directed only to issues that power – including media – elites deem useful for their purposes, just as law can be subverted or circumvented by those with the will and influence to do so. At the same time, highlighting injustice and suffering in one case can bring both justified attention to that case and a heightened sensitivity to roughly similar cases elsewhere.

While it would be naïve to expect moral consistency in the attitudes of the UK or any other state to atrocities permitted in different places across the globe, the pressure for consistency, and the associated charge of hypocrisy, can still be a powerful tool. In some situations this can be pressure to do less – eg stop selling arms to criminal regimes – in the name of ‘do no harm’, while in other cases it can be pressure to do more.

Making a difference: people power

While states have put narrow interest first, and inter-state organisations have been hamstrung by internal disagreement, some individuals and groups have provided leadership. During the Second World War, independent MP Eleanor Rathbone fought to persuade the British government to put resources into rescuing Europe’s Jews at a time when the focus was on military victory. Rathbone’s aid to refugees culminated in the establishment of the National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror in 1943.

Journalists, too, have turned the spotlight on ‘unfashionable’ atrocities. John Pilger, for instance, was influential in raising awareness of Indonesian crimes in East Timor and the collusion of the US and China with the Khmer Rouge for years after its genocides in Cambodia.

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, International Crisis Group, and, in Britain, the AEGIS Trust, have campaigned for action against gross human rights violators. A variety of aid agencies and charities, including Oxfam, CARE, and Médecins sans Frontières, have offered help to the victims.

Donald Bloxham is Richard Pares Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh. Among his publications are Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford University Press, 2001); The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford University Press, 2005); and The Final Solution: A Genocide (OUP, 2009). He has also written on the history and ethics of the discipline of history, with publications including Why History? A History (OUP, 2020) and History and Morality (OUP, 2020). He is currently completing a book on extreme political violence worldwide since 1945.

This article was originally written for BBC History Magazine in 2008 and has been updated following the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022

]]> Poland and Ukraine’s shared history: how dreams of nationhood endure https://www.historyextra.com/membership/poland-history-polish-lithuanian-commonwealth/ Fri, 08 Apr 2022 10:05:27 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/poland-history-polish-lithuanian-commonwealth/ In 1795, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, once a major power governing territory that extended from modern Lithuania to Ukraine, disappeared from the map. Journalist and author Misha Glenny tells Jonathan Wright how this history helps us understand events today In 1795, following decades of decline, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth finally ceased to exist. Prussia, Russia and Austria had divided the vast territory of one of Europe’s great powers, which had once extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It’s a history that resonates into the present day when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

Misha Glenny, formerly the BBC’s central Europe correspondent and author of, among other books, McMafia (2008), which inspired the BBC drama of the same name, has much experience of reporting on the region.

In BBC Radio 4's The Invention Of Poland, recorded shortly before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Misha Glenny and his producer, Miles Warde, trace Poland’s history, a story that also takes in Ukraine because of the countries’ shared histories.

Here, in conversation with Jonathan Wright, Misha offers his thoughts on how the past feeds present relations between Poland and Ukraine.

Can you introduce us to Poland’s history?

It’s fascinating that Poland is today a large European country and yet it disappeared for a while.

There’s a pivotal moment when Poland ceases to exist in 1795. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been whittled down for 22 years prior to that, in particular by Russia and Prussia, and then Austria decided to join in as well. Austria took southern Poland, including Kraków, and what is now Lviv in modern Ukraine, which we know from recent news reports. Poland then disappeared until the end of the First World War.

But until the middle of the 18th century, Poland, or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as it was known, was one of the biggest territories in Europe. And it was politically anomalous in that it was liberal. There was limited democracy and the nobility the szlachta – were able to vote for their monarch.

Russia-Ukraine crisis

Why is Ukraine being invaded, and what might Russia want from its neighbouring country? Professor Serhy Yekelchyk, an expert in Ukrainian history and Russian-Ukrainian relations, explains nine milestone moments in the history of Ukraine and Russia | Read more

Russian civil war, 1919

This was a powerful and militarily successful territory, which went from the Baltic Sea right down to the Black Sea, including almost all of present-day Ukraine. One thing that means is, when we hear from Vladimir Putin that essentially Russians and Ukrainians are the same people, that’s at the very least arguable because Ukrainians have lived under a variety of tutelages, whether Turkish or Russian or Polish. Ukraine means ‘on the edge’, and it’s on the edge of several empires, not just one.

How did Polish aspirations to nationhood survive post-1795?

Although there were several rebellions in territories where Polish was spoken, there was no state associated with Polish nationalism if you discount the Napoleonic satellite, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw.

What Poland did have was a significant émigré community, in places as diverse as Istanbul (or Constantinople, as it was then), Chicago, Paris and London. A lot of them were wealthy and well educated, and they kept the flame of Polish identity alive.

Poland and Ukraine: from the First World War to the present day

1917 | Establishment of the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic 1918 | Establishment of the Second Polish Republic 1918–1919 | The Polish-Ukrainian War results in the Second Polish Republic controlling territory in western Ukraine 1919 | Establishment of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, from 1922 one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union 1939 | Nazi Germany and the USSR invade Poland and divide the country, including territory that’s now part of Ukraine 1941 | Germany invades the USSR. Total losses suffered by the Ukrainian population are estimated at 6six million, including 1.4 million troops, at least 40% of all Soviet losses. 1947 | Establishment of the Polish People’s Republic, part of the Eastern Bloc 1989 | Establishment of the Third Polish Republic 1991 | Ukraine declares its independence from the Soviet Union 2014 | The Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine ousts the government of Viktor Yanukovych, who had pursued closer ties with Russia 2022 | Following earlier incursions, including the annexation of the Crimea, Russia invades Ukraine

Is there a sense that all this means Poland thinks of itself as a big country, yet the rest of the world doesn’t to the same degree?

When I first visited Warsaw in 1973, one thing that struck me was that there was a self-confidence about Polish national identity. If you were to talk to Czechs in the 1970s or 1980s about eastern Europe, they would look at what was going on in East Germany, Poland or Hungary and how it was relevant to the wider picture, and how it impacted on Czechs. But if you talked to Poles, they were only interested in Poland.

This was partly because it’s a large country and partly because, from the Second World War onwards, they had this intense tradition, which had echoes of earlier traditions, of resistance to the Soviets. They had understood for a long time that they were in the middle of what the historian Timothy Snyder calls the ‘bloodlands’, the flat territory of eastern Europe that Russia and Germany have contested at many points.

Poles resisted the Soviet-backed communist regime in 1956, in 1970–71 and then, most spectacularly, in 1980 with the rise of [Polish trade union] Solidarity, which mainly protested against Poland’s own communist government.

It was the Poles who fired the starting gun for the revolutions of 1989.

Russia-Ukraine war: events in context

What are the contrasts and similarities between Ukrainian history and Polish history?

There’s a close linguistic connection between the countries, so that mutual intelligibility is very rapid. Since Poland joined the European Union and Poles have left to work in western Europe, the country’s labour market has been filled up largely by Ukrainians, particularly in south-eastern Poland where you will see things written in Ukrainian Cyrillic script.

There is a clear division between the west of Ukraine and the east and centre of Ukraine. For part of the early 20th century, what is now Lviv and the west was still part of either the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Poland. And the centre and the east was part of the Soviet Union, although Ukraine gained its own identity as the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic and had elements of statehood.

One of the most important events in the 1930s was the Holodomor, which is a state-engineered famine that killed millions in one of the world’s greatest bread baskets when food production was requisitioned by Josef Stalin in order to pay for industrial goods imported from the US and Europe. A sense of being sacrificed on the altar of imperial aspirations, be it German, Polish or Russian, is something that’s all too familiar for Ukrainians.

Have we sometimes been too accepting of a particular Russian view of eastern European history in, for example, the idea of a Russian sphere of influence? This arguably has a big impact on Ukraine’s history.

Yes, it does. And not just Ukraine. Of course, there are some people who argue that spheres of influence really emerge during the 19th century. The US, with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, is one of the first to carve out a sphere of influence. This idea becomes a sort of codification of the imperial interests of European powers as well, both outside of Europe, but also within territories inside Europe, such as Poland.

What I think is quite interesting is that western Europe and the United States were ultimately as content with the Yalta agreement of 1945, which divided Europe, as Russia was. What it does is to eliminate those ‘bloodlands’ by putting Soviet tanks in them and stopping the Germans from expanding eastward. And what that enabled the United States to do was to pour capital into western Europe under the Marshall Plan, and to create mature, sophisticated and lucrative markets.

That is why, whenever there was a revolutionary movement in eastern Europe, whether it was Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviets would always do the courtesy of calling the White House before they intervened, and to say, “Do you continue to stick by the Yalta agreement,” to which American presidents successively said, “Yes, we do.”

Commentators have been talking a lot about the idea of a new world order being partly defined by the war in Ukraine. What are your thoughts on this?

We’ve been seeing the meandering development of a new world order since 1989, which has been replete with many illusions, many false dawns and many misunderstandings. In truth, it’s too early to begin to talk of with any confidence about what the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is going to be. I mean, you can do it, but it’s speculative and that’s all.

BBC Radio 4's The Invention Of Poland

Between 1795 and 1918 there was no Poland, but the idea of Poland remained extremely strong. Travelling by bus and train around the south east, Misha Glenny and producer Miles Warde go in search of what kept Poland alive | Catch up on the series

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Misha Glenny is a journalist, broadcaster and author. His books include McMafia, an account of the global criminal underworld that inspired a BBC drama of the same name, as well as several titles about Central and Eastern Europe. He is former Central Europe correspondent for the BBC, and he is due to take up the post of Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM, in Vienna

]]> Peter Caddick-Adams on generals killed on the battlefield https://www.historyextra.com/membership/russian-generals-killed-in-battle-compared-ukraine/ Wed, 06 Apr 2022 11:54:26 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/russian-generals-killed-in-battle-compared-ukraine/ “Russian general casualties in Ukraine today are significantly higher – whether seen as a proportion of all Russian generals or as a percentage of the 200,000-strong army they command – than the Allied commitment in 1939–45,” writes historian Peter Caddick-Adams The world has been agog at the number of Russian generals killed in Ukraine over the last few weeks. This appears to be the tip of the iceberg, for “at least 15 senior Russian commanders have been killed in the field,” according to Markiyan Lubkivsky, a spokesperson for the Ukraine Ministry of Defence. The total was later amended to 16, including five named colonels and four lieutenant colonels.

By 27 March 2022, Ukrainian officials said the total number of Russian generals lost in battle was confirmed at seven. Russia has not confirmed this, and the tally has not been independently verified. But the seven Russian generals believed to have been killed include three army commanders: Andrey Kolesnikov, of the 29th Combined Arms Army, killed on 11 March; Andrey Mordvichev, leading the 8th Army, who died in a Ukrainian raid on his command post at Kherson airfield; and Yakov Rezantsev, general of Russia’s 49th Combined Arms Army, killed in another airfield strike, apparently on 25 March.

2H699MF STAVROPOL, RUSSIA - NOVEMBER 14, 2021. Lt Gen Yakov Rezantsev, Commander of Russia's Southern Military District 49th Combined Arms Army (R front), takes an annual international Russian geography test, Geographical Dictation, at the Stavropol Presidential Cadet School. Geographical Dictation has been held annually since 2015 by the Russian Geographical Society to promote the knowlegde of geography and interest in the geography of Russia. Dmitry Akhmadullin/TASS

In addition, four other generals are reported killed, according to western sources. On 26 February, Magomed Tushaev, a Chechen major general in Russia’s National Guard (Rosgvardia), died when a column of 56 tanks was attacked near Hostomel (although it should be noted that some Chechen sources dispute his death). Around 1 March, Andrey Sukhovetsky, deputy commander of Russia’s 41st Combined Arms Army, was shot by a sniper. The first week in March saw the death of Vitaly Gerasimov, chief of staff of the 41st Combined Arms Army, outside Kharkiv; while on 15 March, Oleg Mityaev, of the 150th Motor Rifle Division, died as his men stormed the Ukrainian coastal city of Mariupol. There is evidence that some of these generals were targeted by Ukrainian Special Forces, using sophisticated eavesdropping devices.

We do not know how many Russian generals are leading troops in Ukraine, but best estimates are that up to 10 Russian armies, each led by a general, supported by a deputy commander and chief of staff, both of whom are also generals, are involved, giving a total of perhaps 30 officers of general rank. At least 12 divisions, led by major generals, have been identified. This suggests a minimum of 42 generals, possibly closer to 50, are directing combat formations in Ukraine. Below them, numerous brigades and now around 100 Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs), commanded by colonels and lieutenant colonels respectively, have been involved. Based on these figures, up to 17 per cent of 42 Russian generals may have been killed.

Are these significant losses in themselves, or are senior officer casualties routine in intense combat of the kind we see in Ukraine?

Generals killed in WW2

The western experience of losing generals during the Second World War was low, for the size of armies involved. America lost four lieutenant generals and nine major-generals during the war, but nine of these were due to accidents, mostly aeroplane crashes. The British and Commonwealth forces lost a similar number – 16 lieutenant and major generals, of whom eight were killed in accidents, again mostly aircraft crashes. In addition, 20 American brigadier-generals and 24 British and Commonwealth brigadiers also died on active service, a striking proportion in accidents.

These casualties were sustained while commanding far larger numbers of troops, and spread out over several years of war. Fatal aircraft crashes, which also claimed the lives of Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, who oversaw D-Day; Battle of Britain commander Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory; and the brother of George VI, Air Commodore HRH Prince George, Duke of Kent, reflect the fact that aircraft were far more primitive and senior figures had to fly frequently over huge distances to command the vast forces at their disposal.

British Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay

In summary, based on what we know, Russian general casualties in Ukraine today are significantly higher – whether seen as a proportion of all Russian generals or as a percentage of the 200,000-strong army they command – than the Allied commitment in 1939–45.

In 1998, author Aleksander Maslov listed 235 Soviet generals killed in combat in his Fallen Soviet Generals, with more than 200 more dying in other ways. They commanded a force that rose from 4.8 million in 1941 to mobilising 29.5 million men and women into the armed services during the course of the war.

An equally staggering total of 136 German generals were killed in action or died of wounds during the Second World War. A further 30 died in accidents; 64 took their own lives; and 20 were executed by the Nazis. Both these totals more closely reflect the current Russian model of anxiety to please senior commanders by moving as close to the front as possible – and, in the fatal cases, too close.

It was also a German tradition of senior commanders being generally closer to the front, perhaps reflecting poorer communications, but with battlefield knowledge of when to commit reserves. Overall, a striking number of German officers were awarded medals for bravery, rather than command. However, given the size of the German armed forces, which included 315 infantry divisions, each commanded by a general, where a total of 13.6 million volunteers and conscripts passed through its ranks, today’s Russian losses of its leaders are far, far higher by any metric.

How many generals were killed in WW1?

The conflict where we know most about general officer casualties is the First World War of 1914–18. According to the pioneering work in 1995 of Frank Davies and Graham Maddocks in Bloody Red Tabs, some 232 British and Commonwealth generals, including brigadier generals, became casualties, of whom 78 were killed or died as a result of active service. However, as the duo helpfully identified a total of 1,257 senior commanders who served in the same period [a research project at the University of Birmingham supported their conclusions], this equates to a casualty rate of 18.5 per cent over 51 months of fighting. This is remarkably close to my estimate of Russian general casualties in Ukraine today.

This staggering statistic means that British generals in the First World War were almost as likely to be killed or wounded as private soldiers. As we do not know how many Russian commanders are involved in Ukraine today, it is impossible to know the same figure, but with a force of 200,000, it cannot be far different.

None will compare with the misfortune of US General John Sedgewick in the American Civil War, at the battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse in May 1864. Admonishing a Union soldier for hugging the ground under fire, the general touched him gently with his foot, and said, “Why, my man, I am ashamed of you, dodging that way… They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” Whereupon Sedgewick was immediately felled by a fatal shot.

Peter Caddick-Adams is a writer and broadcaster who specialises in military history, defence and security issues. He lectures at universities, military academies and staff colleges around the world and spent 35 years as an officer in the UK Regular and Reserve Forces. His next book, 1945: Victory in the West, is due to be published by Penguin in May 2022

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