Recognized historian of the Second World War, the British Antony Beevor offers, with his new book, Russia. Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921 (Calmann-Lévy, 568 pages, 25.90 euros), a dive into the October Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War, whose resonances with Russian aggression in Ukraine are obvious.
Do the atrocities committed by Russian forces in Ukraine show the persistence of a history of violence and terror that has its roots in the 1917 revolution?
The 1917 revolution and even more the civil war, which lasted until 1921, causing between 6 and 10 million deaths, were indeed marked by extreme violence on both sides. If the worst examples of a perverted humanity were found among the [Russes] whites, the ruthless inhumanity displayed by the Bolsheviks remained unparalleled. It was Lenin who invented the gulag, the Cheka, the KGB, with their cohort of tortures, assassinations, massacres. Opposing the methods of Lenin to those of Stalin is a fable. This tradition of total contempt for human life continues: we see it today with the aggression against Ukraine, as during the two wars in Chechnya, the invasion of Georgia or the Russian intervention in Syria. One of the explanations is to be found in the daily violence that is practiced within the Russian armed forces themselves, and the way in which today, as in the tsarist or Soviet era, the officers treat their men, beaten, humiliated. The latter take revenge on young army recruits, but especially on civilians, especially women, when they are in operation.
This culture of violence is therefore even older…
No country can escape the ghosts of its past, Russia least of all. It is marked by the persistence of recurring fears for centuries, that of encirclement and the threat to its borders. Also still weighs the memory of the Mongol invasions with their procession of massacres and mass rapes, since considered, in the imagination of a good part of Russian society, as part of the natural practices of war. Oppression and bloodshed permeate Russian history. Atrocities were certainly committed in Europe during the wars of religion; but since the Age of Enlightenment and the emphasis placed on the concept of humanity in the 19e century, the West got rid of these practices. Not Russia.
Were revolution and civil war the matrix of the brutalization of European history in the last century?
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