THE RUSSIAN FRONT

The Russian Government appears uneasy with criminalizing historical opinions, though the justification given below seems quite narrowly technical and not what would be a more principled position–that freedom of thought and freedom of speech are incompatible with state authorities determining which historical views are acceptable. From Ekho Moskvy, 14 January 2010, via BBC monitoring and Johnson’s Russia List:

The Russian government has refused to endorse a draft law criminalizing denial of the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II, Russian Ekho Moskvy radio station reported on 14 January, quoting a report by the business daily Vedomosti.

Vedomosti has obtained a copy of the relevant resolution, signed by Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Sobyanin, which reads in particular that the ministers have failed to understand the part of the bill dealing with distortions of the verdict of the Nuremberg Trials, because “it is unclear to them how a document that has already come into force can be distorted”, the report said.

The draft law was submitted to the State Duma about two years ago by several leading members of the One Russia party, including Emergencies Minister Sergey Shoygu and Boris Gryzlov, the State Duma speaker and chairman of the party’s supreme political council. In May 2009 the relevant parliamentary committee recommended the bill for passage but things have not progressed since then. The report quoted a source in the State Duma as saying that “from the very start (the bill) was a fairly controversial initiative proposed exclusively in connection with Shoygu’s vociferous statements (demanding that denial of the Soviet role in World War II be made a criminal offence)”.

On May 15^th 2009 I had the opportunity to give a lecture to a group of about 100 members of the History faculty and students at Huazhong Normal University in Wuhan, China. The lecture was based on new archival research conducted in support of a recently published two-volume set The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero which I edited along with several colleagues.

After briefly summarizing the operational history of the War, I offered ten reasons why new research findings justify the conclusion that the Russo-Japanese War should be considered World War Zero.

1. Like World War I, the origins of the Russo-Japanese War were rooted in imperialistic competition between world powers

2. As in August 1914, when the Russo-Japanese conflict began, it was fought in a neutral country(s) (China and Korea)

3. In the midst of the conflict and in the area where combat occurred, governmental structures broke down and the emergency was greeted with a response by non-governmental agencies such as the Red Cross

4. The conflict was marked by the use of sophisticated, complicated, and (above all else) lethal industrial weapons such as machine guns, rapid fire infantry assault weapons, rapid fire artillery, mines, and torpedoes. These were accompanied by the logistical infrastructure needed to keep ammunition and other essential supplies flowing to modern fielded armies

5. The natural product of the War’s deadly battlefields — mass casualties — required levels of aid which no medical corps of the period had the ability to help. The sheer numbers of men in need of aid overwhelmed these units.

6. The duration of battles at the beginning of the War lasted two or three days (The Yalu and Nanshan) and were contained to relatively small areas.  By the end of the war the battles of Liaoyang and Mukden lasted weeks and featured battlefields that extended for kilometers.  [NB: In terms of duration and brutality, the six to seven-month siege of Port Arthur foreshadowed what later happened at Verdun in 1916.]

7. The cost of fighting such a technologically demanding war required the formation of international syndicates of bankers simply to derive the credit needed for both the Japanese and Russians to keep purchasing and producing weapons and munitions.

8. Like WWI, the Russo-Japanese War was widely reported on and represented in all forms of visual presentations, from photographs to wood block prints.

9. Like Versailles, the Treaty of Portsmouth occurred only after one belligerent (Japan) ran out of men, materials and credit, and the Russians found themselves in the midst of a Revolution.  Perhaps more to the point, the treaty itself resolved little beyond ending hostilities and, worse, created circumstances that fueled grievances that culminated in future conflict.

10.  When the war concluded and the peace was signed the strengthening of the pan-Asian movement continued to fuel animosities that further destabilized the world.

How well did my Chinese audience accept the logic of the Russo-Japanese War as World War Zero?  While the faculty liked the idea, they accepted it with much circumspection.  More surprising were the questions I received from the students which suggested that they had little knowledge of the conflict in general.  Whatever the case, the students were far more interested in discussing Japan’s role in the Asian world during the first half of the 20^th century.  The students were particularly curious to know my thoughts on to possible re-emergence of Japan as a world power in the 21^st century.

As for the concept of World War Zero, most western military historians continue to view the Russo-Japanese War as a regional conflict rooted in the age of imperialism. Historians in Asia, appear much more respective.  I remain a World War Zero advocate. And I look forward to continuing public discussion of the War’s legacy, especially when that discussion is conducted within a new international frame of reference.

I’ve been reading some history of history in preparation for my next round of handling my department’s introductory graduate course in historiography.  I very much enjoyed John Burrow’s A History of Histories
by the way, and recommend it for anyone looking for a look at the development of the discipline that’s actually pleasant to read.

But in looking at another navel-gazing history of history, I ran across a nugget relevant to the ongoing question of the neglect of political, military, and diplomatic history, including a recent New York Times article that produced a lot of reactions across the blogosphere, including here.

Harry Barnes, discussing Herodotus in his History of Historical Writing, writes that “his prestige and importance have been enhanced in our generation as a result of the growing popularity of the history of culture and the gradual eclipse of the long-popular episodical military and political type of history which prevailed from Thucydides until . . . our era.” (p. 29)

So when did Barnes write this account of the decline of military and political history?

1937.

Maybe the good old days weren’t so good after all.

Colonel S. N. Kovalyov’s essay on the origins of World War II (mentioned here and with Russian text available through here )is an excellent example of the pitfalls in attempting to draw history into contemporary politics by going after vague and undefined falsifiers.

One pitfall is that trying to score political points makes you screw up your facts, and thereby look dumb. The claim in Kovalyov’s article that stirred up public controversy is that Poland produced the war by failing to accept Hitler’s perfectly reasonable demands in the fall of 1938.

What Kovalyov misses are two salient facts. First, Hitler’s allegedly reasonable demands for Danzig and an extraterritorial connection across the Polish corridor to East Prussia came in the immediate aftermath of some other allegedly reasonable demands for Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. Hitler’s request to the Poles is hardly as innocent and pure as Kovalyov makes it seem, and the Poles were quite correct to see the threat behind the superficially limited demand.

Second, Kovalyov points out that it is only after the Poles’ final refusal of German demands on 26 March 1939 that Hitler denounced the 1934 German-Polish non-aggression pact. What Kovalyov fails to note is that this Polish refusal came ELEVEN DAYS after the German invasion and annexation of rump Czechoslovakia. This provided such a clear and unequivocal demonstration of the true nature of Hitler’s supposedly reasonable and limited demands that even Neville Chamberlain picked up on it. Kovalyov fails to mention this obvious piece of context.

Kovalyov also suggests that the Soviets had no choice but to occupy the Baltics, or else face the prospect of the Nazis doing it instead. That’s a reasonable argument, and people could certainly discuss its merits. But when Kovalyov says that the Baltics joined the Soviet Union “by request of the governments and parliaments of these states absolutely voluntarily,” my response is “pull the other one.”

(For non-native English speakers who might be reading this, that idiom means “that argument is obviously ridiculous, and would only be convincing if I were stupid.”)

The second pitfall of going after falsifiers of history as Kovalyov does is that it is pushing on an open door. His bigger claim is not really about Poland, but instead that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was the only reasonable choice for Stalin in summer 1939. The Western allies had made it abundantly clear, especially at Munich, that they would rather do anything than fight the Germans, and the Poles refused to even consider allowing Soviet troops passage to get the Germans.

Anyone who has even the smallest familiarity with Western literature on the origins of World War II would reply to Kovalyov, “Yes, of course, almost everyone who’s looked at 1938 and 1939 would agree with you that the Western allies gave Stalin no reason to trust them to fight Hitler. You make Hitler look like a good guy to prove THAT?”

The third pitfall of torturing the historical record is that you get caught. Given that Kovalyov’s article has been pulled from the Ministry of Defense’s website, and that his attacks on Poland and the Baltic States and partial rehabilitation of Hitler will win no friends in Europe, he has to be a little worried about a posting to scenic Kamchatka.

I have never met Kovalyov nor read anything else he’s written. That said, I get the sense that he set out to score some points on Poland and the Baltics. To do that, though, he had to make Hitler seem reasonable and statesmanlike, which doesn’t fly with a lot of Russians who might otherwise be quite happy with his stance.

I think we may have a candidate for the Truth Commission’s first target: a Russian military officer who argues that Poland’s responsible for World War II.

I’m headed to the MoD website to see if I can find it for myself. My thanks to the person who brought this to my attention.

UPDATE: here’s the Russian-language text of the Defense Ministry’s statement disavowing the official status of the argument.

UPDATE: the article in question by S. N. Kovalyov seems to have been taken down from its original page (subtly titled “History: Against Lies and Falsification), but I was able to grab a copy of the text and will post it soon.