Sir Antony Beevor
speaker
363 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 6 Jun
Sir Antony Beevor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
One thinks of the horrors of the wars of religion as bad as anything that had happened in Russia up till that time.
But the difference came really because afterwards there was the Enlightenment in Europe in the 18th century.
There was also in the 19th century very much more a codification of warfare, which attempted to make it not necessarily more civilized, but at least
following certain rules and then the invention of the red cross and geneva conventions and so forth that did not affect russia nearly so much specifically in his expansion towards the east and towards the south into the caucasus and above all the conquests of siberia which was savage so there is this difference very much between the uh the russian attitude and the european attitude which has gone on
But Russia itself is this extraordinary mixture.
And one of the reasons of writing about Rasputin was that he summed up so many of these contradictions himself.
And I found it fascinating the way that, for example, in the 19th century, the great poet saying, Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone.
And I think there's a lot of truth in that.
There is all of these elements, as I say, contrasting themselves.
In the case of Ajaz Putin, the deep spirituality mixed in with lasciviousness, corruption mixed in with incredible generosity.
All of these sort of coming together in the same person very much sort of represented, not so much an archetypal Russian, but if you like, the potential conflicts within what might be talked about as, say, the Russian soul, the Russian mind.
And I think it's intriguing.
There is no DNA, a national DNA, but there is a certain self-image in all countries, I think, that they try to live up to a certain reputation, a certain tradition.
And this is what one can not necessarily generalize about, because certainly with Russia, with so many different nationalities, you cannot say that, you know, a Buryat is the same as somebody from the extreme Far East or from Moscow or anything like that.
And this is part of the fascination of Russia itself.
Well, that's an extremely good question, and it's certainly a very important one.
I don't think there's an easy answer because there are those who very much reacted against it, of course.
And this led to the extraordinary sort of intellectual flowering and artistic development in Russia, which one sees particularly in the 18th century and onwards.
I mean, when one goes to the Tretyakov or some of the great galleries in Moscow, you see a sudden development which comes.
And I think this is very much more when Russia started to escape
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