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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Appearances
And even then, the Tsar was interested in the disastrous Japanese War of 1904 and 1905, of again seizing more territory there.
Now, part of that is an expansionist mentality, like, as you rightly say, with other European colonial powers expanding.
But at the same time, there is this sort of arrière-pensée of fearing that, you know, unless you keep expanding, you're going to contract.
And this has obviously been one of the problems of warfare with, as Paul Kennedy, the rise and fall of the great powers.
If you keep on pushing and expanding too much, you're going to overstretch.
Well, I think there are two things there, but most of it comes from the history.
You're quite right.
There has always been this case whereby the attitude of meat for the cannon, in the Russian phrase, is assumed because of the size of their population.
I mean, the whole notion, the Russian steamroller, etc., the idea that simply out of sheer weight of numbers, they can crush any enemy.
And that has certainly been why the French were so desperate to have the alliance with the Russian Empire for the First World War.
And again, to a certain degree later on, feeling that sort of only the sheer size and scope of it would save the West in the Second World War.
But the real problem is that they have often treated their own people as badly as the enemy.
I mean, I remember being horrified when researching in Moscow in the 90s,
at the scale of suicides amongst the Russian conscripts, simply because of the way they were treated and bullied and all the rest of it.
I mean, they were up to 5,000 a year.
And I remember the British ambassador was absolutely appalled when he went to see General Lebed, who made a joke about it.
He thought it was terribly funny that in Siberia they had to make sure that they were digging enough graves for all the suicides for the next winter, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to bury them.
In the Second World War, we see the way that, and I think this is a crucial element, that the soldiers had so often been treated so badly, and in fact not as individuals, when, for example, at Stalingrad and in fact really through the whole of the advance towards Berlin afterwards, if there were any casualties or any desertions,
An officer was expected to just grab any civilians they could and say, right, you're in the army now or whatever.
They'd never recorded their names.
Showing 61–80 of 363 · page 4 of 19
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