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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

TRIGGERnometry · The Russian Mindset and Where it Comes From - Historian Sir Antony Beevor · 6 Jun 2026 podcast

Their names were only recorded if they were suspected of treason or desertion and then investigated by SMERSH or the, earlier before that, the NKVD special detachments.

This meant that actually there was a burning resentment.

And this, in fact, is one of the major explanations for the mass rapes of 1945 in Poland, in Hungary and above all in Germany.

And it's also one of the explanations for the cruelty to Ukrainian prisoners of war and Ukrainian civilians in the war that we're seeing at the moment.

But also then don't forget the treatment to their own soldiers when, and especially the foreigners who've been guffed and tricked or press ganged into the Russian army fighting in Ukraine, where we've seen Africans who've had landmines strapped to their chest and are being forced forward as suicide bombers.

I mean, this is a form of inhumanity, which obviously in the West we find incomprehensible.

But it's still something which Russia has not been able to get an attitude, which they have not been able to get rid of.

I think the communist mindset raised the idea of ruthlessness as almost a romantic, admirable heroism.

The idea of and the , the idea that you have to crush your enemy totally.

I mean, the poems about sort of crushing bones and all the rest of it written by members of the Cheka in their own sort of magazines are simply unbelievable.

You know, even the Spanish Inquisition, I don't think their torturers sort of wrote poems in that particular way.

It is a very special mentality, but it was something which was, shall we say, there in the background, and then which the mentality of romantic communism, of achieving the future through total ruthlessness.

And one has to remember, at the Battle of Stalingrad, Russian snipers were ordered to shoot down starving Russian orphans who'd been bribed by German infantrymen with a crust of bread to fill their water bottle in the Volga.

You know, it didn't matter who you were, what your origin was, whether you were innocent or not.

That made no difference whatsoever when it came to what we regarded as the interests of the state.

I don't think it is.

I mean, in terms of morale, the way that the Ukrainians offered their telephones to prisoners so that they could ring their parents, their mother at home or whatever,

was a very effective propaganda device.

Many of them felt tricked.

I mean, not just foreigners who had been tricked to join up being told, oh, we'll train you up as bodyguards or whatever it might be with some of the promises.

Showing 81–100 of 363 · page 5 of 19