Sir Antony Beevor

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

But many of the ordinary conscripts

who were not supposed necessarily to go to a front line, found themselves every single promise was broken.

And although they'd been bribed quite often with an upfront exam, they then found they had no further control over their fate.

and I think it was this feeling that they had completely lost any form of control over their end fate, has a devastating effect on morality and on morale, rather.

I mean, we're seeing what are called now the disposables, and these are either the Africans or others who are being used, but also even some of the amputees being sent back into the front.

Well, I mean, the Russian attitude towards amputees in the Second World War, they were known as some of ours after they'd lost their limbs.

And Stalin, having talked about the heroism of the Red Army and all the rest of it in 1945, then bans any of them from the cities.

They're sent to the north just to get them out of the way because he doesn't want to have cities cluttered up with limbless veterans.

I mean, treatment like that does not exactly encourage, if you like, loyalty.

Worse than that is when you also recruit from the prisons some of the most brutal members of society and gang members of the worst order, they then become even more dehumanized by their experience at war.

Yet they go back into civilian society.

I mean, the reports of some of the horrors which have been committed by soldiers who've returned, who've been even more traumatized by what they've been through, are pretty horrific.

So should we say the social consequences of the war in Russia are going to be pretty devastating.

I think there's a question of mindset, and a mindset which sort of refuses to change more than anything.

And because it was the way that it's always been done, and you're a tough man and all the rest of it, this is what's going to make

the recruits tougher by treating them in that particular way.

It's, shall we say, unenlightened, to put it mildly.

And I would have thought in the long term, it's going to be much less professional in the effect that it has in your training.

Well, I'm certainly not an expert on that particular period, but indeed it did traumatise the country in many ways.

What happened?

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