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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Well, because of the civil war, the massacres that were going on and all the rest of it.
I mean, in many ways you could only really compare the time of troubles really with, say, the European Thirty Years' War in the 17th century.
So from that point of view, the effect of it eventually meant that
Everybody was so exhausted by the end that that was the opportunity when they made the Romanov dynasty start.
And Mikhail Romanov was, to begin with, was being hidden by his mother because they were certain that it would lead to his death.
Every other potential Tsar had been murdered and that this would be his particular fate too.
But in the end, this was the start of the dynasty.
And as soon as he and his descendants sort of acquired enough power, they knew perfectly well that if they were going to let it go, there was always going to be the fear of the time of troubles.
And that actually, you're quite right to bring it out because it's very much there always in the back of the mind of the Russian mind.
rather as, and of course, the Civil War being another one after the revolution, after the February revolution, which even led to the point that sort of when Stalin died, almost everybody was in tears, not because of love of Stalin necessarily, but because they feared that the collapse of centralized power might again lead to another period of time of troubles or civil war or whatever.
I mean, one has to remember the importance of the Russian Civil War.
Historians, particularly German historians, were absolutely right in identifying the First World War as what they described the original catastrophe of the 20th century.
But actually, it was the Russian Civil War which had the greatest influence because the sheer horror of it, the sheer scale, if you include those suffering from disease and starvation, you're talking of up to 10 million casualties.
And this created such an effect, not just across Europe, even across the world, fear of the destruction and the cruelty spreading as a result of the split between red and white, but also fear on the left of white counter-reaction and fear on the right of the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, of the idea that there was going to be a genocide, a class genocide.
And this leads to the Spanish Civil War, this vicious circle of rhetoric and fear, and also evened into large elements and contribution to the whole of the Second World War.
So in many ways, the Russian Civil War basically defined most of the pattern of history of certainly the first half of the 20th century, but also to a certain degree, then the split between communism and fascism, or sorry, between communism and capitalism in the second half.
And we're still seeing the effects of that today to a certain degree.
But I mean, the way that all of this played out during that particular period means that we are still, and this is why I think with the shock of last year,
but sort of the old order has suddenly changed.
And that the multipolar world, or if one's going to call it that, has actually suddenly been shuffled.
Showing 121–140 of 363 · page 7 of 19
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