Suchergebnisse

Russia was not ready for a great war. The war led to the rise of nationalism in the multi-ethnic empire. It put an end to autocracy's pragmatic nationalities policy and unleashed an orgy of violence on a grand scale. The war plunged the tsarist empire into chaos and anarchy, uprooted millions of people, and marked the dawn of ethnic cleansing. The refugee became the emissary of the new age. The Great War had begun in 1914. It came to an end only in 1924. Everything that had been painstakingly built over three centuries collapsed within a few years. Russia was the birthplace of the totalitarian temptation, which sought to impose order on anything that refused to be subjugated. To this extent, the Eastern Front was no peripheral theatre of operations in the great European war. Adapted from the source document.

Twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable for a historian to combine the National Socialists' murderous excesses and programme of extermination with Bolshevik atrocities in a single history. He would have been accused of 'relativising' one set of murderous crimes by relating it to the other. The comparison does indeed have a relativising effect in that it puts the events in a new light and so makes them, for the first time, comprehensible. But at that time, when historians still treated all historical questions as moral ones, nobody wanted to anything to do with that comparison because it ran counter to the political will. You could compare anything with anything, except the Holocaust, which had to remain unique. Nobody could write about the excesses of Stalinist violence without acknowledging that the Nazi murder programme was unique. Nonetheless everybody knew, even then, that uniqueness cannot be established without comparisons and contrasts.1Since then, a view that used to be considered shocking has become a self-evident: no examination of state atrocities is now possible without a comparative element. But this change can also serve political ends: the Holocaust has become the sole yardstick for measuring state-organised crimes of violence. It seems that such crimes can only be taken seriously if they are comparable to Nazi atrocities.2

Review Essay of the following: 1) Tod Eines Dissidenten. Warum Alexander Litwinenko sterben musste [Death of a Dissident. Why Alexander Litwinenko had to die] by Alex Goldfarb & Marina Litwinenko (Hamburg: Hoffman & Campe, 2007) 2) Das System Putin [The Putin System] by Margarete Mommsen & Angelika Nussberger (Muchen: CH Beck, 2007) 3) Pulverfass Russlan. Wohin steuert die Grossmacht? [Powder Keg Russia. Where is the Great Power?] by Dirk Sager (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2008) 4) List in Translation. The Yeltsin and Putin Legacies by Lilia Shevtsova (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, 2007) 5) Russland gibt Gas. Die Ruckkehr einer Weltmacht [Russia gives gas. The return of a world power] by Alexander Rahr (Munchen: Hanser, 2008). The war in Chechnya, persecution of oppositionists, unexplained murders, & a ubiquitous secret service: Vladimir Putin's policies can only be described to a limited extent with democratic & constitutional formulas. Where is Russia going, how should the West react? Five new publications are seeking answers. Adapted from the source document.