Do you think Putin, in the years since then, has benefited from this idea of controlling the narrative, not allowing westerners to frame Russian military history? Antony Beevor After discarding a flawed translation by another publisher, Beevor said, Azbooka-Atticus "thought that really a proper translation should be done, and they translated it again from the start." RFE/RL: When I read your book on Stalingrad I was surprised to learn that there were many Russians fighting on the German side... The diffusion of opponents played into the Bolsheviks’ hands, as their differences were so extreme that a unified opposition fighting force was never a viable option. But if the battle lines were often blurred, the hatred felt by the combatants for each other was nightmarishly vivid. At its most bloody points the book requires a strong stomach to continue reading

RFE/RL: Given that Stalingrad’s war industry had been more or less destroyed and Germany already controlled vast swaths of Soviet territory by 1942, what prompted the Germans to invest so many resources into taking the city? Did their desire to conquer Stalingrad actually make military sense? Spiro, Zachary. 2015. Russia Bans Books on Nazi Defeat by British Historians. The Times (6 August). There’s no doubt about it, the best diary writers in the Second World War were women: in Italy, Iris Origo; in Germany, Ursula von Kardor and the anonymous diary of a Berlin woman; and so forth.I’m referring, for example, to Professor Rzhezhevsky, who was the President of the Association of Second World War Historians, an Academician and the Chief Historian in the Academy of Sciences. He had actually been a huge admirer of Stalingrad, and then started sending me material on all the rest of it. But when the Berlin book came out, he immediately turned against me, saying that this was, again, lies and slander. He also expressed doubt as to whether errors or misrepresentations might have been introduced in the Russian version targeted in the Ukrainian import ban, citing the thorough approach of publisher Azbooka-Atticus, a joint venture between French Hachette and Aleksandr Mamut's A&NN Group.

This seems to be one of the unsung attributes of a historian: the ability to deal with the personalities of the various gatekeepers. Antony Beevor

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Stalingrad has become a tremendous sort of myth. In fact, Jean-Jacques Annaud, the director of “Enemy at the Gates,” said to me once, "But Antony, who can tell where myth begins and truth ends?" And all the rest of it...I don’t know whether that’s an excuse for playing around with history and sort of saying that history is totally elastic. I’m afraid it’s one of the problems that basically the needs of Hollywood and the entertainment industry and the needs of history are totally incompatible.

Born in Kensington, [2] Beevor was educated at two independent schools; Abberley Hall School in Worcestershire, followed by Winchester College in Hampshire. He then went to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where he studied under the military historian John Keegan before receiving a commission in the 11th Hussars on 28 July 1967. [3] Beevor served in England and Germany and was promoted to lieutenant on 28 January 1969 before resigning his commission on 5 August 1970. [4] [5] Career [ edit ]RFE/RL: Are you irked by how Stalingrad has been commandeered by popular culture in recent years as in films like "Enemy at the Gates" or the hugely popular computer game "Call of Duty," which claims to go to great lengths to re-create the battle conditions of Stalingrad? Do you think they distort the public perception of the battle? Or perhaps they at least help foster interest in the subject... sides.” NM in Telegraph Spain “Ahora leo con una especie de obstinación sombría Rusia: Revolución y guerra The military historian Antony Beevor is best known for his books Stalingrad and Berlin, which, as their titles suggest, focused on a single location and two clearly defined sets of combatants. The dimensions of his undertaking with Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 are on a far larger and more daunting scale. The violence we’ve witnessed on television of late has a long and depressing history in the region

The British Army, Manpower and Society into the Twenty-First Century, ed by Hew Strachan ISBN 978-0-7146-8069-9 Arnhem opens in a different time and place: Holland, 1944, with the image of shire horses pulling the wagons of the German 719th; and there’s this line about how Germany at that stage was now fighting a poor man’s war. Is there a unique challenge to write about a confident army as opposed to writing about a poor man’s army? Antony Beevor The women snipers came in later. The first women’s sniper school was set up in February 1943, just after the Battle of Stalingrad. And then there were large numbers of women snipers who served on many fronts indeed.Stalingrad's 1998 publication closely followed new access for Western scholars to Soviet archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The book incorporated"primary sources never used before," according to its U.K. publisher, "including reports on desertions and executions from the archives of the Russian Ministry of Defense, captured German documents, interrogation of prisoners, private diaries and letters from soldiers on both sides, medical reports, and interviews with key witnesses and participants." Beevor: No, it wasn’t unique to that battle. In fact, funnily enough, many more women served later in subsequent battles. But as far as reliability went, women were, without any doubt, far, far better. They’d kept their eyes open and their mouths shut at the time. They weren’t like the men, who were now trying to re-establish their position in history. Five Dials This month marks the 70th anniversary of the start of the Battle of Stalingrad, a ferocious and brutal siege that proved to be a major psychological and military tipping point in World War II. I must say, this sounds absolutely astonishing," he told RFE/RL on January 17 in response to Ukraine's refusal to allow the import of 30,000 copies of his book Stalingrad. "There's certainly nothing inherently anti-Ukrainian in the book at all."