NKVD massacre site discovered - one of many?

An interesting news story caught my eye yesterday.  A piece on the Telegraph website reported that Ukrainian and Polish archaeologists had discovered a mass grave in the grounds of a former castle at Volodymyr-Volynsky in Western Ukraine.  According to the investigators, the grave contained some 950 corpses, including both civilians and Polish military personnel.  Cartridge cases found at the site were said to have come from the Tokarev TT pistol, the wartime side-arm used by Red Army officers as well as the NKVD.  The victims, it is said, had been executed with a shot to the back of the head.

For students of Polish history, this story will seem like "so far, so familiar".  It will, of course, be very reminiscent of the Soviet Katyn massacres, where some 22,000 Polish army officers, policemen and others were killed in the spring of 1940 - with the only exception being that, on that occasion, NKVD killers used German Walther pistols rather than their own Tokarevs.

In fact, this is not even the first NKVD mass grave discovered in Volodymyr-Volynsky.  Others were discovered in 1997 and again in 2013, containing the corpses of some 700, mainly Polish policemen.

Given the wider political situation in Ukraine at the moment, it is likely that we will hear a lot more of such discoveries.  As I noted in my book "The Devils' Alliance" almost every town in the Kresy (Eastern Poland, occupied by the Soviets in 1939) saw murders and persecutions of the local population by the NKVD.  Many of them would have witnessed their own "Katyns", especially in the murderous phase immediately before the arrival of the Germans in June/July 1941, when the Soviets disposed of all those 'prisoners' that they did not want to leave alive.  At that time alone, it is thought that 3,500 were murdered by the NKVD in Lwow, 2,000 in Luck, 600 in Sambor, 890 in Czortkow, 574 in Tarnopol, 550 in Dubno... and so it goes on.

So, now that Ukraine finds itself at odds with the Kremlin, we can expect to hear of similar gruesome discoveries elsewhere in the country.  I suspect that such sites were probably never entirely forgotten and have lived on in folk memory; perhaps their locations are known precisely, perhaps only vaguely.  But with the seismic geo-political shift of recent months, the climate is now right for them to be "discovered", investigated and publicised. They certainly give Kiev a stick with which to beat Moscow in its current conflict, but we should see beyond the current squabble and recognise them for what they are: as historically important reminders of the horrors of Soviet rule.

The Fortress at Brest - a story of heroism, sacrifice and unreconstructed Soviet historiography

I watched an interesting film yesterday.  "Fortress of War" is the subtitled English-language release title of a Belarusian film from 2010, 'Брестская крепость' or "The Brest Fortress".  It tells the remarkable story of the Soviet garrison manning the 19th Century Fortress at Brest, on the Soviet-German frontier, in the opening days of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.  Astonishingly, the fortress held out for a week against the German attack, suffering enormous privation in the process, before its last defenders were forced to surrender.  It is indeed a remarkable story.

And, it is a remarkable film.  In pure cinema terms, it is actually rather good.  If I were to describe it as a "Belarusian 'Saving Private Ryan'", then that might sound mocking, but it should be taken as a compliment.  The narrative is well-paced, the characters (though a tad two-dimensional) are just about rounded enough, and the battle scenes are gripping and reasonably realistic.  So, on that level at least, the film is certainly not a waste of 138 minutes of your life.

The film is also remarkable on another level, however: as an example of unreconstructed Soviet 'hurrah' historiography.  But for the glossy modern production values, this exact film could have been made in 1985 - or even 1965.  The message is the same: the Soviet Union was a land of milk, honey and happiness before the Nazi invasion, and the Red Army was the unblemished valiant defender of the Soviet people.  Even the film's Political Commissar - Yefim Fomin - is portrayed with unalloyed admiration.  This - in 2013 - is truly remarkable.

So, there is a great deal that the film does not tell the viewer.  One salient point is the immediate history predating the 1941 attack, for instance that Brest had been in Poland two years before, and had itself been invaded and occupied by the Soviets and the Germans jointly in 1939.  Indeed, it was at Brest that one of the most remarkable episodes of the opening phase of the World War Two took place; the joint Soviet-German parade of September 22 1939.  As the image below shows, Brest could well have been synonymous with the brief flowering of 'friendship' between Moscow and Berlin.

German & Soviet Commanders take the salute at Brest

Yet, understandably perhaps, that was not an image that the world chose to remember after 1941.  Accordingly, no mention is made of it in the film.  Even the Nazi-Soviet Pact itself is reduced to a couple of oblique references that would pass most viewers by entirely.  The political and geographical complexity that Brest signified is reduced to a simple tale of Red Army soldiers defending the Soviet Motherland against unprovoked attack.

Of course, it is too much to expect a film with a discreet narrative to include such related, though extraneous, material as the Nazi-Soviet Pact, or the Soviet deportations of Poles from Brest and elsewhere of the previous summer, but the 'tone' of the film is still rather astonishing.  One parlour game that I sometimes play in these situations is to transpose the Soviets for the Nazis and then question whether the portrayal might be deemed balanced or objective.  So, for instance, the Political Commissar character - let us imagine that he were to be changed to an SS man, galvanising his troops, leading them in battle?  (Now this is not such a crass comparison: after all, let's not forget that the NKVD (to which the Political Commissar belonged) was responsible for the Soviet Purges, the Deportations, the Gulag, the Katyn Massacres, etc etc.. and easily qualifies as a criminal organisation, like the SS.)  So, even after the most cursory thought, most readers will surely agree with me that it is unthinkable that an SS officer would be portrayed in an uncritical light, and rightly so.  Yet, incredibly, in the Soviet world-view, the Commissar can still be a positive figure. Clearly, a generation after the fall of the Soviet Union, the ex-Soviet equivalent of Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung: the famed "Coming to Terms with the Past", is barely off the starting blocks...

So, "Fortress of War" is well-worth a watch, and is remarkable on a number of levels.  Its Belarussian film makers should probably be congratulated, but they should most definitely be dragged into the 21st Century.

On the anniversary of the tragic events of 9/11, its worth perhaps remembering one of the festering wounds that brought the world to that unhappy and horrific day - the sorry saga of Afghanistan.  This is my review of Rodric Braithwaite's excellent book "Afgantsy", which first appeared in the UK's "Independent on Sunday" in the summer of 2011. 


Rodric Braithwaite, “Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989”

Profile Books, £25.00, 417pp, notes, maps illustrations.

 At a time when British politicians and commentators are questioning the continued involvement of their forces in Afghanistan, it seems appropriate to examine the story of the last foreign power to come to grief in that unhappy country.

Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, ostensibly in support of a communist, client government, which was spiraling into mayhem and facing revolt in the provinces.  Initially fulfilling a limited role of assisting an ally and training Afghan personnel, the Soviets would be drawn inexorably into a full-scale conflict with the American and Pakistani-backed Mujahedin rebels.  They would only leave some nine years later, after 15,000 Soviet soldiers and an unknown number of Afghans had been killed and a generation on both sides had been traumatised.

Rodric Braithwaite is well-placed to tell the story of the Soviet Union’s Afghan adventure.  A former British ambassador in Moscow and a fluent Russian speaker, he brings a cool, critical eye to this complex tale, dispelling a few old Cold War myths and misconceptions along the way.

His approach is a rather novel one.  Though the book’s structure is broadly chronological, the central section dealing with the war itself is organised thematically, covering areas such as ‘soldiering’, ‘fighting’ and ‘devastation and disillusion’.  Whilst this approach rather robs the book of some of its narrative head of steam, it does nonetheless facilitate the showcasing of Braithwaite’s excellent and original use of the first-hand testimony of Soviet Afghan-war veterans – the ‘Afgantsy’ of the title.  Their accounts – of the boredom and squalour of military life; of the atrocities that they committed and suffered, and of the psychological consequences that they incurred – provide a fascinating leaven to Braithwaite’s otherwise somewhat solid narrative.

Though he eschews making the comparison explicitly, the shadow that inevitably hangs over almost every line of Braithwaite’s book is the current western involvement in Afghanistan.  The similarities – and ironies – are obvious: both the Soviets and ourselves went in to that country parroting the same watchwords about ‘stabilisation’ and ‘pacification’; both spent many of the subsequent years seeking a way out, all the while fearful of what horrors would follow their withdrawal

Afgantsy is well-written and engaging and should serve to popularise a subject that deserves much wider attention and scrutiny.  More immediately, one is struck by the thought that this book should be required reading for all of those, military and civilian alike, who are involved in the current Afghan adventure.

© Roger Moorhouse 2011