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Russia: The Wild East

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A history of Russia, written and presented by Martin Sixsmith

Russia: The Wild East: Series 2

Russia: The Wild East: Series 2: Episode 14: The Spoils of War

Episode 14

Episode 14: The Spoils of War

Series 2

The Spoils of War

BBC Radio 4 - Russia: The Wild East, Series 2, The Spoils of War

Hopes of greater freedoms after the war are crushed by Stalin.

Victory was a chance for national unity but ethnic tensions resurface after the war. Stalin crushes all hopes of greater freedom as the party-state reasserts its grip on power.

Victory had been a remarkable national achievement and a chance for national unity that might have healed a fractured society. 

But instead Stalin used the war as a pretext, to carry out a cynical campaign of ethnic engineering against those nationalities he viewed with suspicion: ethnic Soviet Germans were deported to Siberia; hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks and Tartars were expelled from their homes; anti-semitism, briefly forgotten during the war resurfaced. People who expected their heroism to be rewarded with freedom and the right to participate in the running of their country found the party-state apparatus had reasserted its grip on power and did not intend to let go. 

Major Yershov, in Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate, sums up the hopes of the nation: "He was certain that he was not only fighting the Germans, but fighting for a free Russia: certain that a victory over Hitler would be a victory over the death camps of the Gulag where his father, his mother and his sisters had perished..." Instead, the state was seeking to suppress the very qualities it had encouraged during the years of fighting. Courage, initiative and enterprise were deemed dangerous, former soldiers were regarded as a potentially hostile force, freedoms (religious and artistic) granted during the war were swiftly withdrawn, and the regime acted to prevent unrest in the only way it knew how - by sending potential troublemakers to the Gulag. 

Set against Shostakovich's Anti-Formalist Rayok, written in private having been forced to publicly recant, Martin Sixsmith concludes, "if nothing had changed after the war, if Soviet society was simply going back to the old ways, the question inevitably arose in many people's minds of what exactly they'd been fighting for." 


Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking


Producers: Anna Scott-Brown & Adam Fowler
A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.

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Episode 14: The Spoils of War

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