Thinking About the Forgotten Front

Listening to Thomas Laqueur’s History 5 at Berkeley reminded me of one of the best things about the demise of the Soviet Union: now it’s all right to focus on all of the history that was out of bounds before 1989. Foremost of this is the nature of the Eastern Front in the Second World War. The good war was fundamentally fought with neither the Americans nor the British. The horrible Eastern campaigns, fought in cold and mud with pack animals and wooden carts, exhausted the German army, destroyed the credibility of fascism, and spent the youth of an entire generation on both sides. For Western Europeans the Great War was the First, for the Germans and Russians, the Second. Entire armies numbering into the hundreds of thousands were taken prisoner on both sides, and the killed and wounded eclipsed the losses in the West by an order of magnitude. This entire episode has been almost ignored in the Western Hemisphere for sixty years, and is only now beginning to get a little recognition (with Enemy at the Gates as probably the best representative.) This is a forgotten piece in the Anglo-American psyche; as Mr. Laqueur put it, “why did these people put up with so much from the communists in the 60’s? Because they believed they’d saved their country from destruction during the war.” It’s worth remembering that Khrushchev was the political member during the war – at Stalingrad.

Maybe now the story can be told by both sides, both for good and bad.