Spring Victory

Book excerpt: Mark Solonin is a Russian aviation engineer and historian. He was born in Kuybyshev (now Samara) on 29 May 1958. The problem with history is that it changes, depending on who is writing it and for whom it is being written. As the hackneyed phrase goes: "History is written by the victors". A subtler rephrasing has it that "the vanquished are the ones who are guilty of treason, even by the historians." Sometimes, however, many parties feel that certain historical events are best forgotten, the facts being too awful and the conclusions too dire to face. This was certainly the case with the history of the Red Army's advance through Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War. This was the most massive ethnic cleansing ever performed. Between 1944 and 1950, through terror and starvation, 12-14 million ethnic Germans were driven from their eastern homelands with a death toll so large and chaotic that it can only be estimated between 600 thousand and 2 million. The Western Allies preferred not to know so as to avoid being sullied by the crimes. The Soviets, who never had their Nuremburg for this or other doings, most certainly were not ready to face the matter and never have. "It was a long time ago and it never happened anyway." This short book was written by Mark Solonin in 2009 and is possibly the first book written by a Russian historian as a polemic for Russian readers to face facts and discover one can still live -and live better- with awkward knowledge. It is a remarkable work and should be useful to Western readers who also need to face the fact that we here allowed these matters to swept under the carpet as well. Mark Solonin is the author of several best-selling books in Russian that freshly analyse the history of the Second World War (the Soviet Great Patriotic War). As a result, he now finds himself obliged for his personal safety to live in exile.