Jonathan Dimbleby at Marlborough LitFest

I don’t wish to alarm anyone, but it seems to me that we stand closer to a serious escalation of international conflict than I can recall in my lifetime. So Jonathan Dimbleby’s talk on the Soviet victory on the Eastern Front in World War Two was a salutary reminder of the inevitable horrors of such conflicts. Indeed no conflict can have been more horrendous. I recall seeing a memorial to the dead of both World Wars in a Bavarian village. The fallen of World War One on the Western Front exceeded those on the Eastern front by a ration of nine to one. In World War Two the figure was reversed. Joseph Stalin’s verdict om the war was a shrewd assessment as a generalisation – that Britain gave time, America gave money and Russia gave blood. Gave blood indeed, Dimbleby reckons that 27 million people died in the Soviet Union and not just people, that 700,000 horses died gives further insight into the nature of the conflict. His statement that WW2 was won on the Eastern is indisputable, but, as he prefers to put it, it was there it was lost by Germany. He adds detail that I never realised. It is a myth that the Red Army stood aside while the Germans crushed the Warsaw uprising, In fact it was held up in Eastern Poland. I never realised that there was an extensive partisan war behind the German lines: 100 civilians were shot for every German killed. Churchill proposed an invasion of Croatia to cut off a Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. As we see graphically and sadly today, war is about the suffering of those caught up in it and Dimbleby’s account is made immediate by his use of the diaries and letters of such ordinary people on both sides.

Nor did he neglect to draw the lessons that horrendous conflict holds in the present situation in Eastern Europe. Russia’s Imperial past is recalled in Putin’s desire to reunite the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine with the motherland, His casting of Ukrainians as Nazis has its roots in the collaborations of WW2. After the horrors of the ‘Great Patriotic War’, Russia has a genuine fear of encroachment from the west.

Finally, a more cheerful note. What appeared to be a serious hiccup of microphone failure threatened the start of the talk. Of course, Jonathan Dimbleby must have seen worse moments, but the response of the festival team was immediate and effective. Well done!