Russian

Polit.Ru “Is a Scientific History of the Great Patriotic War Possible?”

11 March 2016 — ProScience Theater

Is a Scientific History of the Great Patriotic War Possible?

Oleg Budnitsky

Photo: Vladimir Golikov

We publish the transcript of another ProScience Theater event, held on 15 February at the Central House of Journalists. Oleg Budnitsky, Doctor of Historical Sciences and professor specializing in Russian history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, spoke on the topic “Is a Scientific History of the Great Patriotic War Possible?” The evening was hosted by journalist Nikita Belogolovtsev.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

My name is Nikita Belogolovtsev, and I will be the host of today’s performance at the ProScience Theater. We are accustomed to saying that what you see on this stage is a little more than just a scientific lecture. Today our subject is also a little more than just science. We will be talking about something that has become an absolutely mass phenomenon recently. We will discuss the history of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War as part of the Second World War. And I ask you to welcome the hero of our evening: Oleg Budnitsky, a Russian historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences and professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. To your applause, Oleg Vitalyevich comes up onto our stage. Oleg Vitalyevich, hello; these applause are for you. Please sit down and make yourself comfortable, and to begin I will ask for a few more facts about our guest today, a somewhat fuller dossier than the one I have just announced. Please.

Natalya Kharlamova:

Oleg Vitalyevich Budnitsky is a Russian historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences, professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, and director of the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences. In 2012 he was elected a member of Academia Europaea. At present Oleg Budnitsky is the only Russian historian elected to Academia Europaea in the “History and Archaeology” section.

Oleg Vitalyevich is the author of scholarly and popular works and more than 250 articles. He also works as a publicist and popularizer, actively participates in television and radio programs, and hosts them. Based on his doctoral dissertation, in 2000 he published the book Terrorism in the Russian Liberation Movement: Ideology, Ethics, Psychology (Second Half of the Nineteenth–Early Twentieth Century). It was the first book in Russia to attempt to understand the reasons for the emergence of terrorism and to show its genesis and the development of its ideology. In 2005 he published one of his most important books, Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites (1917–1920).

Oleg Budnitsky has also published several volumes of Vasily Maklakov’s correspondence and has written such books as The Money of the Russian Emigration: Kolchak’s Gold, 1918–1957, Russian-Jewish Berlin (1920–1941), and others. He devoted a number of books to the Great Patriotic War—not to the history of military operations, but to its social history, to what is called the “human dimension of war.” These include the collections It Has Happened. The Germans Have Come! Ideological Collaborationism in the USSR During the Great Patriotic War and The USSR in World War II: Occupation. Holocaust. Stalinism, as well as the book Odessa: Life Under Occupation, 1941–1944.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

Is all that correct, Oleg Vitalyevich? Well, we did our best.

Let us now, literally in just a few words, theses, perhaps questions, outline the range of issues we will discuss today, so that any remaining doubts among those who have come here are dispelled and they understand that they definitely did not come in vain.

Oleg Budnitsky:

I think that those who displayed mass heroism by coming here today to listen to a conversation about war and history do not need persuading; they need to be thanked for coming. And we should be grateful that part of our society has an interest in history in general and in the history of the war in particular. That is the first thing I wanted to say.

We will talk about the difficulties we encounter both in studying history in general and in studying the history of the Great Patriotic War in particular. There is a certain nuance here. In our consciousness, in our society, there seem to be two separate wars. The Second World War is something “out there,” while the Great Patriotic War is “ours.” Yet it is obvious that the Great Patriotic War—or, as it is called in the rest of the world, the “war on the Eastern Front”—was part of the Second World War. It is also clear that for our country the Second World War did not begin on 22 June 1941 but somewhat earlier. I mean September 1939. This is the first problem that immediately catches the eye, embedded in the very name and terminology. There are many other aspects of studying the war, many difficulties historians encounter. On the one hand, they complicate the study of the history of the war; on the other hand, they make that study fascinating. Yes. If everything were already at our fingertips, what would we even have left to do?

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

May I immediately ask the question that, one way or another, is hanging in the air? To make the air a little lighter, I will voice it right away. The “cult of war,” the “cult of victory,” which people have spoken about so much lately and which undoubtedly exists—does it make your work easier, harder, or more interesting? Do major discoveries, like big money, prefer silence, or on the contrary has it become more pleasant and convenient to work?

Oleg Budnitsky:

You know, it does not affect my work at all. One has to distinguish between using history to solve educational, political, or other tasks and the professional work of a historian. Of course, as one of the classics of Marxism-Leninism once said, “One cannot live in society and be free of society.” That is obvious. But for a professional historian it is irrelevant—or it should be irrelevant, I would put it that way. If a historian adjusts himself to whatever the weather is outside, then he is no longer a historian; he has a different profession.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

But just on an everyday practical level: is access to documents greater or smaller, are there grants, access to different places, or is everything as it was?

Oleg Budnitsky:

It varies. On the one hand, I always say that so many documents have been opened that the present generation of historians is simply incapable of looking through them all, let alone mastering them. It is an enormous body of material, and there is a huge field for work here. On the other hand, of course, there are a number of restrictions that do not help historians. For example, it is very difficult to gain access to materials in the FSB archive. Incidentally, the organization that used to have another name prepared reports on public moods, which are extremely important for a historian studying not what is understood as strictly military history—the history of military operations—but the history of society during the war.

Another point. In the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense there is the collection of the Main Political Directorate. That was also a structure responsible for indoctrination and for the moral and political condition of the army—in other words, for those very people at war. That collection is also practically closed. There are also a number of restrictions that exist everywhere in the world, concerning access to personal documents and private papers. This creates certain difficulties as well. Those are some of the aspects.

In addition, our archives have some rather technical difficulties. For a long time they were administered by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. On the one hand, this produced a splendid system for describing and registering archival materials. Perhaps only in Britain, in certain archives, can one find something similar. When we cite an archival document, we cite the fond, inventory, file, and sheet. And that is excellent. But at the same time there are restrictions that have existed from time immemorial. We are given no more than five files a day, and moreover only every other day. So if you receive five folders and suddenly those folders—whose contents cannot always be determined from their titles—turn out not to contain what you need, it greatly complicates the work. In foreign archives materials are issued by the box, several boxes a day. The quantity is practically unlimited.

The speed with which materials are supplied is another matter. At the Bakhmeteff Archive in New York they once asked me in horror: “Is it true that at the Hoover Archive they bring materials only after two hours?” At Bakhmeteff it takes fifteen minutes, or five if the material is nearby. I have worked a great deal on the history of emigration. A few weeks or months spent in a foreign archive can be equivalent to years, if not decades, that I would need to work through comparable materials here. Such paradoxes exist. I am not even talking about copying materials. But I am already getting into narrowly professional matters. For example, nowadays in practically the entire civilized world you can photograph archival documents. That accelerates a historian’s work enormously. Here we have a purely technical limitation: there simply is not enough copying equipment, there are queues. And it is also quite expensive. A photocopy costs one hundred rubles per sheet. If there are many sheets, the total is not small. But these are purely technical points; the main issue, of course, is not that.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

Before we move on to the first lecture segment, let us try to strike a balance between the professional and the personal, because you are the hero of our evening. Usually when one reads the story of some historian—excuse the tautology—there is some vivid childhood episode: “I read this particular passage and realized that from then on my whole life…” and so forth. Was there some romantic episode in your childhood after which your future existence as a historian was predetermined?

Oleg Budnitsky:

I am afraid I will disappoint you. I had no intention at all of becoming a historian.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

What a pity.

Oleg Budnitsky:

I wanted to be a journalist, and even at school I made a few reports for local radio. I lived in the city of Shakhty in Rostov Region. One heroic episode in my biography was when I made a report from a women construction workers’ dormitory. For a tenth-grader, that made a strong impression. I could talk about it for a long time. There were some notes in the local newspaper about an “Hello, We’re Looking for Talent” competition, about how our basketball team finally beat the previously unbeatable team from School No. 2, and so on. But then someone explained to me that getting into the journalism faculty at Rostov University was, to put it mildly, very doubtful. The army was hanging over you. I was advised to enter a teacher-training institute instead. Moreover, a new faculty had recently opened there—a history-and-English faculty. “They’ll train you there!” They did train us, of course, but not for diplomatic missions. The idea was to send us to a village and kill two birds with one stone: one person would teach history and English, and social studies as well. So that is how it happened. My parents, who thought I was displaying a certain degree of madness, told me: look at respectable journalists—none of them graduated from a journalism faculty. They were historians, lawyers, or something else. Nobody taught them journalism; you cannot teach a person how to write. I think that was right. If you cannot teach yourself, or if there is no spark in you, then it is useless. But that is how it turned out. And we quickly understood the hidden meaning of that history-and-English faculty. We had a subject called “country studies,” the country of the language being studied. We studied the map of London, knowing perfectly well that we would never be in London. Most of us expected never to leave the Soviet Union at all. When I eventually found myself in London for the first time, I realized that I had studied one useful subject: I knew where to go from Trafalgar Square. But central London turned out to be very small. We had studied it more extensively than necessary; you could walk around it in about an hour.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

I learned English from old textbooks, and my first impulse was to ask, “Where is the telegraph office?” Once I found myself in an English-speaking environment, I had to suppress that impulse with all my might.

I would like to suggest moving on to our first lecture segment, since we have skipped the epic story of that report and the article about Shakhty basketball teams. What is the history of war as a subject, as a distinct field of knowledge? Please.

Oleg Budnitsky:

I will repeat once again that I am not a military historian in the usual sense of the term—that is, someone who studies the history of military operations, military technology, the arms industry, and so on. I am interested in people at war: what happens to them and how they change. I am interested in the effect the war had on Soviet, and not entirely Soviet, society. Let us not forget that only about twenty years had passed since Soviet power had been established. Society still consisted to a significant extent of people who remembered what life had been like before the revolution, people who had lived through collectivization and much else besides. My interest in the social history of the war was partly driven by a desire to understand this. I read in books that society rose as one to defend the motherland, Soviet power, and so forth, and, like Stanislavsky, I wanted to say, “I don’t believe it.” It simply does not happen that ten years before a war people are robbed and then go off with pure hearts and pure thoughts to defend the very government that did it. Clearly society was much more complicated than it was presented as being. Of course, I was not the one who discovered this. As the prewar society was studied, these complexities became obvious and much of what happened became understandable. I will add one more thing. Most of us have only the vaguest idea of the society that entered the war. What do we know about the history of the war, and where do we know it from, if we look at human documents, memoirs and the like? Who wrote those memoirs, who told those stories? They were educated urban people. And how many educated urban people were there in the country at that time? On the eve of the war our country was a peasant country. Two thirds of the population lived in villages and rural areas. We have the 1939 census, which is fairly accurate; demographers believe the population was inflated by only one or two percent. Stalin had said at one of the party congresses that our population was increasing by the equivalent of an entire Finland every year. Yet the 1937 census showed that, for some reason, it was not increasing. There had been deadly famine, repression, the hardships of life and a high mortality rate. What happened to those who carried out the previous census? It is not hard to guess. So those who conducted the next one learned from their predecessors’ mistakes and tried to add a little to the population count—but not all that much.

So, two thirds of the population lived in the countryside. Then there is the phrase “cultural revolution.” And indeed, compared with what had existed earlier, there had been a leap forward, a breakthrough, and so on. Nevertheless, one fifth of the country’s population was illiterate. The criterion for literacy was rather peculiar: a person was considered literate if he or she could read by syllables, perform operations with simple numbers and sign his or her name in any available way. If we look at formal education, then out of every thousand people, if I remember correctly, 77 had a secondary education and 6.4 had a higher education. You understand, of course, that there cannot be four tenths of a person; these are statistical figures. But that was the level. That was the society. And who told us about the war? That small part of the population which, by Soviet standards, was extraordinarily well educated and lived in cities. But what about the rest, the great mass of people? Who will tell their story, convey their feelings, their sensations, what they went through? This is a real challenge for a historian. Where do we find sources that allow us to understand how people experienced all this, how they did everything they did and, in the end, won the war?

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

All right. I would now like to turn to another feature of our format. Those who attend ProScience Theater performances know it: the so-called “skeptic’s question.” But so as not to disrupt our detailed and friendly conversation by making me ask you awkward questions, we have prepared a specially trained person for that purpose.

Oleg Budnitsky:

In other words, there is a good cop and a bad cop.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

Of course. The only advantage of our bad cop is that he will simply ask you a question; he will not, for example, shine a spotlight in your face. You must admit that this testifies to our boundless humanism.

Oleg Budnitsky:

That is good news.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

Please.

Skeptic:

Actually, things are even simpler with us. We have the smart interrogator up on the stage and the stupid interrogator in the audience. And the stupid interrogator, who is not really an interrogator at all, asks the following. A stupid question with a very short formulation: What made it possible to win the Great Patriotic War?

Oleg Budnitsky:

It was possible because the material, demographic and all other resources of the USSR and its allies in the war substantially exceeded the resources of Germany and its allies. I would put it this way: Germany—the main driving force, with the others essentially harnessed alongside it—was rash to attempt to cope with the USSR, the United States and the British Empire. Continuing that thought, I believe that the decisive event of the war on the Eastern Front was the Battle of Moscow. Why Moscow rather than Stalingrad or Kursk, where devastating blows were in fact inflicted on the German army? Because the Barbarossa plan was thwarted, the blitzkrieg was thwarted, and the war became protracted. Germany could not win a protracted war. Let me give you one example. In peacetime Germany needed around five million tons of oil; to wage war it needed twelve million tons. It could obtain those resources only from Romania, and that was the maximum available. Who at that time was the world’s largest producer and exporter of oil? The United States. And so on.

We are accustomed to viewing the war as a heroic saga. We study heroic deeds—one, another, a third—mass heroism, and then we say: that is why we won the war. But no matter how heroic soldiers and officers may be, if there is no appropriate military technology, heroism is meaningless. In the combined production of all these things, Germany’s opponents far surpassed it. Once the blitzkrieg failed, Germany was doomed. Broadly speaking, it was doomed as soon as the war acquired a global character. One more small observation: Germany had not intended to start a world war. Hitler had specific plans; he hoped to force Britain to make peace on terms favorable to him, and so on. Gradually, step by step, the war became a world war. This happens very often in history. In the First World War, people thought it would last a few weeks or at most a few months, and it lasted four years. The same happened here: events did not follow the scenario the politicians had expected. Forgive me for answering at such length. It is a very good question, one of the key questions in our understanding of the history of the war. One of the traditional misconceptions in popular consciousness is to view the war waged by the Soviet Union as if it existed separately from the context of the Second World War. That is completely unscientific and gives us a false picture of what happened.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

Oleg Vitalyevich, I will ask one more personal question, because I found it very interesting that you mentioned almost in passing that you did not believe the traditional view that “the whole country rose in a single impulse,” and so on. Today this doubt and this critical mode of thinking about the war seem logical, understandable and well founded. But in my frame of reference it does not seem a very logical view of the war for a young man who had just been writing for a Shakhty newspaper, wanted to become a journalist in the Soviet press, and so forth. Where did the turning point occur? When did you begin to doubt?

Oleg Budnitsky:

First, I did not originally work on the history of the war. I came to it to some extent by accident. I would say that I have one characteristic that distinguishes me from many colleagues in the profession: over the course of my life I have worked on different subjects. Different topics interested me at different times. The first was terrorism, at a time when it was taboo. There was terrorism in the West, the Red Brigades and so on. But in Russia, even in the history of Russia, terrorism was presented as isolated mistakes committed by individual revolutionary groups, mistakes that had been condemned and exposed, and so forth. When I enrolled as an external postgraduate student at the Institute of the History of the USSR, I already had a subject in mind. I intended to write about terrorism within the system of struggle of the People’s Will. I told my academic adviser, Boris Samuilovich Itenberg, who turned ninety-five five days ago—a war veteran who finished the war in East Prussia and a wonderful man. When he heard all this, he looked at me... I quote him with his permission; I even included this in the preface to the second edition of my book on terrorism, which will appear in a month. He said, articulating every word very clearly: “Young man, you have to defend a Candidate of Sciences dissertation. What terrorism? Have you gone mad?” Today it is hard even to imagine that. His reaction was entirely justified: it was an impossible topic. Now, when I returned to that old subject while preparing the second edition of my book, I decided to add a chapter. The book came out in 2000 and is fairly often cited. I decided to reissue it as it was, but nevertheless to add a chapter on what has been written about terrorism over the past fifteen years. All the more so because when I submitted the book for publication it was on the eve of the Moscow bombings; a year and a half later 9/11 happened, and terrorism became the most sought-after subject in the world. And so, somewhat stunned, I discovered that somewhere in the world a book about terrorism is published every six hours. Fortunately, the lion’s share is of course about contemporary terrorism; I do not know what they manage to write about with such intensity. There were consolidated figures for 2007: in the main scholarly journals alone, 2,300 articles appeared. Back then such a quantity would have been unimaginable.

We eventually agreed that I would write about the history of the study of the People’s Will. Later, when it became clear that terrorism did in fact exist—and that, apparently, it had existed here too—I defended my second dissertation precisely on terrorism, mainly on the ideology of terrorism. I tried to understand why and how that ideology arose, how the idea emerged that freedom could be achieved through political murder. After all, those people wanted the best. Along the way they killed a certain number of people—not necessarily officials. That was my first subject.

Then I received an American grant to study the history of terrorism. The Hoover Archive is the best place on earth; I hope no one accuses me of being unpatriotic. Stanford University is in Northern California, and in every respect it is one of the best places on earth. The climate there is unique; there are perhaps two other places on earth with something similar. There is practically no winter, though it does rain. And there is the Hoover Archive, founded in 1919. Its full name is the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. It was founded by Herbert Hoover, who later became president of the United States. He was not a poor man. The archive collected all kinds of documents; it contains an astonishing range of material. Documents on Russian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were collected there. For example, the archive of the Foreign Agency of the Police Department is there—imagine that: 216 boxes of documents. And there is much else besides, remarkable collections. I pounced on them like a hawk, especially since there you can order up to ten boxes of documents a day.

Here is the attraction. I have said that in our archives everything is very conveniently described. At Hoover you receive a box and you know there is something in it on the relevant subject, but you do not know exactly what; there could be anything. For example, I was looking through one box belonging to Nikolai Basily, a diplomat who represented the Foreign Ministry at the tsar’s headquarters during the First World War. I opened the box and medals literally spilled out of it. Then some little velvet object fell out. I looked at it: it was the menu from the tsar’s last dinner before his abdication. Basily had kept it as a souvenir. He later did what diplomats do: he married well, to the daughter of a Citibank vice-president responsible for Europe. He was not a poor man and assembled a splendid collection of paintings. At Hoover there is a Basily Room, with works by Borovikovsky, Rokotov, eighteenth-century paintings. There was nothing especially extraordinary about the menu itself, but one thing struck me: there were peaches on the day Nicholas II signed his abdication. War is war, but on 2 March there were still peaches.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

Peaches according to schedule.

Oleg Budnitsky:

In the Hoover Archive I began looking at émigré materials, including the archive of Vasily Maklakov. And I suddenly realized that my life had been wasted: I had been studying terrorists, revolutionaries, murderers whose thoughts had only about one and a half convolutions—if one compares them, though I do not want to offend revolutionaries. This, by contrast, was a feast of intellect and brilliant language. Today most people write emails or send text messages. Those people sat down and wrote letters. Vasily Maklakov was a famous lawyer, the finest Russian orator of the early twentieth century, a deputy of three State Dumas, a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party, ambassador in Paris, and a friend of Leo Tolstoy. He remained in Paris and lived there for another forty years. Despite the enormous age difference, Tolstoy took a liking to him and walked with him around Moscow when he lived in Khamovniki. The difference between them was forty years. Maklakov wrote remarkable memoirs about Tolstoy. I could speak about this for a long time. I understand that you have a script.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

I have already put it aside.

Oleg Budnitsky:

His personal archive consists of twenty-six boxes. Fourteen of them are correspondence, including his correspondence with Mark Aldanov. It has just been published. It is the thickest book I have ever edited: 1,143 pages.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

Oleg Vitalyevich, please clarify something. I just caught myself thinking that perhaps everyone present imagines a “box” differently. For some it is a small neat box from IKEA; for others it is a cardboard television box. I was imagining something about the size of my folder.

Oleg Budnitsky:

There are many folders like that inside those boxes.

The letters were also interesting because people were more candid in them. Maklakov published four books of memoirs. He published the last one when he was eighty-five. His mind was extraordinary, his memory was extraordinary, and he preserved his gift as an orator until the last years of his life. He was a particular kind of orator, without pathos, as though he were simply talking to you—that is the highest level. He knew how to make his opponents in the Duma listen to him. Our parliamentarians could learn from some of the people who performed such functions in pre-revolutionary Russia.

I became absorbed in that. It was the second subject I worked on. As you see, there was still no question of the war.

Then I became deeply involved in the history of Russian Jewry. I had not planned to write a book. One paper led to another, and eventually there was a book—550 pages. It enjoyed some success. It was published in Russian and reviewed in many different languages, not only in scholarly journals but in newspapers as well, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. For a German historian, that is something like being reviewed in Pravda in our old days. The review took up a whole newspaper page, which is almost unbelievable, though half the page was occupied by a portrait of Trotsky—or rather, a caricature of Trotsky. The book was later translated into English.

The review appeared after the book was presented in Frankfurt am Main in 2006. My American colleague Michael David-Fox, who also spoke at the presentation, and I were drinking beer—what else is there to do in Germany? He said: “I’m organizing a conference called ‘Russia–Germany: Entangled Histories.’ Would you like to take part?” I had not specifically worked on that subject. But I had written an essay about my academic adviser, whom I have already mentioned today, a lieutenant in the Red Army. He commanded an anti-aircraft platoon on an armored train and entered Germany on it. Although armored trains now tend to be associated with the Civil War, they were used to protect bridges and so on. He was a commander there; it was called a firing platoon. I was writing an essay about him for one of those traditional collections. By then I was already working at the Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The collection was called “Scholars of the Institute—Veterans of the Great Patriotic War.” I said: “Boris Samuilovich, why should I repeat official things? Perhaps you have some documents left?” “Letters,” he said, “and stupid ones.” “But that is the most interesting thing!” He gave me his letters to his wife and parents. They were fantastic letters, especially those from Germany. I quote from memory: “At last I saw Germany, this damned country. And I saw an unbelievably good life. How well these bastards lived. What houses, furniture, libraries.” This was already a city through which the Red Army had passed. The Germans had fled and almost nothing remained. He said there was not even furniture, only the skeletons of furniture. Red Army soldiers cut the leather off armchairs and sofas and sent it home. They did not understand that this leather could not be used to make shoes. Almost nothing remained, yet even what remained amazed him. And he wrote: “What did these bastards need? Why did they come to us?” In short, that caught my attention; there were many other things as well. I began to look at how Germany was perceived by the people who arrived there. Quite unexpectedly it turned out that works by well-known people had been published. Boris Slutsky, for example, in his Notes on the War written in 1945, described his experience of the campaign abroad. He had been in Romania; he had not been in Germany but had been in Austria. How he avoided being imprisoned is one of nature’s mysteries, because he read this text publicly to friends, acquaintances and so on. There was nothing in it even remotely resembling the official canon of the war. Or take David Samoilov, the poet of “The Forties, the Fatal Years.” His diaries exist. Historians do not read them; literary historians and scholars do. Yet he went through the whole war and was in Germany. The entries are extraordinarily interesting. He writes cautiously. For example: “Goebbels’s propaganda said the Bolsheviks would come and do terrible things, but our soldiers are doing nothing to disabuse the Germans of that belief.” Things like that are fascinating. I gave a paper and wrote an article; that was probably my first publication about the war. And from there it went on and on. Then I became absorbed in the subject. You can see what came of it.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

At the very least, what came of it is today’s lecture. You know, I was just thinking that we have more or less answered the question “Why do we study the war?” We have partly answered, and continue answering, the question “How?” But we have not yet answered “What for?” And one gets the impression that lately parliamentarians and historians have been diverging more and more sharply on this question. Different people give very different answers to “Why do we study the history of the war today?” Why do we study it, from your point of view?

Oleg Budnitsky:

First and foremost, to satisfy our curiosity. If you are not interested, then you should not study history—or anything else. If I were not interested, if this were simply a job I had to do from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon, I would probably do something else. It is simply interesting. From my point of view, that alone justifies history. And if people read, come to—I would hesitate to call this a lecture—a meeting, a conversation, then presumably there is some meaning in it. People often say that history is studied in order to understand ourselves somehow and to foresee the future. But I will tell you immediately: it is impossible to foresee the future. Sometimes we even predict the past well and sometimes badly. You know the joke that Russia is a country with an unpredictable past. To a considerable extent, I would say, that applies to most countries. Broadly speaking, if we become philosophical about it, without history we do not know who we are. If we do not know the past, we do not know who we are. And without historians that cannot be done.

The question is complex because it is not only about professional history, but about how history is used for various purposes. There is a theory that every nation has a foundation myth on which it relies. In the United States, for example, it is the American Revolution, the War of Independence, and everything connected with them. That is where America begins. There are several other reference points, but that is the main one. In France it is obviously the Great French Revolution, the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity, from which modern Europe emerged. What was our foundation myth? In imperial Russia it was probably the story of the accession of the Romanovs: Russia reborn after the Time of Troubles, and so on. That is why the tercentenary of the House of Romanov was celebrated so lavishly in 1913—no one could imagine that the dynasty had only four years left. What was the foundation myth under Soviet power? The Revolution, of course. The Great October Socialist Revolution, the great event of the twentieth century. But forty years, fifty years passed after the Revolution—where was the promised happiness? I have noticed now that the younger generation has a poor idea of what the Soviet Union was. I can say that I am happy a significant part of my life has been lived after the Soviet Union. An ideological problem arose. What was to be done with the Party program adopted in 1961 at the Twentieth Congress: “the present generation of Soviet people will live under communism”? We can see quite clearly the moment when the war began to be used as a point of support. It was twenty years after victory, in 1965, when Victory Day was restored as a public holiday; before that it had not been a day off. The idea was, “We may not have sausage in the shops, but at least we won the war.” That was a support under Soviet power. After the next Russian revolution, in 1991, it receded somewhat for a time. But then people began looking in the past for a point of support again: what unites us as a nation? What unites us is that we have one common, indisputable value—the victory in the war. Besides everything else, for most of the population it is family history.

Incidentally, I was not being entirely candid about my own relationship to the war. My father was extraordinarily interested in its history; our bookcase was packed with military memoirs. He was an engineer, but he knew the subject better than any professional historian. Yet it was his childhood. He tried to run away to the front. When he was fourteen my grandfather took him to the front because he had already run away several times and been caught several times. My grandfather took him along; he was a good teacher: “Of course you’ll be in reconnaissance, but first help out here at the medical battalion.” It was during the Jassy–Kishinev Offensive, and my father had to carry severed arms and legs away in a bucket. After that his desire to fight diminished somewhat. But it was impossible to send him back, and he spent the winter there in Kishinev. For many people, the war is still family history.

That is what seemed to become a unifying force. But if you are interested in my attitude to it, my feelings are mixed. I believe that one cannot strive toward the future while riding on a train and constantly looking backward, seeing one’s ideal in what is past and in what was accomplished not by us.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

Let me clarify something, since we have a pause. You used what seems to me a very important word: “myth.” But if we are going to rely on it, then surely it really must be a myth. In a myth, the bad things have to be very carefully rationed—only enough to serve the plot, no more. So there is a certain contradiction here with the ideal. And you—not you personally, but you historians—are not merely useless in this respect; at times you are even harmful. We have our radiant myth of the “great victorious people,” and then you come along with your material factors—more resources rather than mass heroism, collaborationism rather than the entire country going to the front, and so on.

Oleg Budnitsky:

Please do not attribute all that to me.

I have already spoken about this. As a historian, these things really ought not to concern me. I proceed from the assumption that historians, first, satisfy their own curiosity. Second, history is nevertheless inevitably addressed to society, to the reader. I assume society is interested in receiving a scholarly product. There were some very interesting sociological surveys about ten years ago, around yet another anniversary of the war. We tend to experience flare-ups around anniversaries. People answered that the Great Patriotic War was the most important event in the history of our country in the twentieth century. An overwhelming majority said they were proud of it. And an overwhelming majority of the same people said they did not know the whole truth about the Great Patriotic War. Once I was completely astonished when I was flying somewhere and saw that all the girls in the duty-free shop were wearing St. George ribbons. It was quite a sight. I asked, “Was there an instruction to do that?” “No, we did it ourselves.” You see, when people speak of “truth,” it is a very lofty and responsible word, and at different times it means different things. Nevertheless, I proceed from the assumption that society really does want to know “how it actually was.” That phrase comes from the German historian Leopold von Ranke, in the first half of the nineteenth century. He said that the task of history was to tell how things really happened, how they actually were. But I will disappoint you if you do not already know this: no historian can tell you how it actually was. What is the difference between history and chemistry or physics? Let me ask the audience.

Voice from the audience:

None.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

The degree of demonstrability, I would venture to guess.

Oleg Budnitsky:

Exactly. In physics or chemistry one can conduct an experiment. A body will fall with the same acceleration every time. In history we cannot conduct an experiment. It is not a computer game. We cannot replay what happened. We have no time machine and cannot transport ourselves there. We reconstruct the past from different kinds of sources. But imagine that those sources have not survived. Then we will learn nothing about the event that took place. Nothing at all, ever.

Or take another case. We have such a quantity of sources that we are physically incapable of mastering them, reading them, assessing them, and so on. We decide to select some that seem most representative. But what if we chose wrongly? History contains such nuances. Our task, though, is to try—in the difficult situation in which the historian is placed from the outset—to be guided by scholarly methods and to work our way toward understanding two simple things: what happened and why it happened. That is all. That is what we try to do.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

All right. I would like to move on to the next segment. With all your colleagues, including those in other fields of knowledge where there are reproducible experiments and all the rest, we try to talk about misconceptions. Clearly your subject is a veritable treasury of misconceptions: one could talk endlessly about the Great Patriotic War and the Second World War. Among non-specialists there is a common assumption that we simply do not know much about the war because certain sources of information are closed: archives are closed, secrecy has not been lifted. And supposedly, when everything finally opens, suddenly we will know it all—all the figures, all the facts, all the motivations, and so on. How close is that to reality, or is it a one-hundred-percent misconception?

Oleg Budnitsky:

This is one of those cases where there is no unequivocal answer. First, there is a great deal we do not know, but a very large number of documents are not merely accessible, they have already been published. For example, several volumes have recently appeared from the Presidential Archive, the former Politburo archive. It is a very large body of genuinely interesting documents that show both how decisions were made and various other curious circumstances. As I said at the beginning, there are some archives and materials I would very much like to see that are still inaccessible, and it is not very clear when they will become available. But I do not think their opening would radically change the situation. Moreover, the idea that archives contain answers to every question is a serious exaggeration. Obviously a historian cannot work without archives. Let me give an example: the Soviet era, the Brezhnev period. Imagine if we studied that period only through archival documents. We would get a total distortion of reality, because what was preserved in the archives did not reflect it at all. There were jokes told in kitchens, songs, people’s moods. If we relied only on official archival documents, we would hardly understand anything. I think this is really true of any period. As for the war, my view is that to understand what happened and how, we need what we call sources of personal origin—above all diaries and letters from the period itself. Diaries are very rare. But even a few diaries can tell us more about what was happening than tons of memoirs written fifty years later. A person writing a diary does not yet know what will happen to him, does not know whether he will survive until the end of the war; there is not yet any established canon of the war’s history. He writes here and now about what he sees. It is just a fragment, a small piece of reality, but that fragment allows us to understand a great deal more. We talk a lot about how this was a people’s war. Yet, in my view, a people’s history of the war has still not been written, partly because we have not turned to sources of this kind.

Konstantin Simonov once had the idea of creating precisely such a people’s archive within the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense. He said that journals received a great many memoirs and texts written by veterans. Most could not be published—not only because they sometimes contained things that did not fit the official canon, but because they were simply unliterary and terribly awkward. “But they contain information,” Simonov said. “Let us collect all this and encourage people to write it down so that the memory does not disappear, so they record their experience, and then historians and writers in the future will be able to use it.” He was a candidate member of the Central Committee, incidentally, and wrote this proposal to one of the Central Committee secretaries. It was sent to the General Staff for an opinion. The response was signed by the then Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Ogarkov, and the head of the Main Political Directorate, Yepishev. They wrote that it should not be done. “As it is, there is inconsistency in assessments of the history of the war,” they wrote. “As it is, there are troublemakers.” Marshal Yeremenko had written the wrong kind of book, and General Gorbatov’s book had been withdrawn altogether. By today’s standards, what those men had written was childish babble. Nevertheless, on the basis of the military-political leadership’s conclusion, it was decided not to create such an archive.

Millions of participants in the war have now passed away. Literally millions: 34.5 million people served in the Red Army over the course of the war, including those already serving before the war. Very little written material from them has survived, but some has. Every time I appear on radio or television I call on people to send material if they have anything. And they always do. Sometimes months later. One day a woman suddenly wrote to me from Novosibirsk: “Am I writing to the right person? My father served in an aviation unit; he wrote down various details of everyday life and was somewhat skeptical in his outlook. I don’t know whether it would interest you.” Of course it would. “But it is all so fragile. I am prepared to send you the original, but on the other hand I am afraid to part with it.” “Photograph it,” I told her. Then silence; she disappeared. Two months later she sent both photographs and what she had managed to decipher. An astonishing diary. A man from a village, with a little education, recorded what an ordinary real village person thought, felt and experienced in 1941–42. Separate notes. It is living life. There were many such things. And I appeal to all of you: if any of you, or your acquaintances, or anyone else has something like this, my email address and office telephone can be found on the HSE website—send it. Remarkable things have been sent to us, and we are still working through them.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

Oleg Vitalyevich, I would like to clarify the issue of verification and the factual reliability of such sources. We have already said that we are talking about a rather particular country, one that was not entirely free. A country in which, forgive me for the involuntary and perhaps not entirely exact quotation, the author at some point pulls himself up. So how much can such material be trusted? Do you have to look for a first and second layer in such documents, to understand where the author of a letter is being honest and where he is honest, but not completely?

Oleg Budnitsky:

First, of course, it varies enormously. Texts differ in their degree of frankness. But for me the most important thing is this: a person records things that it was not customary to talk about in later years and that people preferred not to include in memoirs. Why does he write them down without fear? Because he is a genuine Soviet person. He records what he dislikes because, in his mind, these are shortcomings that need to be fought and overcome. I am completely serious. Here is a wounded sergeant, Komsomol member Boris Komsky. I published his diary. He writes: how can Soviet soldiers be treated like this? We have been lying for a fourth day on straw in filth and nobody examines us, nobody changes our dressings, and so on. The very first place he ended up was the Battle of Kursk. He had been at a military school, which is interesting in itself. They were just a few days short of graduation, but everyone was sent to the front because there were not enough men. One myth is that the country had unlimited human resources. It was already clear by the spring of 1942 that those resources were limited. And the idea that losses were simply not counted is absolute mythology. Of course they were counted.

Or take the famous diary I have just published, written by Sergeant and later Lieutenant Gelfand—a huge brick of a book, 750 pages, though the commentary does of course take up a fairly large part. He wrote every day; he was a genuine graphomaniac. That is a rare case. Diaries were usually kept by people who were not right at the front—for example, interpreters. But he was a mortar man; only the infantry had it worse. There were episodes when he literally wrote in a trench. Shelling is going on, a shell falls, somebody is killed—what a pity—and he keeps writing. Something quite incredible. And he is this kind of Soviet person who is constantly fighting shortcomings, teaching everyone political literacy and so on. He records all sorts of unimaginable things without fear. He knows that he is a Soviet person. If the occasion arose, of course, someone might have explained to him who he really was.

Or consider Nikolai Nikulin’s memoirs. Yes, they were written after the war. They were written as a reaction to anniversary chatter. And despite the fact that they were written thirty years after the end of the war, I trust this source a great deal. There are two reasons. First, the author wrote the text knowing that it would never be published. In the end it was published, but he died shortly before that. When memoirs are written in the Soviet period and not for publication, they can contain very interesting things. Second, he was of course an intellectual. Although he had completed only nine or ten years of school, he had visited the Hermitage since childhood and eventually became curator of part of the Hermitage’s painting collection. That ability to reflect and to remember is also not very common. So I trust Nikulin’s memoirs. I even borrowed from him the phrase that the main themes of soldiers’ conversations were death, food and sex. Completely normal, just as among soldiers in every army in the world. I served in the Soviet army, though not in wartime, of course. I can say that the conversations were no different, except that we did not think about death. But if you read certain published texts, they are all about the motherland, the Party and so on.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

A useful clarification, because many people had the impression that the history-and-English faculty spared you from the Soviet Army.

Oleg Budnitsky:

Ours was a pedagogical institute, and we did not even have a military department. The fairer part of humanity predominated there. For the pitiful ten or twelve specimens of the male sex, they were not going to establish a military department. So I volunteered for the Soviet Army. I could have avoided serving by working as a teacher in a rural area; teachers were not drafted.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

You decided the Soviet Army was the lesser of two evils.

Oleg Budnitsky:

I was young, twenty-two. I thought: am I really going to spend five years teaching? I had a girlfriend in Leningrad. I thought, I’ll just go off to the army quickly. If I had had a realistic idea of what the Soviet Army was like, I would have thought very carefully. But nevertheless I made the decisive move and served my year. Well, there were some interesting impressions.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

Friends, let me clarify that you will have an opportunity to ask questions. It will come very soon. Oleg Vitalyevich, before I hand full control over to the audience, I actually wanted to ask you one and a half final questions of my own. First, a very short, conceptual question. When we speak about the state and the state’s attitude toward the war, one of the most frightening concerns from a human point of view is often voiced: soon the last veterans will be gone, soon the last people who saw the war will be gone, and then what? We will lose living memory, so we must urgently collect it, talk to veterans, record them on video and do everything we can. Forgive me if this sounds cynical, but from your human and professional point of view, will anything change when there truly are no longer any people alive who saw and remember the past war?

Oleg Budnitsky:

God grant them all health and many, many years of life. But I am afraid the train has already left. First, human memory is rather fragile. Second, you know there has been an entire industry of interviewing veterans. There are websites containing probably thousands of veterans’ interviews. They need to be used very cautiously. Some people think they are supposed to say what they are supposed to say, and usually one can see it. Some people have already seen and read so much that one memory sometimes replaces another. I am not saying this about everyone, but I have noticed such cases. A veteran, for example, is clearly retelling the film Enemy at the Gates and thinks it happened to him. Nevertheless, one can find information in any such interview. There is a simple principle: pay attention not to what the narrator wants to tell you, but to what he does not attach importance to, what he mentions incidentally. As a rule, that is more reliable. If someone says he killed fifty Germans, one can wonder whether that really happened. But if he tells you about a problem with a button and exactly what that button was like, I think that probably did happen. In such cases I use a remarkable interview about the Totskoye camps as an example. People were being trained there for combat, but they were terribly hungry. The country was in an extremely difficult food situation. The young soldiers training there were starving; this runs like a red thread through many accounts. But one man says: no, everything was fine. He was a former Party worker. Everything was wonderful; he was young, of course, so naturally he wanted to eat. Whatever he is asked in the interview, he reproduces the Soviet history textbook. And then suddenly he loses his vigilance: “We came back from exercises and had only just sat down to eat when suddenly another order came to continue some training. I had just reached the food, so I took my porridge and put it in my pocket, and afterward the others said, ‘Wow, how did you think of that?’” And then he ate that porridge from his pocket. Imagine how hungry a person must be to put porridge in his pocket. This “porridge in the pocket,” so to speak, appears in many interviews, in one context or another. A person tells you something like that without attaching importance to it, and from such little details one can build a reasonably reliable picture of wartime everyday life. I do not mean that interviews never contain important information when a person simply tells what happened. People differ. Sometimes information can be verified through the accounts of others, through other documents, and so on, and then one can work with it. But in my view interviews conducted decades after the war are not especially reliable sources. I would not rely heavily on them.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

We naturally ask all your colleagues, especially those in the natural sciences, about the Nobel Prize—about something that sets a standard and a benchmark for everyone, something supreme. Clearly it is a little strange to ask a historian about the Nobel Prize because there is no Nobel Prize in history, and really no obvious equivalent in the historical profession. So my first question is: do you think such a thing is needed? Does the community need some prize, mark of distinction, medal? And if so, to whom would you award it—or at least according to what principle?

Oleg Budnitsky:

Well, I would not object to there being a Nobel Prize for historians. Why not? Historians have in fact received Nobel Prizes twice—not in history, but in literature. One went to the German historian Theodor Mommsen for his five-volume History of Rome in 1902. Another went to Winston Churchill for his history of the Second World War. True, I do not see either Mommsen or Churchill around us, so for the time being the Nobel Prize can rest. But there are other prizes. There is the Enlightener Prize, established by the now defunct Dynasty Foundation. Sitting in the front row today is my colleague Oleg Vitalyevich Khlevniuk, who received the Enlightener Prize for his book Stalin: The Life of One Leader. There are other prizes of that kind too, though I cannot immediately recall many in Russia. Americans have a great number of prizes for books. There is the American Association for Slavic Studies—it has a somewhat different name now—which holds annual conventions and awards prizes in many categories.

We now have no fewer than three historical associations. There is the Russian Historical Society, chaired by the chairman of the State Duma, Mr. Naryshkin. There is the Russian Military Historical Society, chaired by the Minister of Culture, Mr. Medinsky, author of the famous books called War, for which advertisements of this “remarkable” work hung along the roads. And there is the Free Historical Society. I do not know whether it has a chairman.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

Judging by the name, it should not.

Oleg Budnitsky:

But as far as I know, none of these associations, which command differing degrees of respect, has thought of establishing any prizes. I would like to say something else, though. Svetlana Alexievich recently received the Nobel Prize in Literature. It is quite obvious that this prize was not entirely for literature. With all respect to Svetlana Alexievich, it would be difficult to call her a great writer. Rather, it was for a particular direction: what is called non-fiction, the literature of fact. She made her name precisely with a book about women at war, The Unwomanly Face of War. In my view that book cannot in any sense be regarded as a historical source. One voice is heard throughout it—the voice of Svetlana Alexievich. Nevertheless, this is a sign that the world values the literature of fact. In that sense it is a good signal for historians. There were interesting debates among historians; a journal interviewed people on the subject. Historians immediately became indignant: “Now we are all finished! What Alexievich does is not real history, but now everyone will take it for real history, woe is us.” I said we should be pleased, because it drew attention to the field. We will sort out the distinctions somehow. So there is an interesting aspect to it.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

My very last question. I am shamelessly stealing the audience’s time already, but forgive me, I cannot resist my curiosity. If possible, give a concise answer—yes or no, one sentence. In principle, in the modern world, a world in which we know as much as we now know, is a historical statement or synthesis comparable in scale and force to what Mommsen and Churchill produced even theoretically possible? Or are we already so deeply immersed in details that it is difficult even to imagine such fundamental histories?

Oleg Budnitsky:

I hope it is possible. There are books that generate great public interest, not merely specialist historical interest. As a rule, however, historians are rather skeptical of such books. Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, for example: a speculative book, but very successful. There are several other works of a similar format. There are historians—this is especially characteristic of Britain—who specialize in what I call “history for the poor,” in the sense that it is popularized history. On the one hand, such books claim to be scholarly works; on the other, they are written for the general public. On the whole, however, they are not harmful if we are talking about popularizing history. Max Hastings in Britain, for example. Orlando Figes, whose reliability as the author of some historical works is questionable. But these are readable books. In the end they help popularize our craft, and I do not think that is harmful.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

Well then, friends, we have reached the point when you have an opportunity to ask questions.

Question:

Please tell us, will the truth about the Finnish War ever be told?

Oleg Budnitsky:

First of all, I am wary of using words such as “truth.” Let us put it this way: do we have qualified studies of the Finnish War? Yes, we do. As far as the Finnish War is concerned, in my view it has been studied reasonably well. There are quite a few documentary publications and studies. Offhand I cannot name one particular work, but there have been enough of them, by both Russian and foreign historians. Even Marshal Mannerheim’s memoirs have been published. There was also a joint, thick book by Russian and Finnish historians in which both sides carried out research. So the situation with the Finnish War is quite respectable.

Question:

Are there archives concerning those missing in action?

Oleg Budnitsky:

You know, all that is open. Moreover, it is all available on the Internet. The Ministry of Defense has a database called “Memorial.” It lists the names of all those killed and missing in action to the extent that information about them exists. Unfortunately, for an enormous number of people who disappeared, all that is known is that they disappeared. This is not a matter of someone wanting or not wanting to conceal something. Alas, it was such a meat grinder, such slaughter, that for a huge number of people we simply do not know how they died. “Missing in action” generally means killed.

Question:

What is your attitude toward Viktor Suvorov’s works on the history of the war?

Oleg Budnitsky:

Well, I have no particular attitude toward Suvorov’s works. They are outside scholarly historiography—speculative works of that kind. The first book did some good. It prompted historians either to respond to or to agree with certain ideas of Suvorov. A major debate arose, and it produced a fairly substantial body of literature, including some quite decent books. In that sense it provoked scholarly discussion.

Question:

Oleg Vitalyevich, as a professional historian, do you personally feel any constraint or barriers imposed by the state through various laws on preserving the memory of the war?

Oleg Budnitsky:

No. I have spoken about this repeatedly in the media. Whenever something new appears, one radio station or another calls and asks what I think. I think these laws are unnecessary. There are already laws dealing with insults and other such matters. There is no need to adopt a special law. In practice none of it really works. As you know, Karamzin once said that in Russia the existence of bad laws is compensated for by their bad enforcement—something like that. I remember there was some commission on the falsification of history. I do not know what exactly was meant by that, but the commission existed for a while and then dissolved. It is unclear why such things are done. In my view it is simply an attempt by certain political figures to draw attention to themselves. I see neither real sense nor substance in it.

Question:

I wanted to give an example. The remarkable newspaper Arguments and Facts wrote that the Germans had an absolute advantage in the number of aircraft. The question is why they write things like that.

Oleg Budnitsky:

First, different media outlets cover events differently. I would not exactly advise you never to take information from a newspaper publication, but I would advise checking it. Journalists are not professional historians. They obtain their information from historians as well.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

In the best case, speaking as a journalist.

Oleg Budnitsky:

Sometimes they decide that somebody is a historian. If he has published a book, then he must be a historian. I hope I do not offend anyone, but when you enter a bookstore, the shelves of books about the war are probably among the most extensive. About ninety percent is simply rubbish—waste paper. There is an entire population of so-called “historians” who write this sort of thing, practically turning out a book a day. Journalists sometimes take material from them. Sometimes they search for information independently and encounter texts of that kind. On the one hand, I would not judge them too harshly. On the other hand, in the USSR, which I have spoken of negatively today, there was one useful practice: information was checked. There were people who actually verified factual details. I have the impression that in contemporary media the factual basis is very often not checked at all. Hence all sorts of blunders.

Let me tell you an amusing story involving Arguments and Facts, so that everything is not quite so gloomy. I published a book—you mentioned it today—The Money of the Russian Emigration: Kolchak’s Gold. It is about the fate of the part of the Russian Empire’s gold reserves that fell into Kolchak’s hands and later came to be called “Kolchak’s gold.” As you know, people search for it—at the bottom of lakes, in abandoned mines, in various other places. In the book I showed where it all went: there is nothing to search for; it was all spent. Then, suddenly, a female journalist called me at night while I was on a business trip in New York. She urgently needed material. “Lake Baikal—you say no gold can be found there?” Of course it cannot, because it is not there and never could have been. “Let me interview you.” So we did the interview. I explained that all the documents concerning the gold and the money received for it have survived in those embassy archives—everything, down to the last centime. For example, even a bill for, I think, a dollar and a half has survived for exterminating “various kinds of insects” in the building of the Russian trade mission in New York. This was in 1920. Obviously it meant killing cockroaches. An ambassador saw cockroaches, they bought pesticide and killed them. Fine, I told the story. She then sent me the text. Never mind the headline strap—“AiF Has Found Kolchak’s Gold”—the main title was “Golden Cockroaches.” I said, “I will not be able to show my face to my colleagues after an interview appears under a title like that.” “Oh, but the editor has already looked at it and approved it.” “I will sue both you and your editor.” I was terribly menacing. Apparently I frightened them somehow. In the end they changed the title. This illustrates the level of some journalists. Unfortunately, this is the world we live in. Standing here in the House of Journalists, I can say that journalists differ. There are wonderful journalists. And there are… other journalists.

Nikita Belogolovtsev:

Oleg Vitalyevich, I will tell you that slightly different headlines are fashionable now. Today that interview would be called “Cockroaches, Luxurious Dinners, and 15 More Things Kolchak’s Gold Was Spent On.” That is the fashion now. To conclude our conversation I would like to give you a souvenir. As you know, theater begins with the coat rack. Our ProScience Theater begins with a ProScience coat hanger. Now you will have your own personalized, signed one. Thank you very much, Oleg Vitalyevich, for being with us today. And thank you very much, dear friends, for coming.

I will also announce that the next ProScience Theater performance will take place in a little less than a month, on 14 March. The speaker will be the well-known astronomer Vladimir Surdin, senior research fellow at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute and associate professor at the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University. The topic is “Misconceptions and Myths About the Universe.” Please come. A transcript of today’s conversation and these wonderful photographs are available on the polit.ru website.

Once again, thank you very much for being with us. Until we meet again.

Oleg Budnitsky:

Thank you. Thank you to everyone who came.

© Polit.ru