During World War Two, a 20 year old female Soviet sniper killed 59 Nazis. This is her diary.
Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday in the UK. Up and down Britain folk gathered round memorials to silently remember the fallen from two World Wars.
With many western democracies now looking shoogly, and relations between old friends turning to rivalries, it’s worth recalling what happened last time things got out of hand, and the unity of effort it took to restore some kind of order — not only by the Brits and Americans, but by a huge variety of countries whose politicians shared little, as is increasingly the case again these days.
Which brings me to Russia.
It’s quite a thought that for every name carved on a British cenotaph, there are the names of 28 Soviets, each immortalised somewhere in the former USSR. We don’t hear much about it, though they fought the same enemy as Britain and America. Nor does their enormous sacrifice stop senior British politicians from comparing modern Russia to Nazi Germany. That’s one reason why this is an important story. 10.6 million soldiers from Russia and the other Soviet republics died over a period of four years in a smallish area of Eastern Europe, fighting the…
