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Russian revenge

James Delingpole

Wednesday, 12th November 2008

James Delingpole looks back on recent TV broadcasts

You’re a middle-class Pole living in modest bourgeois comfort in a detached house in the handsome Austro–Hungarian city of Lwow in 1939 when there’s a knock at the door. Two officers from the newly arrived Soviet army of occupation have come to tell you that from now on all bar one of the rooms in your house are theirs. Everything in the house belongs to them too, including all your mother’s lovely clothes which you’ll soon see being flaunted by the Soviet officers’ vulgar wives.

Or maybe you live in a fine old country house and your father is one of the war heroes who saw off the Russians in 1920. Big mistake that, because one of the Russians your father beat was Stalin and he’s had a chip on his shoulder ever since. By way of revenge, he has ordered the NKVD to scour the land for Polish veterans who beat him. Now you have precisely half an hour to grab what belongings you can and leave your home for good.

That’s if your father’s lucky. If he happens to belong to the hated Polish officer class, he will perhaps end up in Kalinin prison where he’ll be extensively interrogated. There, one night, he will be led down a corridor to an empty cell with a wall of sandbags in front and worrying stains on the floor, the door will be closed behind him to muffle the noise from his comrades, and a man with a brown leather apron and brown leather gauntlets will shoot him in the back of the head. His body will then be thrown in a mass grave with some 20,000 others in the forests of Katyn.

No matter how many times you read or hear about the monstrous things Stalin did, the mind still boggles at what an unutterable bastard he was. At least as bad as Hitler — and responsible for more deaths — he has, despite the best efforts of writers from Robert Conquest to Simon Sebag Montefiore, had a relatively easier ride of it. World War II: Behind Closed Doors (BBC2, Monday) is one more step towards rectifying this ongoing imbalance.

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ian skidmore

November 13th, 2008 10:44am

A perfectly valid question. A "conchie" I know dropped with the paratroops at Arnhem as a medical orderly VOLUNTEER

W. Woodbine

November 15th, 2008 4:41pm

It was easy to spot the really bad guys of WWII in this programme. Apart from looking as if they were auditioning for the part of Herr Flick, they were continuously lighting cigarettes. This now seems to be a theatrical measure of vileness (including pipe smokers. see Stalin). Did they clear the set to avoid the subsequent litigation by any passive smoking Beeb employees? In the same vein, how long will it be before Hitler is depicted as a secret 20 a day man?

Ch. Lazarski

November 18th, 2008 5:16am

The number of over 20 million Soviet victims in WW II has been questioned for some time. Some historians point out that a lot of those who perished might have been victims of Stalin's crime, and the Soviet simply use the war to put a blame on Hitler.

Ibrat Jumaboyev

November 18th, 2008 1:38pm

Even Soviets themselves knew what a grade-A **** Stalin was, so you are not inventing anything new, Mr Delingpole. I am an Uzbek who lost a grandfather and several great-uncles in the war, and it is frankly disgusting to read that you think we deserved it. I often meet people like you who are stuck in that cold war mentality and still see the Soviet Union, which does not exist anymore, by the way, as an evil empire with nothing humane about it. You mind is as narrow as any of the hawks in the US. Move one.