Ceausescu remains exhumed

by Kathryn Hadley,


Last Wednesday, July 21st, forensic scientists in Romania exhumed what are believed to be the remains of the former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena. Samples were taken from the couple’s grave following doubts that they were really buried in the Ghencea military cemetery in west Bucharest.

The couple’s late daughter Zoia Ceausescu had sued the defence ministry in 2005 saying she had doubts that her parents were buried in the cemetery. When she died in 2006 her brother Valentin, the Ceausescu’s only surviving son, and her husband Mircea Oprean pursued the case.

Nicolae Ceausescu (1918-89) became General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party in 1965; however his government was overthrown during the anti-communist revolution in December 1989. Ceausescu and his wife were executed on December 25th, 1989. They were incidentally the last people to be executed in Romania before the abolition of capital punishment on January 7th, 1990.

According to official reports the DNA tests could take up to six months.

The exhumation is symptomatic of Romania’s struggle to come to terms with its communist past. In Coming to Terms with the Past: Romania Markus Bauer hopes that Romania’s new membership of the European Union will enable it to face down the ghosts of its troubled twentieth-century past.

Views of Bloody Sunday then and now

by Kathryn Hadley

‘Will unsullied evidence ever be obtained on which definitive judgements can be made? Will not the emotiveness of the events preclude such definition? And would the truth be believed by all parties if it was obtained?’

Those were the questions asked by Dr Anthony Seldon about the events of Bloody Sunday in an article published in History Today almost twenty years ago, in November 1991.

Seldon’s article examined the dividing line between history and current affairs and was part of a special supplement entitled ‘Secret History’, which explored the issues raised by a series of ‘secret history’ documentaries being screened at the time on Channel 4. The Channel 4 series aimed to use new evidence and re-interpretation to uncover the ‘historical truth’ about a wide range of controversial historical events in the 20th century. In his introduction to the series, Channel 4’s then controller of factual programmes, John Willis, described the aim of the series: ‘to establish the firm truths underlying the welter of hearsay, propaganda and partial recollection that obscures so much of our knowledge of the past’.

Twenty years later, have Anthony Seldon’s questions not been answered with yesterday’s publication of the long-awaited Saville report? Has the ‘truth’ about the events of Bloody Sunday not been established at last?

There certainly appeared to be no doubt in David Cameron’s mind about the conclusions of Lord Saville’s report as he delivered his speech, yesterday, to the House of Commons: ‘The conclusions of this report are absolutely clear. There is no doubt. There is nothing equivocal. There are no ambiguities. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong’.

Footage of Cameron’s speech is available on the website of the BBC.

Image:

Bernard McGuigan lying dead on Bloody Sunday (Channel 4), published in Secret History (November 1991).

Our Tribute to Michael Foot

by Kathryn Hadley

Michael Foot died at his home in Hampstead yesterday, March 3rd, aged 96. Born in Plymouth on July 23rd, 1913, he was then educated at Leighton Park School in Reading. He went on to study Classics at Wadham College, Oxford, and in 1933 was elected president of the Oxford union.

Foot first contested a seat for the Labour Party in 1935. He lost, however, and moved to London where he worked as a journalist for the New Statesman, Tribune and the London Evening Standard for the following ten years. He edited the Tribune from 1948 to 1952, and again from 1955 to 1960. As a journalist, he led the denunciation of Nazi appeasement and in 1940 wrote Guilty Men with Peter Howard and Frank Owen, attacking fifteen public figures for their policy towards Nazi Germany. The book was reviewed in History Today by John Charmley in 1999.

Foot was first elected to parliament in 1945 as an MP for the Plymouth Devonport constituency. He remained in parliament until 1992. In the 1950s he was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a cause for which he fought for over 40 years. In March 1974, following Labour’s return to power, he became employment secretary under Harold Wilson and was then deputy prime minister to Jim Callaghan from 1976 to 1979. The following year, he was elected Labour leader. He resigned, however, following the Tory victory in the 1983 elections and was succeeded by Neil Kinnock.

Michael Foot was also a prolific writer and notably the author of a two-volume biography of Aneurin Bevan entitled The Pen and the Sword (1962 and 1973), The Politics of Paradise (1988), a book on Byron, and The History of Mr Wells (1995). His last book was The Uncollected Michael Foot (2003).

Obituaries, tributes and photographs of the ex-Labour leader are all over the newspapers. Michael Foot wrote an article for History Today entitled Thomas Carlyle and the London Library in April 1991 in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the London Library. Our picture editor, Sheila Corr, had the privilege of working with Michael Foot on his biography of H.G. Wells. Here is her tribute to Michael Foot:

‘Back in 1995 I was lucky enough to work with Michael Foot on his biography HG: The History of Mr Wells. I explained that I would seek out
photographs which showed Wells, his friends and colleagues at the time he knew
them (as anything else would feel anachronistic) and that I’d also research
cartoons, books and drawings to give the picture sections variety and interest.
He liked this approach - intellectually he was fascinated by how other people
work, and he was enthusiastic and appreciative about the material I found. For
example, as an editor himself, he was highly amused that the editors Wells
worked for were all photographed in identical quizzical poses with their heads
resting lightly on a hand.

Two pictures I found brought an unexpected
response. The KGB around this time claimed he had acted as their agent, and The Sunday Times printed the story. When I showed him a photograph of
Wells with Ivan Maisky, the popular and sociable Soviet Ambassador to London, he
said incredulously ‘this is the man I’m supposed to have passed secrets to’.
Michael Foot’s patriotism was apparent, and his personality seemed disinclined
to any deviousness – he was proud to have been friendly with Maisky and
successfully sued the newspaper.

When HG Wells died in 1946, Vicky drew
a cartoon which shows him as superman going skywards in a T shirt inscribed
‘Mind at the end of its tether’. I didn’t know until he told me then, that Vicky
was a great friend who had committed suicide in 1966, and I was afraid that I’d
inadvertently opened old wounds for him, but he was completely delighted to
include the cartoon as the final picture in the book and a fitting tribute to
his friend.’

Foot's obituary is notably published in The Guardian.
There is a slideshow of images of Foot on the website of The Times as well as a picture gallery charting his career on The Guardian website.

Mandela’s former office in Johannesburg: a derelict squat

Mandela’s former office in Johannesburg: a derelict squat
Chancellor House once housed Nelson Mandela’s law firm, which was the first black law firm in Johannesburg. The building is now in ruins and is occupied by squatters. There are plans to turn the office into a legal resource centre for young black lawyers. However, efforts to raise the necessary funds to relocate the squatters and legal negotiations have been dragging on for the past ten years.
Andrew Harding reports on BBC Radio 4.
For further information on the history of South Africa, visit our South Africa focus page.

The death of palaeography
Professor David Ganz from King’s College London is the current holder of the UK’s only chair in palaeography. The university has, however, recently, announced its decision to close the chair from September onwards. The subject will no longer exist as a separate academic discipline in British universities. Ganz has now begun to ‘fight for his subject’ and many of the world’s most eminent classicists have petitioned King’s College to reconsider its position. John Crace explains in The Guardian why the study of ancient manuscripts matters and why history will be lost without it.

The Staffordshire Hoard returns home
On Saturday, the Staffordshire Hoard will go on display, for the first time, in the county in which the treasure was found, at the Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent.
Maev Kennedy reports in The Guardian.
The Staffordshire Hoard
February 13th – March 7th
The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery
Bethesda Street, HanleyStoke-on-Trent ST1 3DW
Telephone: 01782 232323
www.stoke.gov.uk

The Nazification of Carnival under the Third Reich
Siobhán Dowling reports in Der Spiegel Online on how the Nazi regime used Carnival, the pre-Lent festival celebrated predominantly in the Catholic west and south of Germany, as a propaganda tool to put forward their own notions of the German nation. There is also a slideshow of images of Carnival celebrations from the time.

Alfred Gregory: Official photographer on the 1953 Everest expedition
Alfred Gregory was the official photographer to the British expedition that made the first ascent of Everest, in 1953. He died on Tuesday, February 9th, aged 96. His obituary was published yesterday in The Independent.

Chamberlain’s 1938 plane ticket to Munich sold for over £9,000

by Kathryn Hadley

Two weeks ago today, we reported on the upcoming auction of Neville Chamberlain’s British Airways plane ticket to Munich. He flew out on September 29th, 1938, at 8.30am. The following day, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain and Daladier signed the Munich Agreement. The ticket was auctioned by Mullock’s on Tuesday January 19th. It was expected to fetch between £5,000 and £7,000.

The final selling price was considerably higher than expected. The ticket sold for £9,280. Richard Westwood-Brookes from Mullock’s Auctioneers was unable to tell me the name of the buyer, but confirmed this morning that he was a private individual. It is also believed that the British buyer purchased the ticket with the view to donating it to a British museum. More to follow…

Above is a photograph of the ticket and the envelope belonging to George William Denny MBE, one of the founders of British Airways, inside which it was recently discovered.

The holiday resort built among the ruins of a former communist gulag in Romania

by Kathryn Hadley

Under the leadership of the Stalinist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (1901-1965), the Danube-Black Sea Canal was one of the most notorious forced labour sites. Gheorghiu-Dej was in office as the Romanian Communist Party first secretary from both 1945 to 1954 and then 1955 to 1965. The village of Periprava, on the Danube Delta, 19 miles from the place where the northern branch of the Danube empties into the Black Sea and against the old border with the Soviet Union, existed as a communist gulag until 1977. It is estimated that over 100 unidentified bodies of some of the prisoners who died in the camp are buried in the village cemetery. 42 prisoners are believed to have died during the winter of 1959/60 alone.

A tourist resort has now been built on the site of the former gulag by a French entrepreneur, Sylvain Remetter. Guests sleep in the four-star ‘Last Border’ Hotel, which previously housed the office of the commandant of the Periprava Labour and Prison Camp. The first tourist arrived in October.

Remetter allegedly plans to build a small museum in remembrance of the hundreds of prisoners who died in the camp. There is currently no memorial to the dead, however, other than a white cross with no inscription in the cemetery.

Walter Mayr reports in Der Spiegel.
In Coming to Terms with the Past: Romania, Markus Bauer considers how Romania’s new membership of the European Union, in 2007, would enable it to face down the ghosts of its troubled twentieth-century past.

The legend of Mitterrand’s opposition to German reunification

by Kathryn Hadley

What if Mitterrand’s alleged opposition to German unification was no more than a myth? Was Thatcher thus the only leader opposed to German unification? How far did Thatcher's views represent those of Britain as a whole? Maybe her alleged opposition to unification too was merely a legend? Or maybe these are the wrong questions to ask? If German unification was inevitable, perhaps the questions to be posed are slightly more complex.

These were some of the questions raised by an impressive panel of speakers at a conference held at the residence of the French Ambassador to the UK last week. The conference, entitled ‘France, Britain, German unification and European construction: Twenty years after the Fall of the Wall’, was organised to mark the launch of the latest book by Frederic Bozo, Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War, and German Unification. Bozo is professor in contemporary history and international relations at the Sorbonne. Speakers included Bozo himself, Professor Michael Cox from the LSE, Professor Patrick Salmon, chief historian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Jean Mendelson, the director of the French national archives. The hugely engaging and stimulating discussion was chaired by James Blitz, the Diplomatic Editor of the Financial Times.

In his book, Bozo argues, against the dominant view, that Mitterrand was against German unification, and that he sought to oppose it. The French president’s alleged opposition was a ‘legend’. French policies were undoubtedly different to German and American policies and these differences, at times, caused disagreement between the three countries. Historiography is also dominated by the American viewpoint, which has caused French policies of German unification, in favour of a unified Germany within a European framework, to be largely overlooked.

Mitterrand was thus not opposed to German unification. According to Bozo, he was ‘intellectually ready’ and the German question was at the heart of French policies. He did not try to block German unification, but merely sought to slow down and control the process in order to embed it in a European framework. Bozo quoted Mitterrand: ‘German unification is legitimate provided it is done peacefully and democratically’. In Mitterrand’s opinion, German unification should not be a takeover, and should be compatible with international defence arrangements. Mitterrand may not have actively sought to oppose the unification process; however, is Bozo’s study not overly positive? Moreover, if Mitterrand was in favour of German unification, was Thatcher then the only leader who voiced her opposition?

Following his study of British diplomatic documents for his work on Britain and German Unification 1989-90, Patrick Salmon was largely in agreement with Bozo: Mitterrand was in favour of German unification, albeit within a European framework. But, in his view, French opposition was not the only ‘legend’; British opposition was also a myth. Thatcher did not impede unification either, and he argued that there was a certain passivity about Thatcher and a fundamental gulf between her words and her actions. Her public rhetoric was, above all, ‘a way of letting off steam’ and the documents reveal how close British and French views were in reality. British and French views were divided primarily over Germany’s position in Europe. Another difference was that British diplomats had to work against the grain and wear down Thatcher’s opposition.

Neither Mitterrand, nor Thatcher, were thus opposed to German unification. The issue is, however, slightly more complex. The unification process was widely perceived as inevitable and, in this sense, it is unrealistic to think that Mitterrand or Thatcher would have publically opposed it. According to Michael Cox we are thus asking the wrong question. The question is not ‘did Mitterrand slow down the process of unification’. Indeed, in the face of the inevitability of German unification, it would have been an embarrassment to do so. Instead, the question should be: ‘was it reasonable for people to ask questions about a process that was already underway?’. A key issue was thus Gorbachev’s position within the process: would Gorbachev be brought down if the process got out of control? Was it important to keep Gorbachev within the unification process?

Finally, a key issue to consider is the extent to which Thatcher’s views were representative of those of British diplomats as a whole. What was Britain? With a strong leader such as Thatcher, there was a danger that her views obscured those of the policymakers who worked behind the scenes. Cox quoted a British draft paper on German unification to reveal an altogether different view to that publically voiced by Thatcher. The paper was admittedly only a draft; nevertheless, it stated that although there were ‘various disadvantages’ to reunification, ‘these aspects should not be exaggerated’ and ‘can be easily averted’. It argued in favour of unification provided that Britain could ‘exert influence over the speed and direction’ of the process.

Thatcher’s rhetoric was not just unrepresentative of British views in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO); Cox concluded that Thatcher’s attitude, in fact, put the FCO in a very difficult position: Thatcher was ‘embarrassing and complicating Britain’s position’.


In After the Cold War: The Private Side of German Reunification, part of our short series ‘After the Cold War’ looking at changing attitudes to history in the former Communist states, Paul Betts considers the consequences of the collapse of Soviet Communism in eastern and western Germany.
In The Berlin Wall: A Secret History Frederick Taylor asks whether the barrier between opposing sides of Berlin was more convenient to the Western democracies than their rhetoric suggested.

First Impressions: Moliere or The League of Hypocrites

by Kathryn Hadley

Moliere or The League of Hypocrites opened at the Finborough Theatre last week. Written by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), in 1931, under the Stalinist regime, the play recalls Molière’s fight to keep his integrity during the reign of Louis XIV when his plays were viewed by the Church and court authorities as increasingly subversive. It provides fascinating insights into both the life of Jean-Baptiste Molière (1622-1673) in 17th-century France and the Stalinist regime, of which Bulgakov was a victim.

The play is framed by two scenes in which the ‘scribbler’ records the events of the days on which the play begins and ends. He marks both days ‘with a black cross’. On the first day marked with a black cross, in 1662, Molière marries Armande Béjart, who is significantly younger than him and whom he believes to be his lover Madeleine’s sister. However, Armande was rumoured to be Madeleine’s daughter and the marriage is in the end one of the causes of Molière’s downfall. The play ends, in 1673, on another day marked with a ‘black cross’: the day of Molière’s death during his performance of Le Malade Imaginaire.

Bulgakov’s play provides, first of all, an intriguing insight into the life of one of the most famous French playwrights and the court of Louis XIV. This particular period of French history is vividly brought to life by the excellent staging, costumes, choreography and performances. The hypocrisy and extensiveness of the court is subtly highlighted, for example, by the identical masks worn by the women at Louis XIV’s court. The staging of the last scene, during which Molière’s company perform Le Malade Imaginaire, is particularly powerful. The actors chant medical formulae in Latin and oppressively dance around the main character Argan, a hypochondriac who imagines himself sick and scrupulously follows all his doctor’s orders, highlighting the arrogance and pedantry of doctors in 17th-century France, a recurring theme in Molière’s plays.

Beyond 17th-century court life, however, the play acts as a mirror of the time during which Bulgakov wrote and provides a deeper insight into the repression of the Stalinist regime. The story of the attack mounted against Molière’s Tartuffe following its premiere in 1664 hints at similar censorship in Soviet Russia. The play, which mocks a hypocritical priest and his dupes, was viewed as an attack on the Church. The Archbishop of Paris issued a statement excommunicating anyone who performed, watched or even read the play. The play itself was banned.

In a particularly dark and terrifying scene set in the crypt of church, hooded monks from the ‘League of the Holy Writ’ interrogate Zacharie Moirron forcing him to confess that Molière is married to his lover’s daughter, Armande Béjart. In the words of Jean-Jacques Bouton, the theatre factotum, the members of the league ‘take no account of the law so we must be prepared for anything’. Numerous references are made to the dangers of losing the king’s favour and a later scene, during which Moirron is interrogated by the king himself, is a further allusion to the torture and interrogations of the Stalinist era. When Moirron asks what he should do now that he has been banished from Moliere’s theatre company, the king suggests that he might ‘enter the royal service and work for the secret police’.

Bulgakov wrote at the time of the Great Terror in Russia. His plays were gradually banned and he found himself unemployable. His situation at the end of his life closely resembles that of Molière, who is portrayed as a broken man. Molière is old, has a ‘weak heart’ (he was in reality suffering from tuberculosis), has been deprived of the king’s patronage, his wife has left him and his lover is dead.

Excellently staged and performed in this production directed by Blanche McIntyre, a powerful and thought provoking play, which has forced me to reconsider my choice of the best history play of the year for our advent calendar of the top history moments of 2009!

Moliere or the League of Hypocrites
Until December 19th
Finborough Theatre
118 Finborough Road
London SW10 9ED
Telephone: 020 7244 7439
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Photos (by Sheryl Tait):

- Justin Avoth as Molière

- court scene with Gyuri Sarossy as Louis XIV

Preserving public access to over 4,500 boxes of papers relating to Lord Palmerston and Mountbatten: the Broadlands Archives campaign

by Kathryn Hadley

At the end of last week, the University of Southampton launched a campaign to raise the necessary funds to preserve public access in the UK to hundreds of thousands of papers and photographs relating to Lord Mountbatten and Lord Palmerston. The Broadlands Archives have been on loan to the University’s Hartley Library since 1989, where they were transferred from the home of Lord Romsey. They were inherited by Lord Romsey, Mountbatten's grandson, on Mountbatten's assassination by the IRA off the Irish coast on August 27th, 1979. The University now needs to raise 2.85 million to acquire the Broadlands Archives.

The archives are stored in more than 4,500 boxes and include documents which chart the major political, social, diplomatic and economic events of the 19th and 20th centuries. They include 1,200 letters dealing with foreign affairs and general government business from the Queen to Lord Palmerston (1784-1865), who served as Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary and Prime Minister during Queen Victoria’s reign.

There are also 250,000 papers and 50,000 photographs which chart the career of Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1900-1979). In particular, they cover his time as Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia Command (SACSEA) from 1943 to 1946, and as the last Viceroy of India in 1947 and 1948 and the first Governor-General of the newly independent Union of India. Correspondence from this time includes letters from Gandhi and there are also papers and photographs of Mountbatten’s wife Edwina, Countess Mountbatten.

Lastly, the Broadlands Archives include the diaries of the politician and philanthropist Anthony Ashley Cooper (1801-1885), the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. Known as the ‘poor man’s earl’, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury notably fought for the protection of child chimney sweeps and shorter working hours for children and women in factories, and his papers provide an insight into social progress in Victorian England.

In Safe Harbour for Mountbatten Archive Sydney Reynolds reports on the initial transfer of the Broadlands Archives to the Hartley Library in April 1989.

In 1991 we republished a vintage article by AJP Taylor entitled Lord Palmerston and written in July 1951 about the 60 year long career of Lord Palmerston.
Also, for further information on the Indian partition and the role of Lord Mountbatten as the last Viceroy of India, read our article Mountbatten and the Transfer of Power.

Image:
Lord and Lady Mounbatten with Gandhi on the terrace of the Viceroy's House in New Delhi, 1947 (courtesy of The Trustees of the Broadlands Archives)

The Online Encyclopaedia of Mass Violence: calming the dead who still haunt the present

by Kathryn Hadley

What is genocide? What is mass violence? How do historians document genocide and mass violence?
Professor Jacques Sémelin, research director at the Centre for International Studies and Research (CERI), is an expert on genocide based at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris (Sciences Po). He spoke on Thursday, November 12th, at the University of Manchester about his latest project to produce an online record of 20th century acts of mass violence. Dr Jean Marc Dreyfus from the University of Manchester is a member of the project’s steering committee responsible for its implementation and development. Sémelin initiated the project in 2004 and the website was launched four years later. I interviewed Professor Sémelin yesterday.

The origins of the project
Sémelin is the author of Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide and his project to create an electronic database documenting the massacres and genocides of the 20th century came with his book. The book uses a multidisciplinary approach (Sémelin himself began his career as a psychologist and then moved on to study history and sociology) to analyse and compare the mass massacres during the Holocaust, in Rwanda and in Bosnia. With the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence he sought to expand his study to other examples of mass massacre using the same of comparative analysis.

The main aims of the website
The website features articles about acts of violence in the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Rwanda, for example, as well as lesser known cases in Kampuchea, Poland and Tasmania. The purpose of the website is to create a reliable and universal public service accessible to everyone, in countries across the world. It is designed to provide a balanced study of 20th-century massacres in the hope that it will enhance our understanding of such conflicts and the ‘destructive passions’ of men. All contributions are subject to a rigorous selection process. Contributors are given strict guidelines and each contribution is then peer-reviewed. Sémelin also stressed the importance of a multidisciplinary approach due to the complexity of phenomena of mass violence and the site includes articles by historians, as well as demographers, sociologists, anthropologists and NGO staff.

But what qualifies as an act of genocide? How do we define mass murder? How do Sémelin and his team select the cases that are documented on the website?
The section entitled ‘our scientific approach’ on the homepage of the website addresses some of the issues surrounding the definitions of genocide and mass murder.
Defining phenomena of mass violence or genocide is inherently complex in part because notions and perceptions of violence are subject to cultural sensitivities. Definitions of violence change over time and in accordance with the culture of a particular country or region.

‘Genocide’ is also a complex and controversial term. Coined in 1944 by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin, it was then applied to international law in the Convention for the Prevention and Repression of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the United Nations on December 9th, 1948. In the aftermath of the Second World War, it was primarily used to refer to the crimes of the Holocaust. Its use then spread over the course of the 20th century to refer to the most horrific of crimes committed against civilian populations. It was even used retroactively to refer to crimes, such as the Armenian genocide in 1915, committed before the term was invented.

The term ‘mass violence’, rather than ‘genocide’, was deliberately chosen because it is more neutral and general, an ‘umbrella notion’. It refers to ‘human phenomena of collective destructiveness that are primarily due to political, social, religious or cultural causes’, committed against non-combatant populations. It excludes cases of technological accidents and natural disasters. References to ‘mass’, ‘mass killing, ‘mass murder’ or ‘mass rape’, is furthermore a 20th-century invention, which reflects the aim of the encyclopedia to document 20th-century cases of violence.

But how then does one define a ‘mass’ phenomenon’? Where does one draw the line?
Another inherent problem to the definition of ‘mass violence’ is that it is, in many cases, very difficult to evaluate precisely numbers of victims. Sémelin stated 50 as the minimum number of victims for a case to qualify as ‘mass violence’.

Documenting mass violence is inevitably bound-up in a web of subjective and conflicting memories. What effects have issues of memory had on the project to construct a neutral and balanced website documenting all sides of the conflict?
Issues of memory are at the core of the project not least because, in Sémelin’s words, ‘memory is always in the present’. Memory is particularly an issue when dealing with relatively recent conflicts, such as the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s or the violence in Darfur. In Algeria the conflict of 20 years ago is still taboo; in Darfur it remains impossible to access the area or any documents on the conflict. Sémelin quoted William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun to summarise the everlastingness of memory: 'The past is never dead. It’s not even past’.

One of his key aims is to examine ‘how we speak of the dead in the present’. In his view, historians speak of the dead in different ways: some view themselves as judges of the past and seek to redress the injustices of the past by writing a version of history which avenges the dead; others, Sémelin included, view themselves as ‘pacifying’ historians with no particular allegiance and whose role it is to facilitate the work of memory by considering each party’s memory of events. The role of history and of the project is to ‘calm the dead who still haunt the present, and to offer them scriptural tombs’ (Michel de Certau, The Writing of History).

Sémelin's project is a massive one, which is hugely complex and never-ending. But it is also fascinating, of undeniable necessity and of great interest to follow.

For further information visit the website http://www.massviolence.org/

The Collapse of Communism in Europe: A Re-examination 20 Years After

by Kathryn Hadley

Why did communist systems in Europe collapse twenty years ago? A big question. A question that has been repeatedly asked and a question that has been tentatively answered time and time again.

It was the question that a panel of six speakers sought to answer yesterday evening at The British Academy. All speakers were present and involved in various ways in the events and through each of their presentations they sought to both recapture the spirit and views of the time and to assess the latest research. Speakers included the British academic Professor Timothy Garton Ash; Dr Andrei Grachev, who was Deputy Head of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1990 and Presidential Press Spokesman for Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991; Bridget Kendall, the BBC Moscow correspondent at the time; US Professor Robert Legvold; the Hungarian Professor Ferenc Miszlivetz, who was part of a Hungarian movement promoting East-West dialogue; and Dr Lilia Shevtsova, who was Deputy Director of the Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System in Moscow in 1989.

How were the changes perceived at the time? Was there a sense of the scale of events? Did people know that communist systems in Europe were about to collapse?

Professor Timothy Garton Ash warned against the dangers of studying the events in retrospect and of ‘hindsight bias’. In the light of these ‘illusions of retrospective’, even asking such questions may be misleading. There is a tendency to believe that the collapse of communism was bound to happen. However, it is not lose sight of what Garton Ash described as the ‘real alternatives that were there at the time’ and to examine why these real alternatives did not happen.

Indeed, most speakers stressed the unexpected outcome of the events at the time. According to Garton Ash, it is impossible to recapture the excitement of the time and times were exciting because nobody knew what would happen the following day. The outcome was also unexpected for Gorbachev. Bridget Kendall met Gorbachev on various occasions and argued that he did not want the collapse of the communist system. He ‘wanted evolution not revolution’, both to ensure popular support for his policies and that he remained in control.

As a student and member of a small group of East-West dialogue formed in 1985, Ferenc Miszlivetz remembered the hope and optimism of the time. The group sought to ‘give life’ to the Helsinki Accords signed in 1975 by establishing, for the first time, networks between students in the East and West. He described a growing sense of central European ‘togetherness’ which inspired a hope that things were gradually changing. Miszlivetz and members of similar groups that may have contributed to the collapse of communist systems on a local level had no sense, however, of the scale of what would come just a few years later.

If the collapse of communism was so unexpected, how then and why did it eventually fall?

On the whole, historians agree to a variety of causes. The fall of communism was the result of the complex interaction of all these causes on various levels, between different states, but also between states and societies.

Both Dr Andrei Grachev and Dr Lilia Shevtsova argued, however, that the collapse of communism in Russia came primarily from within due to the distinct nature of the Russian communist model. It fell victim to the contradictions of its own identities and ambitions, which were to realise social justice for all and to build and project the image of a Russian superpower in the world.

Shevtsova reiterated the words of Arnold J. Toynbee stressing the ‘suicidal statecraft’ of Russia. It gradually became increasingly difficult to realise these ambitions, in particular as war came to an end and states instead sought cooperation rather than conflict. Dr Lilia Shevtsova highlighted the uniqueness of the Russian civilisation: it was a militarised civilisation, which survived on conflict and war. The Russian economy had best performed in times of war. It was dependent on war and, from the First World War, to the Russian Civil War, the Second World War and the Cold War; war had been a constant feature throughout the 20th century.

Ferenc Miszlivetz thus underlined the importance of the effects of the Helsinki Accords signed in 1975 by the USSR and thirty-two other European states, as well as Canada and the United Sates, in an attempt to improve the relations between the communist bloc and the West.

What is the state of research on the topic today? What is the legacy of the events twenty years ago? Is communism really dead?

According to Professor Timothy Garton Ash, there remains considerable research to be done. To date research has focused on high politics and the picture therefore tends to be skewed towards high politics. However, ‘in key places and at key times’, those on the ground also exerted considerable influence on the outcome of events and there lacks a comprehensive study of the role of revolutionary crowds.

Last month, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) published a series of archived documents on German reunification as part of the Documents on British Policy Overseas (DBPO). The documents provide an insight into official British reactions to the collapse of Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall. FCO in-house historians held a seminar, today, October 16th, to mark the event. However, the documents are restricted, once again, to the realm of high politics.

Finally, what is left of the European communism today, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Although communism as a structure and economy is dead, Ferenc Miszlivetz argued that in contemporary Eastern Europe communism survived as ‘a way of thinking’. He issued the following final words of warning: ‘Be careful when you suggest that something is over; it is over and it is not’.

In many ways the ghost of Soviet Communism still haunts Eastern Europe today. In our latest September and October issues we featured a short series exploring the impact on history and memory of the collapse of Soviet Communism entitled 'After the Cold War'.
In Haunted by Stalin Catherine Merridale examines competing versions of Russia's troubled past in the light of present politics.
In After the Cold War: The Private Side of German Reunification considers the consequences of the collapse of Soviet Communism in Germany.
In After the Cold War: Finland & the Soviets Ed Dutton looks at how the experience of Finland during the period 1945 to 1989 has led to a historical identity crisis for the nation that remains unresolved.

First Impressions: ‘Beatles to Bowie: The 60s Exposed’

by Kathryn Hadley

‘Beatles to Bowie: The 60s Exposed’ opens tomorrow at the National Portrait Gallery to mark the 50th anniversary of the start of the 60s, next year. Showcasing over 150 portraits of the leading pop personalities of the 1960s and a range of memorabilia including record covers and magazines, the exhibition explores the pop scene of ‘Swinging London’. The display is divided into ten sections covering each year of the decade and includes classic images of bands such as The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Kinks and The Who, as well as previously unseen images.

The evolution of the art scene over the decade is striking: the style and techniques of photography changed, as well as, and almost in parallel with, pop music and culture. Most fascinating is the interaction between photography and the pop scene. To what extent did they evolve independently; how far did the two influence one another?

Photography evolved from static black and white portraits to dynamic and colourful photographs taken ‘on the spot’ and depicting artists in action, such as Fiona Adams’ iconic photograph of The Beatles jumping on a wall taken in 1963. The pop scene also became increasingly diverse in terms of style, culture and ethnicity, reflecting the cultural and social developments of the decade. Pure pop was replaced with progressive music and psychedelia and became influenced by new music styles as musicians such as Jemi Hendrix from the United States moved to England.

The exhibition is set against a background of music from the early and late sixties, which can be heard in two different areas of the display and illustrates this stylistic evolution over the course of the decade. A video in the section devoted to the late 1960s also brings some of these icons of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ to life.

The icons of the 1960s pop scene live on in the imagination of generations who were too young to see them perform live and in the memory of those who grew up at the time. The striking portraits on display in ‘Beatles to Bowie’ are a tribute to their influence on the British cultural scene. Despite the music playing in the background, the artists remain, however, surprisingly silent and the exhibition is slightly too static. My request to the disc jockey would be: turn the volume up and let the music play!

Beatles to Bowie: The 60s Exposed
Until January 24th
National Portrait Gallery
St Martin’s Place
London WC2H 0HE
Telephone: 020 7306 0055
http://www.npg.org.uk/

For further information on the history of music, here is a selection of some of our best articles:
20th century:
In ‘You Say You Want a Revolution’ Mikhail Safonov argues that the Beatles did more for the break up of totalitarianism in the USSR than Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov.
Rock 'n' Roll and Social Change Richard Welch charts the explosion of Rock n’ Roll in American music and argues for its impact on society as a whole.
In December 1970 Elvis Presley requested a meeting with President Richard Nixon. In Elvis: Rock‘n’Roll’s Reluctant Rebel Glen Jeansonne and David Luhrssen look at how the King of Rock’n’Roll managed his rule during the cultural shifts of the 1960s.
Django, Jazz and the Nazis in Paris John D. Pelzer charts the development of jazz in France and considers how it became a symbol of resistance to the Nazi regime during the German occupation.
19th century:
In Changing the Tune - Popular Music in the 1890s Ian Bradley considers what qualified as family favourites in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In Political Heroes of the Victorian Music Hall Michael Diamond discusses what popular songs and singers had to say about Britain's politicians in the 1880s and 1890s.

Images:
- The Beatles, 1963 by Fiona Adams (© Fiona Adams)
- Pink Floyd, 1967 by Vic Singh (© Vic Singh)

From the Sultan to Ataturk: ethnic tensions in Turkey today

by Pinar Sevinclidir

It was an ordinary football match in Turkey between Bursaspor, from the northwest of Turkey, and Diyabakirspor, from Diyabakir in the southeast, a city home to over a million Kurds. Tension rose during the game when supporters from the host team Bursaspor brandished Turkish flags and banners calling supporters from the opposite team PKK militants. The match ended with 4 goals and 20 casualties.

This is a current picture of the tension between Turks and Kurds, at a time when the Turkish government intends to restore better ties with its ethnic minorities. Ever since the birth of the new Turkish Republic in 1923, Turkey has been criticised by the international community for the way it has treated its minorities. The most recent and historically relevant criticism is whether a more humanitarian approach could have been adopted towards Ottoman subjects on the way up to the building of new Turkish nation.

Andrew Mango, author of various books on Ataturk and Turkey, seeks to take part in this current debate in his latest book From the Sultan to Ataturk: Turkey. He describes the state of the Ottoman Empire during the negotiations of the Paris Peace Treaties and the ensuing three-year war with Greece. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, Allied Forces gathered in Paris to divide the territory that was known at the time as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’. Anatolia was occupied by Greece and Istanbul was under Allied administration. In 1919, Mustafa Kemal, the founder of modern Turkey, and his friends started the Turkish War of Independence in an attempt to revoke the terms of the Treaty of Sevres. The war ended in July 1923 with the signature of the Treaty of Lausanne.

Mango describes in great detail the fate of the ethnic minorities in Turkey during the war years. The Greek Orthodox population notably fell from 2.5 million in 1914 to 5,000 today. After the last battle in Smyrna (western Turkey) in 1922, 213,000 Greeks, Armenians and other Ottoman subjects were evacuated and replaced with returning Muslim refugees from the Balkans.

According to Andrew Mango’s research, just before the collapse of the Empire, Ottoman officials sought to conclude an armistice with the Allied Forces by using two intermediaries from ethnic minorities. One was the Armenian notable Boghos Nubar Pasha; the other was the secretary to the Greek Patriarchate. However, at the end of the negotiations the Ottomans were left disillusioned as both men pressed for separate states to be carved out of Ottoman territories.

In a speech at his book launch, Mango sought to explain the reasoning behind the decisions taken by Mustafa Kemal and his commanders to extricate Greek and Armenian minorities from Ottoman society.

Mustafa Kemal was clear sighted enough to see that in the division of
spoils the Turks had to fight for their rights. But he was clear sighted enough
also to see that separation did not imply perpetual enmity, that once the Turks
and their erstwhile partners in Ottoman society had regrouped in their separate
national homes, they could and should establish friendly relations across the
new frontiers.

In Mango’s words there is also a lesson to be learnt from this episode of Turkish history.

The break up of mixed societies is continuing, bringing with it the tragedy of
ethnic cleansing. The history of the late Ottoman Empire and of modern Turkey
suggests that the best way to avoid the tragedy is to shore up mixed societies
before they break up. The nationally mixed societies of Bosnia could perhaps
have been preserved before hostilities started. Now the best that can be hoped
for is that the national communities having regrouped in their own areas should
learn to live peacefully side by side. Efforts to mixed them up together in the
old pattern are doomed to failure.

Andrew Mango’s book From the Sultan to Ataturk: Turkey is published by Haus Publishing in the Maker’s of the Modern World series.

In Catastrophe at Smyrna , Matthew Stewart traces the roots of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921-22, and the consequent refugee crisis, to the postwar settlements of 1919-20.
For further information on the impact of Kemal Ataturk, read our article Turkey's Fundamental Dilemma

Germans Want the Berlin Wall Back?

by Kathryn Hadley

A survey published last week by the German magazine Stern revealed that one in seven Germans wanted the Berlin Wall back. Of the country’s 82 million inhabitants, 15% were in favour of the wall because they believed that they were better off during the 28 years that Germany was divided by the Berlin Wall.

The survey was carried out by the Forsa institute, two months ahead of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, 1989. Between September 9th and 10th, 1,002 Germans living in both former eastern and western Germany were questioned. 16% of those living in former West Germany, ‘Wessies’, wanted the wall back, against 11% of ‘Ossies’.

For the most part, those living in western Germany resented paying higher taxes to pay for the rebuilding of the formerly communist east. Over the past twenty years, approximately 1.2 trillion Euros worth of state funds have been transferred to eastern Germany.

Eastern Germans complained, above all, of unequal income levels between western and eastern Germany. In the former GDR income levels are on average only 80% of Western levels. Higher unemployment in former East Germany has also caused depopulation in certain areas of the east. It is estimated that the population has declined by approximately two million since 1990.

55% of Germans believe that unification could be helped if the ‘solidarity tax’ to help fund the costs of rebuilding former East Germany was abolished; 50% argued that higher pensions for easterners would also ease tensions between eastern and western Germany.

In 1985, the American sociologist Richard L. Merritt considered the possible effects of future reunification on the divided city of Berlin. In the light of the results of this recent survey, his words appear somewhat prophetic.

‘If the city is politically amalgamated on the basis of new international
agreements, it will be fairly easy to rebuild a unified municipal government,
and with time it will be possible to construct the links to tie together divided
water and sewage systems, streets and subway lines, and the like. More difficult
to reconstruct will be the sentimental ties of community […] Rebuilding a common
set of expectations, demands and identities among Berliners will doubtless be a
very slow process, quite possibly slower than that which had forced them apart
in the first place’.

In After the Cold War: The Private Side of German Reunification published in our latest, and newly designed, October issue, Paul Betts explains how what Merritt predicted for Berlin has been equally true for the nation as a whole.

For further information on the impact on history and memory of the collapse of Communism, read articles in our special After the Cold War series.

25 Years Since The Discovery of DNA Fingerprinting

by Kathryn Hadley

The technique of genetic fingerprinting was discovered 25 years ago today, on September 10th 1984, by Alec Jeffreys’ from the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester. To mark the anniversary, the University of Leicester have created an anniversary website featuring interviews and information about Sir Alec’s life and work.

Sir Alec described the discovery in an interview published on the new website:

‘My life changed on Monday morning at 9.05 am, 10 September 1984. What emerged was the world's first genetic fingerprint. In science it is unusual to have such a 'eureka' moment. We were getting extraordinarily variable patterns of DNA,
including from our technician and her mother and father, as well as from non
human samples. My first reaction to the results was 'this is too complicated',
and then the penny dropped and I realised we had genetic fingerprinting.’

Genetic fingerprinting has since been applied to crime, paternity and immigration disputes. In the UK there now exists a national database of over 5 million genetic profiles and the number of recorded profiles has risen by 40% over the past two years. According to an article published on the website of the BBC, over 17,600 offences were solved last year using a DNA match, including 83 killings and 184 rapes.

The University of Leicester website has reprinted a lecture delivered by Sir Alec Jeffreys at the Leicester Medical Society Bicentenary during which he outlined the history of human genetics. Genetics is defined as the study of heredity and the variation of inherited characteristics. He cited two key individuals. In 1900, the Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner discovered the ABO blood group system. This was the first example of a variable human characteristic to be discovered that was inherited according to the simple rules of Mendel. Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884) was an Austrian priest and scientist who discovered the basic principles of heredity based on his work with pea plants. Two years later, the English physician Sir Archibald Garrod, who was working at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London on the inherited disorder Alkaptonuria, discovered the first example of a human inherited disease.

The 1950s saw the rise of genomics, the study of the organisation of genes and chromosomes and structure of DNA. The first human gene was isolated in 1977 and today we now have the final draft of the entire human genome sequence.

On the anniversary of the discovery of DNA fingerprinting, Sir Alec Jeffreys called for changes to the laws governing DNA databases. In England and Wales the DNA profiles of people who have never been convicted are kept alongside those of convicted criminals. In the article published on the BBC website, Jeffreys argued:

‘Innocent people do not belong on that database. Branding them as future
criminals is not proportionate response in the fight against crime. And I've met
a fair number of these people and some of these people are very, very upset and
are distressed by the fact that their DNA is on that database. They cannot get
it off and they feel as if they're branded as criminals.’

For further information, visit www2.le.ac.uk
For further information on the 20th-century scientific-technical revolution and how it produced a new world culture and global organisation, read our article The 20th-Century Scientific-Technical Revolution

Churchill: a liability to the free world

by Kathryn Hadley

‘Churchill was more a liability than an asset to the free world’. That was the motion defended, on September 3rd, by Patrick Buchanan, Norman Stone and Nigel Knight at the Methodist Central Hall Westminster.

Buchanan, Stone and Knight failed to convince the 1,700-strong audience. However, they had to a large degree already failed before the debate began. Prior to the debate, a mere 118 voted in favour of the motion; 1167 voted against; and 422 ‘did not know’. Their arguments convinced just 63 people, with 181 votes against the motion in the aftermath of the debate, and the majority of those who did not know were swayed by the opposition. At the end of the evening, 1194 voted against the motion and just 34 still ‘did not know’.

Buchanan, Stone and Knight condemned Churchill’s economic policies as Chancellor of the Exchequer (from November 1924 to June 1929), his military strategy during the Second World War and the British bombing of German cities in 1945 and blamed him for the loss of the British Empire. According to Nigel Knight, Churchill’s decision to reintroduce the Gold Standard in 1925 severely weakened the British economy, which was consequently hit even harder by the Great Depression. The effects of the Great Depression, in turn, hampered British rearmament and meant that Britain was inadequately armed at the time of the outbreak of the Second World War. Knight also criticised Churchill’s military tactics of delay and dispersion, partly blaming him for the 10 million losses in the last year of the war. When the British army was victorious, at El Alamein for example, he attributed the victory to Montgomery rather than to Churchill, explaining that the British only won because Montgomery refused to follow Churchill’s proposed strategy. Norman Stone accused Churchill of losing the British Empire. Buchanan went so far as to blame Churchill for the outbreak of the Second World War, arguing that he should have instead sought to compromise with Hitler by dividing Europe into spheres of influence. Finally, Buchanan claimed that, at the Yalta conference in 1945, Churchill had given his ‘benediction’ to the Stalinist regime and had supported over 40 years of repressive rule in Eastern Europe.

However, their arguments lacked coherence and consisted above all of a list of individual mistakes which Churchill had allegedly made throughout his 64-year-long political career. Buchanan, Stone and Knight's only consistent argument was that Churchill’s achievements were a myth.

Churchill is indeed, on the whole, viewed as a hero in popular imagination. His statue on Parliament Square alone, just a few metres outside the Methodist Central Hall, is testimony to his heroic legacy. In the shadow of his statue and mythical place in popular imagination, Buchanan, Knight and Stone’s task to persuade the audience that Churchill was, above all, a liability to the free world was almost impossible.

Nevertheless, it seems highly unlikely that this myth was built on thin air alone and just a few of the opposition’s arguments were enough to reassure me that Churchill’s reputation was indeed built on solid foundations. Andrew Roberts, Anthony Beevor and Richard Overy all acknowledged that Churchill made mistakes over the course of his 64-year-long career. However, in Roberts’ words, placed in the wider context of his career and of the time, these mistakes were mere ‘pimples’. Although Churchill’s military tactics of dispersion may not have been entirely effective, they were in keeping with a strong British military tradition and, until the United States entered the war, Britain did not have the necessary forces for a more ‘full-on’ attack.

Above all, one of Churchill’s main strengths was his ability to take advice. His plans for El Alamein may not have been realistic; however, he was able to take advice from Montgomery and the battle was ultimately won. Britain was not a dictatorship and Churchill was not the sole decision maker. In this respect the debate seemed almost pointless: Churchill was not, and could not be, the only person to blame or to praise. Richard Overy described him as ‘largely a spectator’. Roberts, Beevor and Overy all agreed that Churchill was a ‘champion to the free world’ (Roberts) and issues of liberty and freedom formed the core of his set of values and beliefs. Churchill was, and remained throughout his career, a defender of the rule of law and of parliamentary government.

He reaffirmed the necessity to fight for justice and freedom at the end of his last major speech in the House of Commons in March 1955:

‘The day may dawn when fair play, love for one's fellow men, respect for justice
and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forth triumphant from
the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never
weary, never despair.’

For Paul Addison’s view on the ‘Churchill Question’ read, Makers of the Twentieth Century: Churchill
For an insight into how Churchill dealt with his political rivals, read our article Churchill and his War Rivals
For information about his attitude to black peoples, read our article Churchill and Black Africa
In Churchill as Chronicler: The Narvik Episode 1940, Piers Mackesy suggests that Churchill was particularly skilled at writing his own version of history. He explains how Churchill made his father, General Mackesy, the scapegoat for the allied failure to recapture Norway in 1940.

For further information on the Second World War, visit our Second World War focus page.

60th anniversary of Geneva Conventions

by Kathryn Hadley

The Geneva Conventions were adopted 60 years ago, on August 12th 1949. Yesterday, to mark the anniversary, Jakob Kellenberger, the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), addressed a diplomatic gathering in Geneva and various commemorative events were organised across the world. A one-day seminar on international humanitarian law was notably held in Beijing, there was a presentation on the relevance of the Geneva Conventions in Contemporary Armed Conflicts in Addis Ababa, a public forum was held in Manila to mark the anniversary, and a conference with the American Red Cross was organised in Washington.

Jakob Kellenberger began his address with the following words:

‘We gather here to mark a significant coming of age. Sixty years ago today, the
Geneva Conventions were adopted. This defining event played a central role in
expanding the protection provided to victims of armed conflicts. It also
expanded the ICRC's humanitarian mandate, and facilitated our access as well as
our dialogue with States.’

He continued to outline the evolution of armed conflict over the past 60 years, how international humanitarian law had adapted to the changing nature of warfare and the new challenges which it faced today. Statistics quoted in an article on the website of the BBC revealed a considerable increase in the number of civilian casualties from the First World War to the Second World War. During the First World War, it is estimated that ten soldiers were killed for every civilian; during the Second World War, the ratio of soldiers to civilians killed increased to 50 to 50. Today it is estimated that the figures are almost reversed: ten civilians are killed for every one soldier.

To mark the anniversary, the ICRC notably commissioned Ipsos to carry out a survey on what people in countries affected by war consider acceptable behaviour during hostilities and on the effectiveness of the Geneva Conventions. The research is entitled ‘Our World. Views from the Field’ and was carried out in Afghanistan, Columbia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Georgia, Haiti, Lebanon, Liberia and the Philippines. The ICRC’s director for international law, Philip Spoerri, presented the results of the survey:

‘Most of the roughly 4,000 people surveyed across the eight countries – 75% –
say there should be limits to what combatants are allowed to do in the course of
fighting. But when asked if they had ever heard of the Geneva Conventions,
slightly less than half said they knew such rules existed. Among them, around
56% believe the Conventions limit the suffering of civilians in wartime.’

The Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols form the core of the international humanitarian law (IHL), the body of law that regulates the conduct of armed conflict and seeks to limit its effects. They are aimed specifically at the protection of those who are not taking part in the hostilities (civilians and aid workers) and those who are no longer able to fight such as wounded and sick soldiers and prisoners of war. The 1949 Geneva Conventions are divided into four parts.

The first Geneva Convention protects wounded or sick soldiers on land during war and also provides for the protection of medical and religious personnel. The second Geneva Convention protects wounded, sick and shipwrecked military personnel at sea during war. It is similar to the first convention in terms of structure and content but applies specifically to war at sea. The third Geneva Convention applies to prisoners of war and the fourth Geneva Convention provides for the protection of civilians, including in occupied territory.

The history of the Geneva Conventions does not begin with the Second World War. Various conventions to protect those involved in armed conflict were adopted from the mid-19th century onwards. The first Geneva Convention, for example, is the fourth version of the convention on the sick and wounded which was initially adopted in 1864. However, the conventions adopted before 1949 were restricted to combatants and did not apply to civilians. The Second World War had revealed the disastrous effects of war on civilian populations and the consequent need for adequate protection. The existing conventions were thus expanded and formalised in the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The 1949 Geneva Conventions also include Article 3, which is common to all four conventions and, for the first time, made all the essential rules of the four conventions applicable to conflicts of a non-international character. Three further protocols were added to the Geneva Conventions in 1977 and 2005.

The Geneva Conventions entered into force on October 21st, 1950 and ratification grew steadily from then onwards. In the 1950s, 74 states ratified the Conventions; 48 states did so during the 1960s; 20 States signed on during the 1970s; and another 20 States did so during the 1980s. Twenty-six countries ratified the Conventions in the early 1990s, largely in the aftermath of the break-up of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and the former Yugoslavia. Since 2000, seven new states have ratified the conventions, bringing the total number of ratifications to 194 and making the Geneva Conventions universally applicable.

Despite their universal ratification, the Geneva Conventions are not always respected and considerable obstacles remain.

To mark the anniversary, further events are planned worldwide over the coming months. For more information, visit the website of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
http://www.icrc.org/


Pictures:

- Geneva. Diplomatic conference for the revision of the Geneva conventions, 12/08/1949 (copyright ICRC/WASSERMANN, M.)

- ditto (copyright ICRC/CADOUX, J.)

Anthony Blunt memoir available in British Library Reading Rooms

by Kathryn Hadley

Last Thursday, July 23rd, the manuscript memoir of Anthony Blunt became available for study in the Manuscripts Reading Room at the British Library. The manuscript was given to the British Library in July 1984, just over a year after Blunt’s death, by a donor who wished to remain anonymous and on the condition that the manuscript be withheld from public access for 25 years. Anthony Blunt began to write his memoir in 1979, after his public exposure as a spy.

Anthony Frederick Blunt (1907-1983) studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was named Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and oversaw the opening of the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace in 1961. He was Professor of History of Art at the University of London and Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art from 1947 to 1974. During the Second World War and until 1951, he worked for MI5 and was knighted in 1956 for his work.

Blunt was also a Russian spy. He joined the Communist Party at Cambridge and was initially recruited by the Russian NKVD, as a ‘talent spotter’, in 1937. Following a series of interrogations by British security forces in the 1950s, he was independently identified as a spy in 1964. He was granted immunity from prosecution and the British government agreed to keep his spying career an official secret for 15 years in return for a full confession. In the 1970s, however, he was identified as the ‘Fourth Man’ of the Cambridge Five, a group of spies including Kim Philby, Donald Duart Mclean, Guy Burgess and John Cairncross who worked for the Soviet Union during the Second World War and into the 1950s. In 1979, he was publicly named a spy by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the House of Commons. He was stripped of his knighthood and was removed as an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College.

Frances Harris, the British Library’s Head of Modern Historical Manuscripts, described the manuscript:

‘The manuscript survives in two versions: a draft, partly typewritten and partly
in Blunt’s handwriting, and a typewritten fair copy of it. It begins with
Blunt’s birth in Bournemouth in 1907, and continues with an account of his life
and career until his public exposure in 1979. In the preface he states that he
had written it for the benefit of the friends who had stood by him and for those
members of the public who wanted to have his own version of events. In the
course of his own narrative he makes frequent and specific comments on the
accuracy or otherwise of earlier published accounts. Although it contains no
revelations, the memoir is important as an account of Blunt’s life and motives
in his own words and with his own emphasis, composed not under interrogation or
pressure of events, but with time to reflect and when he must have realized his
health was failing and this would be his last opportunity. It is the one central
document bearing on this long, complex and controversial episode in recent
history which has been known to exist, but has not hitherto been accessible. The
lifting of restriction on public access means that it can now be considered
alongside the many records and commentaries from other sources. The time that
has elapsed and the information that has come to light since it was written mean
that it can now receive a more considered and knowledgeable assessment than
would have previously been possible.’

Dr Klaus Fuchs was a British nuclear physicist and spy who helped the Soviet Union develop the atom bomb. In May 2003 MI5 released files on Fuchs. In our article Radioactive Leak Andrew Cook compares the MI5 files with Russian intelligence files held in Moscow.

Essential History: 27th July

by Derry Nairn

Here's a quick look at some historical headlines making the British press, both over the weekend and today.

Guardian: Brutalist London Housing Estate threatened with demolition

Architectural History

The JoePublic blog at the Guardian today puts forward a case for the 1970s Robin Hood housing estate in east London to be saved from demolition. The key question from the debate is a hugely relevant one - how do we decide what historical buildings are worthwhile and which aren't?

Scotsman: Women's beauty evolving; men remain Neanderthal

Pre-history

The Scotsman today quotes a University of Helsinki report, stating that evolution is forcing women to become more attractive, while men remain rooted to their caveman genes. Raises a smile, but also makes you think...

Iranian periods of mourning have signalled great events

20th Century

Michael Purcell in the Times on the historical resonance of mourning ceremonies and martyrdom in Iranian culture. We have a related overview of recent Iranian history in the current August issue.

Confucianism enjoys a revival in China

Chinese History

Steven A Bell in the Guardian assesses recent uses of Confucianism beyond the realm of Chinese government. Academic spheres such as economics and psychology have been incresingly referring to its principles over the past decade. But did it ever go away, I wonder?

New efforts to record and protect ancient trees

Environmental History

The Times reports on a new campaign to protect Britain's ancient trees, described here rather nicely, as 'cathedrals of the ancient world'.

30,000 tribesmen invade Edinburgh for the Highland Games

British History

The Independent reports on this year's Highland Games in Scotland via several interlocking historical themes: record numbers of attendees; the 250th anniversary year of Robert Burns; inverse levels of interest in Scottish tribal history in Scotland and abroad. This article on Sir Walter Scott, '1822 spin doctor supreme', offers some helpful context.

Heritage site descriptions dumbing down?

British History

The Times reports on new efforts by English Heritage, the state body responsible for managing and promoting historic sites such as Stonehenge, to make its literature coherent to 'all intellectual levels'.

100 years since Bleriót flew the Channel

Science & Technology

The Daily Express remembers when Louis Bleriót flew the English Channel, and marks the occasion by talking to a Swede intent on replicating the historic journey

Profile of our very own Andrew Roberts

Authors

The Observer goes all rock'n'roll over one of our most consistent and interesting contributors, Andrew Roberts. He's 'a social animal of epic proportions'. Allegedly. Check out his last piece for History Today, A Woman at Waterloo.

The Nazi-hunting Jewish Brigade of the British Army

Second World War

The Times compares the exaggerated pulp history of Tarantino's new film with the real story behind Britain's postwar Nazi-hunters.