A Victory Of Courage And Coercion: Antony Beevor on Stalingrad's Legacy

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the start of the Battle of Stalingrad, a ferocious and brutal siege that proved to be a major psychological and military tipping point in World War II.

RFE/RL correspondent Coilin O'Connor talks to the prominent British historian Antony Beevor -- author of "Stalingrad" -- about how this engagement between two totalitarian armies helped turn the course of the global conflict. Beevor also discusses the enduring legacy of Stalingrad seven decades after the event and looks at some of the popular misconceptions associated with this famous battle.

RFE/RL: Do you think books like yours have helped reclaim the narrative of the Second World War to a certain extent, i.e. until the 1970s the “history” of the war in the Anglophone world focused heavily on the Western front, whereas the Eastern front was not given the attention it deserved? Do Western attitudes to the war have to be readjusted somewhat?

Antony Beevor: I think very much so. And it’s not just a question of the Eastern front, which I think has been scandalously neglected by Western historians. But this was also partly due to the secrecy that had been maintained throughout the Cold War by the Soviet Union and it not allowing any access to the archives for Western historians....