The next shell exploded right next to the plane, splintering planks on the fuselage and wings. I shot into the cockpit and tried to start the engine. Nothing. I needed someone to hand-prop the plane. I spotted a military truck tearing at top speed down the road, rattling along with three good tires and a bare rim. I sprinted down the hill, trying to wave him down. The teen-aged driver tried to swerve around me, so without thinking, I whipped out my revolver and furiously riddled the remaining tires with bullets. He stopped, cursing me, and pulled out his rifle.

“Drop it,” I suggested, nodding toward his weapon. “You’d better help me start my plane.

The driver gaped at me. I don’t think he was expecting to hear a female voice. 

“Can’t you see the Fascists are here?” he said frantically. “They’ve broken through the front line. I’ve got to catch up to the others!”

“You’ll catch up,” I told him. “But I’ve got to get the plane started, and I need your help.”

“To hell with your plane! Get in the truck. Let’s get out of here before it’s too late.”

I glanced desperately at the U-2 as another blast shook her, shredding the little airplane’s fabric skin. The plane seemed to shiver with cold. 

“They’re going to destroy it!” I screamed, and yanked open the truck door. “Get out! I’ll only need you for a minute!”

“You’re out of your mind!” the boy said, obeying me at last. “Where’s the plane?”

I pointed up the hill, toward the windmill. “You’ve gone mad!” he shouted. “Look, they’re shooting the plane to pieces! Your bird is about to go up in flames…”

This is part 5 in a series of excerpts from a book I co-translated and edited in 2009: Red Sky, Black Death, A Soviet Woman Pilot’s Memoir of the Eastern Front, by Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova

See Anna’s last entry                      See Anna’s next entry

“Along the road out of Kalarovka, a frantic mass streamed from the village. A roiling chaos of people and soldiers mingled with cattle, carts laden with household items, and military vehicles. Half-ton trucks sped along the side, and infantry men hurried along in small clusters instead of the usual orderly marching columns.

I landed the airplane on a hill near a windmill…and shut the engine down…The crackle of gunfire rose form the valley, along with the terrified lowing of cattle and the roar of vehicles and fleeing people. Panic seized me. There could be no doubt now. The battle was coming our way…I could see the front line a half-kilometer away, a thunder of war advancing from the west.

In minutes, the fighting would tear into the silence of those pensive little houses perched along the valley’s edge. And so it did. The first explosion smashed into the quiet streets; then a second rang out…one of the hut roofs caught fire…frightened birds swirled up into the sky. The blunt snouts of tanks scrolled across the landscape as if across a movie screen. They ground along on their caterpillar tracks, spitting flames. Their gun barrels seemed to point right toward my little hill, where the U-2 presented an excellent target.

Indeed, a shell burst right next to the windmill, sending me running toward the airplane…”

-Anna Timofeyeva-Yegrova,  Red Sky, Black Death, A Soviet Woman Pilot’s Memoir of the Eastern Front

It was a gorgeous late summer day…I was less than pleased. In a crisp, clear sky, the “kukuruznik” would be defenseless against the Fascist hawks…plywood “armor” doesn’t stop bullets. Our only defense was to dive down toward the ground and spread our wings low over the withered fields, flying so close to the earth you could hear the landing gear cutting the feather grass on the steppe.

At “tree-shaving” altitude…the earth scrolled by, dangerously close, mere feet beneath my wings…Just then, I saw two distant points in the sky, rapidly approaching. Messerschmitts, I guessed. Suddenly, they were upon me, roaring over my head, brazenly flaunting their spidery swastikas. Machine-gun fire spat at me from above…they covered me with their black shadows, but with all their speed, they couldn’t manage to shoot down the docile little U-2. They flew off, and I released my breath with relief…

- Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova, Red Sky, Black Death, A Soviet Woman Pilot’s Memoir of the Eastern Front

Camouflage shrouded the buildings on Three Station Square like a theatrical set…People in soldier’s blouses stepped briskly through the great station halls, and the booming sound of barked orders ricocheted off the stone walls…Massive anti-aircraft guns stood like long-legged storks on the roofs of multi-storied apartment buildings.

Moscow was beginning to look like a front city. With each passing day, the city grew gloomier and grimmer. Levitan’s daily broadcasts delivered increasingly alarming reports: “After stubborn and fierce battle…” The…reports followed us everywhere. We could scarcely believe them.

I remember sitting on the bus, my face pressed against the window, wondering why we were moving so slowly. I noticed with surprise a girl in a military uniform energetically waving a small red flag to clear the way for a huge column of Red Army soldiers. Such things would soon seem terribly ordinary…

 - Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova, Red Sky, Black Death, A Soviet Woman Pilot’s Memoir of the Eastern Front

Seventy years ago this summer, the German army invaded the Soviet Union, breaking a non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler and raining unimaginable destruction on Ukraine, Belarus, and Western Russia. From the last week of June, 1941 and through that summer and fall, the Nazi advance seemed inexorable, the USSR’s fall inevitable. In this installment of The Atlantic’s retrospective, you’ll see images of the German attack, nicknamed “Operation Barbarossa,” from the June 22 invasion to the Battle of Moscow.

Anna Yegorova, a young flight instructor in 1941, recalls the morning of June 22 in her memoir, Red Sky, Black Death. She and some aviatrix-girlfriends were having a picnic on a beautiful summer day:

(We) roosted on a blanket spread across the thick, sweet-smelling grass…The virgin forest uttered not a sound, sunlight filtered through the branches, and dew sparkled on the grass like diamonds. 

And then, suddenly, voices—unnaturally loud men’s voices, arguing. I turned my head toward where our male comrades had been sitting. A man…approached, his face darkened with alarm. His voice trembled as he said, “Girls, it’s war! I just heard it on the radio in the village.”

…Seconds after the pilot uttered those thunderous words, the scene before us transformed. The colors of the forest morning faded, and the once tranquil silence twisted into something ominous…

*In the next weeks and months, I’ll post occasional excerpts from her book, as if she were blogging about her experiences…seventy years after the fact. I don’t know exact dates in many cases, but the next few entries will be from the summer and fall of 1941, during Barbarossa’s catastrophic early months.

Every generation has its historic “where were you when” moments. For ours, there’s the Challenger disaster (1/86), the fall of the Berlin Wall (11/89), and most vivid of all for me, the three-day Soviet coup in late summer of 1991.

I was a 21-year-old university student then, happily backpacking through Europe (on a quest, as one Danish friend put it, to “see the most train”) en route to Moscow for a semester of study abroad. We’d stopped in Venice to stay with friends in a magnificent old apartment. A quick call home found worry in my mom’s voice and an exhortation to switch on CNN.

We watched those events unfold on a TV screen in Venice, a week before our appointment with a train to Moscow. The images still reverberate in memory: barricades in the streets, Russians shaking their fists at soldiers, Yeltsin’s famous speech on the tank. See RIANovosti image gallery and timeline here.

Initially, it certainly seemed like a pretty pathetic coup, as coups go—young soldiers manning the tanks didn’t look particularly fierce; they looked more…confused. Ditto for the Communist hard-liners who instigated the coup, calling themselves an “emergency committee” (those masters of euphemism)—for perhaps the first time in Soviet history, the Old Guard came off as more ridiculous than sinister. See this “PRI’s The World” feature on the coup.

Still, we wondered if the theatre of the absurd being acted out in Moscow might veer towards tragedy, as precedent would suggest. And we wondered whether we’d soon be headed home instead of East.

Another phone call home from a Munich train station: “Gorbachev is back in power!” came my my mom’s voice, thinned by distance and echoes, but clearly relieved. And a few days later, we boarded a train to Moscow. The well-lighted West shrank behind us, and eerie, green-gray, fishbowl images of Soviet Russia scrolled by our windows as we clattered eastward.

First impressions: men tearing down a statue of Dzerzhinsky, flowers on a bridge for the 3 killed during the putsch, a litter of tram-car barricades near the White House, a sense of exhilaration in the streets. Of course, we headed straight to Red Square that first day, where a crowd had gathered to meet suited men and women emerging from a Kremlin gate.

We pushed into the pulsating throng of middle-aged men and women who surrounded and shouted at the people leaving the Kremlin. My university Russian was no match for the chaos of voices. I absorbed a general sense of their excitement and outrage, but none of the detail.

There was no wall to tear down in Moscow, but symbolic acts abounded: Russian flags replaced the Soviet; Dzerzhinsky and Stalin fell from their pedestals and gathered in a park, a garden of ghostly stone. (Someone had painted red fangs on Papa Joe.)  Streets, parks, and metro stations lost their old names—Gorky fell out of favor once again and lost his namesakes. Imagine the comedy of Russian students trying to grasp directions to places undergoing a politio-linguistic transformation that didn’t always match the current signage.

By the time we left Moscow that December, the Soviet Union was no more, and dead with it, already, were many of the happy illusions that the coup had stirred. Soon, crime had begun to fill the power void. (Four students in our group of ten were victims of one attack or another that fall, from muggings to one serious beating.) And then there were the shortages: by mid-fall, State-store shelves were empty. By November, even potatoes weren’t so easy to find.

We foraging students quickly learned to operate within the three parallel economies at work, as the old system fell away and nothing even vaguely organized emerged to replace it.

1. State stores offered food for a few kopecks, which to us Westerners was play money, nothing at all. But for Russians on official Russian salaries, these stores were the only affordable (and legal) option, as I understood it. As the fall pressed on, lines grew, in direct proportion to the eternal surliness of shopkeepers, and the shelves emptied. By winter, the stores had become purely theoretical—vacant museums to a failed economic theory.

2. Markets—Several outdoor markets, along with thousands of informal sellers at Metro stations and squares all over the city, offered goods and edibles for sale: stacks of watermelon, whole pigs, tiny burlap sacks filled with colorful spice powders, barrels full of pickles. It was explained to me that this type of selling was illegal, although I can’t be sure that’s true. What I do know is that the prices were higher than at state stores by a factor of 10, 100—who knows? The value of the ruble changed every day, at least on the black market. So said Mustafa, the Ugandan mafia lord who sold us rubles from his HQ on the top floor of our institute. He, effectively, set the exchange rate.

3. Hard Currency Stores (Берёзки) - Several grocery stores sold Western products at Western prices, but only if you had hard currency. An Irish store took dollars, another took Deutschmarks, and so on. Not only were the prices astronomical for ordinary Russians living within the “legal” economy; Russians weren’t allowed to possess hard currency at all. Imagine a store in your neighborhood that only “rich” foreigners were allowed to enter. I’m not proud to admit it, but I did enjoy a Guinness or two at the Irish House that fall. It felt, at times, like waking up from an dismal gray dream. (See this NYTimes story about hard-currency stores in 1991. It’s a great portrait of the chaotic parallel economies of that time.)

And then there was the McDonald’s economy.

Even in the snow, the line usually stretched all the way around Pushkin Square, a wait of hours to enter a roiling madhouse of warmth and fried smells, where you’d shout your order across people’s shoulders to the smiling young people, working their dream job. Yes, we ate there. Don’t judge us too harshly. After weeks or months of having to fight with (or bribe) an assortment of surly maitre’d's for the right to sit down in a restaurant, sometimes you just want to get a fucking burger without resorting to conflict or extortion. And the cultural scene at Pushkin Square that fall was rather festive, really— a comical Soviet take on free-market economies. Enterprising souls offered photo ops with cardboard cutouts of Gorbachev or giant stuffed animals; missionaries handed out Russian-language bibles. And we waited, if you can imagine, hours for a dvoinnoi cheezboorgair.

And along with the literal McDonald’s economy, there was the figurative: people selling things everywhere you looked—you couldn’t escape the military watch hawkers or doleful babushki holding up a single, knitted pair of socks in the street. And the parade of private cars pulling over for you,  becoming taxis for dollars. Dump trucks and city buses becoming taxis for dollars. Ambulances becoming taxis for dollars. (Yes, an “ambulance”—really just a rusty white station wagon with a red cross on it—actually carried me back to my institute one night.)

I’m no historian, no economist, just an observer, looking back through the eyes of a naive 21-year old. But in retrospect, I wonder if the bitter realities of how the so-called free-market unfolded there struck the initial death-blow to Russians’ (and other former Soviet peoples’) euphoria after the fall of the Soviet empire. I remember an old woman crying and shaking her fist in front of the Irish House one day. She wasn’t allowed to enter. (Why, why, why didn’t I put my hand on her shoulder and offer to buy her something?! Why are we so stupid and scared at 21?) Another babushka (that’s “BAH-boosh-kah,” not “ba-BOOSH-ka,” just for the record) stopped me in the street one chilly day and asked me why I’d come to such a terrible place. An elderly rest room attendant in Leningrad-now-St-Petersburg-again told me tales of surviving the Blockade, only to face this terrifying uncertainty. It was hard to imagine a woman, who’d endured relentless bombardment and starvation, unbearable cold and loss, and the most ruthless war the world has ever seen, could find the uncertainties of 1991 the most terrifying of all. I sensed hyperbole but felt she was sincere.

Leningrad, 1943: Barrage balloon; Banner reads, "Death to Child Killers!"

There’s one last impression from my first Moscow day, one I’d almost forgotten; but it seems, only in retrospect, to eerily portend what would become of the last Russian revolution. Young black marketeers approached us in Red Square and invited us to either 1. purchase military hats or 2. dine with them at the Hotel Rossiya. We chose the latter.

At the bar, a gigantic, flat-headed young man sitting next to me grinned wildly just before tearing the lid off a bottle of beer with his teeth. “Здесь (here) bar!” he said. “Здесь where I vork!”

We proceeded to share an elaborate, multicourse dinner with 2 black marketeers named Kolya and…I forget, and their ladyfriends…whom apparently, the males shared between them at will. I doubt these entrepreneurs were more than 19 years old, but that night (and, as they explained, every night), they consumed a lavish feast at the Rossiya that would have cost many times the average Russian monthly salary.

The hideous Hotel Rossiya looms behind the Kremlin (Photo: Mikhail Metzel, NYTimes)

I have the sense that to many Russians’ minds, these are the men who stepped into the power vacuum that emerged in the wake of the Soviet Union’s rather sudden collapse. Maybe not these exact thugs, but other, bigger-time thugs, opportunists with extensive criminal histories who knew how to seize the moment, or the oil industry, or whatever happened to be lying around for the taking. And now these delightful fellows are enjoying the bounties of freedom! The freedom to fly planeloads of hookers to alpine resorts!

I wish I’d had the opportunity to witness something different that fall: a promise kept, courage rewarded, the birth of real, lasting freedom and opportunity. I wish that for the Russian friends I made, with whom I spent so many cold winter nights in warm kitchens. And I wish that for the rest of the world, which for about 15 minutes in 1991 thought it could simply brush away the Problem of Russia once and for all and stop cowering under its desk during nuke drills.

Today, around half of Russians old enough to remember the coup believe that the events of August, 1991 marked the beginning of their country’s precipitous, inexorable decline. The greatest tragedy of the coup, it seems, is that so many Russians view it, and the Soviet Union’s collapse, as a tragedy.

For an extremely well-written (and far better informed) explanation of the 1991 coup, its aftermath, and Russia’s so-called “August curse,” read this excellent article by Julia Ioffe for the New Yorker. 

The "Greatest" Generation

Sometimes the powers-that-be usurp wars and their heroes, inflating them and twisting their stories for political purposes. Mythology gradually replaces reality. But war heroes exist, even when presidents, prime ministers, and tsars say they do.

It seems to me, war (and other) heroes set themselves apart not with the kind of braggadocio and high-flown rhetoric that so often accompanies talk of war–in fact, they seem often to refuse to indulge in it. Instead, these men (and a few women, too) quietly do a painful and terrible job, one they’d prefer not to have to do, and their belief in that job’s importance unites with their will do to it well.

Historian Stephen Ambrose documented the day-to-day experiences of a company full of these in his 1992 book, “Band of Brothers.” He interviewed the surviving soldiers of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, and told their story, from basic training to their D-Day drop into Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, and VE-Day.

Theirs is no John Wayne or Rambo story of fearless grit and bravado amid raining bullets; it’s better, because it’s real. It’s the true tale of frightened, exhausted, physically and psychologically wounded young men who froze and lost best friends in foxholes and, despite it all, did impossible jobs against impossible odds.

In the magnificent HBO mini-series adapted from Ambrose’s book, one man stands apart from that company of stalwart soldiers, although he would have disputed that point: Major Richard “Dick” Winters took command of Easy Company on D-Day when the company’s commanding officer perished during the parachute drop. It seems he’s one of those people who sees a problem, sighs, and manages it; and the problem that first day of his combat life was to capture and destroy some German guns that were pounding the road from Utah Beach, where the Allies were landing en masse. He took home his first medal that day, and there were more to come. He continued to lead his men to perform extraordinary feats from D-Day to VE-Day, but Winters’s notion of glory was to win and end the war and retire to a quiet life on a Philadephia farm. This he did.

And how very refreshing that kind of self-effacing heroism is in an age of empty celebrity, “branding,” and the near-worship our society showers upon actors and athletes.

“Dick” Winters died earlier this month, hopefully amid friends and with no regrets. His, seemingly, was a life well-lived. You can read a detailed obituary here.

The two ten-minute videos capture a single afternoon and evening on the Nimitz as it cruises the Indian Ocean. A thousand miles from any kind of terra-firma runway, Nimitz Super Hornet pilots practice carrier landings in the most impossible conditions imaginable: at night in extraordinarily high seas.

Cinematographer Mark Brice writes about what it was like to witness and film the “Night of the Pitching Decks”:

“Looking aft at the LSO’s (Landing Signal Officers) stationed at the stern, I saw what looked like a carnival ride. When a big swell came under the bow of the Nimitz, the stern would tip down at such an angle, it seemed everything on deck would slide into the drink. Then as the same wave made its way back, the stern see-sawed up the other way, 50, 60, 70 feet, obscuring the horizon.

“…The mere facts of a carrier landing are extraordinary — the planes approaching at 150 knots are hitting a moving landing strip a few hundred feet long, at sea. And they’re being brought to a stop by a heavy cable on the deck that catches a tailhook on the plane. They call it a controlled crash. In quiet seas, this process seems almost routine.

But now, as I tracked the first F-18 in the viewfinder, a set of big swells comes under us. As the first wave passes, the stern rises, and rises, until the horizon, and then the F-18 is obscured from view. I was shocked. The plane was on final approach not to the landing deck, but towards the ship’s stern, which is suspended in the air. As another swell comes under the bow, the stern falls away, and the LSO’s wave off the approaching F-18. The angle is too steep to land. The next F-18 manages to touch the deck, but misses the restraining wire, and does a “touch and go”. Finally an F-18 manages to land, and stops yards away from us. The pilot is ecstatic, and it’s all hugs and handshakes with his ground crew. This was emotion we never saw during the grind of the Persian Gulf. It seems that just one in five planes is able to land successfully. Pilots who get waved off or do touch and go’s, go around for a second try, a third try. Some get low on fuel and rendezvous with the F-18 refueling tanker for an airborne fill-up.

Meanwhile, on the “bow cats” more planes are being launched into the sky. Towards sunset, I realize a significant number of jets have taken off. The swell has increased further. Now the precarious landings we’ve been watching on a clear blue afternoon will be taking place at night. As we go below deck, we prepare for the most dramatic operations of the deployment, as the pilots we’ve come to know over the past four months try to reach their floating home, one by one, over the black waters of the Indian Ocean.

That night, after hours of bolters, wave-offs followed by white-knuckle landings, there is one last pilot airborne, Dave “Sex” Fravor, Skipper of the Black Aces. He’s flying the refueling tanker this evening, providing a safety net for his mates who are running low on fuel. By design, the tanker pilot is the last pilot airborne. So Fravor himself really has no safety net. If he lands, then he’ll have a cigar with the Admiral later on; if he can’t, he’ll have to eject into the ocean and ditch his $40 million jet.

In the flight control room, we watch the Platt camera monitor showing Fravor’s approach. It’s dead silent. The deck is still pitching wildly but he somehow is able to stay dead-on target. When Fravor threads the needle and lands, there is an uproar. Everyone’s made it home safe. Fravor gets that cigar with the Admiral, claiming he landed on autopilot. To this day, I’m not sure I believe him.”

I didn’t know Yuri Shevchuk then, but I wish I had. He’s considered the Russian Bruce Springsteen, and he created what was effectively the anthem to that autumn (and the years that followed). Even in the few months I was there, I sensed a sea change–from the delirious optimism of early September, as people absorbed the fact of a new order rising, to a rapidly surging disillusionment, as that new order seemed to bring only chaos and want. The early 90s brought only more disappointment with the form “democracy” and a “free market” were taking in Russia, as criminals, it seemed, rose to power and stole everything in sight.

Shevchuk’s anthem of sorts, called “Что такое осень / Chto takoe osen’ / What is Autumn?” seemed to capture that feeling, for Russians at least (if not for citizens of other former Soviet republics)–disappoinment that democracy wasn’t living up to its promise, humiliation at their nation’s loss of influence, terrible uncertainty about what would happen next:

“What is Autumn? It’s the wind,
Playing again in the torn chains
Autumn, can we crawl, do you think, live until the sunrise?
Motherland and me, what shall befall us?
Autumn, can we crawl, do you think, live until the answer?
Tomorrow, you think, what shall befall us?”

Apparently, the 50-something Shevchuk isn’t planning to retire anytime soon from his role of rock-star political commentator. This morning’s NPR feature by Moscow correspondent David Green (“Yuri Shevchuk: Russia’s Musical Advocate For Democracy“) details Shevchuk’s career, and a stunning televised face off with Vladimir Putin last year in which he asked the prime minister why Russians didn’t have a free press or trustworthy, uncorrupt police force.

Journalists and human rights workers in Russia and Chechnya have been beaten or killed for far less. Perhaps Shevchuk’s celebrity will shield him from a similar fate. Or perhaps he’ll find that the next time he plans a big concert in Russia or elsewhere, he’ll mysteriously be denied the proper permits and visas. Either way, Shevchuk, and Russians, deserve better.

As editor, I hoped to provide glimpses of a wider perspective on that history, by adding historical footnotes about events that Yegorova describes, events like the Warsaw Uprising and Stalin’s repression of the kulaks.

Unfortunately, I’m not a historian. But Anne Applebaum is, and anyone hoping to understand Yegorova’s milleu should scan my footnotes with a skeptical eye and move on quickly to Applebaum’s writings about Eastern Europe’s “borderlands” and the Soviet GULAG system.

Here’s a great place to get started: read Applebaum’s wonderful essay, “The Worst of the Madness,” from the New York Review of Books. She writes about the parade of genocides and occupations that beset the populations caught, geographically and politically, between Europe’s dueling mass murderers.

Many comparisons have been drawn between Hitler and Stalin, but less is known of their early collaborations and occasional shared interests: the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 doomed thousands of Polish citizens to slaughter by their Soviet and German occupiers–the murdered hardly cared whether they were done in by the Nazis or the NKVD. And the insurgents of the Warsaw Uprising, it seems, were viewed as enemies of both regimes–one of which slaughtered them outright, the other merely stood at the city’s outskirts and allowed it to happen.

Americans and Russians do have this in common: the desire to hold up our countrymen’s roles in WWII as a source of national pride and to see the story of that war as a simple one, in which freedom defeated tyranny. Applebaum doesn’t allow us to enjoy those cozy illusions, however. “If we remember the twentieth century for what it actually was, and not for what we imagine it to have been, the misuse of history for national political purposes also becomes more difficult,” she says.

“The modern Russian state often talks about the “twenty million Soviet dead” during World War II as a way of emphasizing its victimhood and martyrdom. But even if we accept that suspiciously large round number, it is still important to acknowledge that the majority of those were not Russians, did not live in modern Russia, and did not necessarily die because of German aggression. It is also important to acknowledge that Soviet citizens were just as likely to die during the war years because of decisions made by Stalin, or because of the interaction between Stalin and Hitler, as they were from the commands of Hitler alone.

For different reasons, the American popular memory of World War II is also due for some revision. In the past, we have sometimes described this as the “good war,” at least when contrasted to the morally ambiguous wars that followed. At some level this is understandable: we did fight for human rights in Germany and Japan, we did leave democratic German and Japanese regimes in our wake, and we should be proud of having done so. But it is also true that while we were fighting for democracy and human rights in the lands of Western Europe, we ignored and then forgot what happened further east.

As a result, we liberated one half of Europe at the cost of enslaving the other half for fifty years. We really did win the war against one genocidal dictator with the help of another. There was a happy end for us, but not for everybody. This does not make us bad—there were limitations, reasons, legitimate explanations for what happened. But it does make us less exceptional. And it does make World War II less exceptional, more morally ambiguous, and thus more similar to the wars that followed.”

It’s not only Yegorova, not only the citizens of a totalitarian state, who retool their histories for their own purposes. And just as in modern-day Russia, suggesting here in America that our role in WWII contained its own complications and compromises earns the questioner the damning epithet of “unpatriotic,” especially from veterans.

It’s understandable that veterans, more than anyone, would want to paint a black-and-white picture of their experience, just like Yegorova did. But to honor their sacrifice and suffering means to try valiantly to see the world as it really is, scars and all, and to shine a searing light on our own deeds, heroic and otherwise.

Perhaps by seeing our history in all its complexity, as Applebaum suggests, we might also begin to overcome our sometimes rather naive sense of isolation and exceptionalism. “The more we learn about the twentieth century,” she writes, “the harder it will be to draw easy lessons or make simple judgments about the people who lived through it—and the easier it will be to empathize with and understand them.”

Those unlucky millions who lived in Europe’s borderlands–14 million of them casualties of Hitler’s Lebensraum ambitions and Stalin’s murderous ideological “experiments”–don’t have the luxury of holding a simplistic view of 20th Century history.   Ask a Pole, Lithuanian, or Ukrainian for his opinion of the WWII “good vs. evil” paradigm sometime. His answer probably won’t be so simple.

For a glimpse into the Polish experience of WWII and the Cold War, rent or Netflix the movie, “Katyn” or read this review by Anne Applebaum.

Uneasy Allies, Busy Carving Up Europe