War and peace - a Ukrainian tragedy

by Alan Stewart

Hubris: The Origins of Russia's War Against Ukraine by Jonathan Haslam, Bloomsbury 

2025. 368 pp RRP: paperback £10.99; hardback £27.99; eBook £8.79.

 

The war in Ukraine started in February 2022 and has been raging for nearly four years.

It is the biggest conflict fought in Europe since World War Two by far. It has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives – both civilians and combatants.

Jonathan Haslam is a widely respected history professor. In his latest, highly acclaimed book he attempts to explain what led to the Russian intervention.

He notes that on 9 February 1990 – at the end of the Cold War –  the US Secretary of State, the emollient James Baker, assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO's jurisdiction or forces would "not move one inch eastwards”. Yet in 1999 Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic all joined NATO.  It was the first wave of post-Cold War enlargement. NATO itself called it a "historic moment”. And then in 2004 the "big bang" enlargement brought in seven more countries. This included the Baltic states – the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. All this further deepened Russia's sense that it was gradually being isolated and encircled.

Then in 2008 NATO made known plans to accelerate entry for two other ex-Soviet states, Georgia and Ukraine. Plus there was evidence of US involvement in Ukraine's "Maidan Uprising" which began in November 2013 and which saw the toppling of the pro-Russian president Victor Yanukovych. Allegations persist that it was a CIA engineered coup.

In any case the Kremlin retaliated by annexing the breakaway autonomous Crimean republic that had left Ukraine to join the Russian Federation  and by, as the author says "fomenting a war in the Donbas region of Ukraine".

Which brings us up to the current day. The Russo-Ukrainian war is not exclusively, or even mainly, about Putin's territorial ambitions. Haslam shows that it is much more complicated than this and that the origins lie on the other side of the Atlantic. It is an interesting perspective and a fascinating read.

The man who built the Berlin Wall

by Alan Stewart
 
The Rise and fall of Erich Honecker; The Man who Built the Berlin Wall: Nathan Morley, Pen & Sword, Barnsley 2024, 272pp, rrp £25

Erich Honecker was born in Saarland in 1912. In 1922, when he was ten, he joined the Communist youth organisation, the Young Spartacus League. Then from 1929 onwards he was active in the German Communist Party, the KPD.  He was arrested by the Gestapo in December 1935 and was subsequently jailed by the Nazis.
After World War Two, in 1946, he co-founded what would become the youth movement of the new Socialist Unity Party (SED), the Free German Youth. The SED, a mass party based on the merger of the KPD and the Social Democrats (SDP) in what had been the Soviet Zone of occupied Germany, soon became the leading party in the new German Democratic Republic that was established in 1949.
Honecker played a leading role in the new people’s republic and as Security Secretary of the SED Central Committee he was the prime organiser of the building of the so-called Berlin Wall in 1961 to isolate the NATO enclave of West Berlin that lay in the heart of the German Democratic Republic.
In 1970 he initiated a power struggle, with the apparent support of Leonid Brezhnev, that led to him replacing Walter Ulbricht as General Secretary of the SED in 1971.
Honecker, like Ulbricht, was instrumental in the processes of detente which led to the GDR and West Germany being accepted into the UN in 1973 and the Helsinki Accords in 1979.  There were even attempts to normalise relations with West Germany when the social-democratic Chancellor, Willi Brandt, was at the helm in the early 1970s.
In the GDR itself there was state subsidised housing. There was also a comprehensive welfare state with free health care and full employment. There were great achievements in the sporting and cultural fields. Plus between 1970 and 1987 the net income of the working population rose by 97 per cent. All of this is well documented by Nathan Morley in his book.
Honecker was totally undermined by the new Soviet leader Gorbachev and in October 1989 the SED Politburo forced him to resign.
However Morley notes that Honecker and his wife had amassed no personal wealth or property.  He would die in relative poverty in Chile in 1994. But his great achievements and his personal integrity should be never be forgotten.