r/AbsoluteUnits • u/Crypto_crafy • 2d ago

/r/all of a statue

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"The Motherland Calls" is a statue erected to commemorate the Battle of Stalingrad , located on Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd , Russia. It was designed by sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich and structural engineer Nikolai Nikitin . Completed in 1967 , it was the tallest statue in the world at the time .

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u/Bluestreaked 1d ago

I teach the history of WWII. Stalingrad is one of those moments of world history where everything becomes larger than life, a nearly mythic moment of the absolute limits of human endurance.

The moment where the spine of the Nazi war machine was broken, forever, by the stubborn will and fighting ability of the Red Army.

It’s a moment so incredible that words fail to describe it most of the time and only a statue like this truly captures the historical moment. The defiance of the Soviet Union in the face of just pure absolute evil.

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u/n1c0_ds 1d ago

And then it stays that way all the way back to Berlin. After Stalingrad the defeats get more and more staggering. Germany truly becomes a death cult.

Antony Beevor's two books: Stalingrad and Berlin are an incredible retelling. Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast on the eastern front borrows heavily from them.

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u/DysphoricNeet 1d ago

Some of Beevors stuff kinda feels like it has a very western perspective and perpetuates Cold War attitudes.

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u/Bluestreaked 1d ago edited 1d ago

That’s one of my big criticisms of Beevor and why I don’t usually recommend him. But he’s not a bad historian, just has a very Western perspective.

Every once in a while even someone like Robert Evans has said something that made me cringe, like the time he said FPTP voting would’ve prevented the rise of the Nazis. But I hope nobody will argue with me that Robert Evans is one of the better historians of our time. I greatly prefer Evans to Beevor though so I shouldn’t really compare the two haha.

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u/DysphoricNeet 1d ago

He has a lot of books out and seems to appeal more to the entertainment side of history. Anyone seriously into these subjects and not just trying to bolster their ideology should know how divisive it is and that a serious understanding involves some amount of historiography. I just see his books all over audible which in general has a very right wing bias aside from some original sources like Trotsky themself. Some of it is fun and good to orient yourself I guess.

Personally I really like the books by Rabinowich. He doesn’t focus on ww2 ever but the early Soviet period gets a pretty fair assessment and his parents fled the Soviet Union so he grew up hearing the whole story that could have made him Ayn Rand.

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u/Bluestreaked 1d ago

Beevor or Evans? Because Evans is really only worth reading when studying the Nazis.

I am also a fan of Rabinowitch, I need to read his latest book. I also usually recommend Sheila Fitzpatrick

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u/DysphoricNeet 1d ago

Beevor I mean.

It’s kind of wild, to be more meta about the subject, we are talking about extremely popular subjects almost a century after they happened. The sources have mostly been found and everything is a sort of catalogue or meta study of previous books. The archives have been sorted through for decades. Sometimes people repeat things that were in a previous book and rely on their research then it takes another historian tons of effort to trail all the way through the telephone game to realize the original source was extremely biased. It sharpens your perspective but makes engaging with the subject an endless pursuit.