WWI's Stalingrad: The Siege of Przemyśl

Bread cut with sawdust. Horses boiled to the bone. Men trading pet dogs and mice for scraps. In the brutal winter of 1914 to 1915, the grand Austro-Hungarian fortress of Przemyśl came under siege. Cut off by Russian armies and doomed by the vanity of their own generals, the garrison survived by the skin of their teeth until a final, desperate breakout charge… Dan Snow is joined by Alexander Watson, author of ‘The Fortress’, to step inside WWI’s longest, bloodiest siege. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and James Hickmann, edited by Natasha Hughes and Dougal Patmore. You can find more of Dan Snow's History Hit on the audio podcast here: https://podfollow.com/dan-snows-history-hit/view Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://bit.ly/4iTFm3x. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Dan Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 1:02Speaker 01

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• 1:45Speaker 01

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• 1:52Speaker 02

  Hi folks, this is Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman and I'm here to suggest that you host Thanksgiving within industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are, as usual, no antibiotics ever in their meat department, so carve up turkey and spiral cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 brand. And guess what? All of their fabulous delectable pies are made with no high fructose corn syrup. Where else are you going to find that? Gourmet Thanksgiving flavours with the quality you want, only at Whole Foods Market.

• 2:38Dan Snow?

  In the 20th century, few regions experienced violence on the scale, on the cadence of East Central Europe. I'm talking about the land stretching across today's Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic. We often associate that violence, that devastation with the 1930s and 40s, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union murdered millions.

• 3:11Dan Snow?

  But its descent into barbarity in fact began earlier with the outbreak of the First World War. From 1914 onwards, enormous armies clashed across the Eastern Front, bringing with them not only industrial warfare, but persecution, forced displacement and ambitious imperial visions of conquest. It was the start of a chapter that, until recently, we believed might have been closed, but now apparently continues. During the First World War, one of the most dramatic flashpoints was the mighty fortress city of Przemyszl, the eastern bulwark of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

• 3:53Dan Snow?

  Sitting in the contested province of Galicia, a land claimed by the Russian Empire as primordial Russian territory, Przemyszl became the focal point of a brutal struggle. Surrounded by a vast ring of forts and defended by 130,000 soldiers, the city was besieged between 1914 and 1915 in one of the longest and largest sieges of the First World War. For months, the fortress and its civilians endured the horrors of both ancient siege warfare and the emerging realities of modern total war. There was starvation and disease, but there was also some of the earliest aerial bombardments in history. Outside the city, desperate Austro-Hungarian attempts to relieve the siege turned the nearby

• 4:38Dan Snow?

  Carpathian Mountains to a frozen battlefield where hundreds of thousands of soldiers perished. By the time the fortress fell in March 1915, the siege had become a symbol of suffering and imperial ambition. It also revealed something darker, that the patterns of genocidal violence, that ethnic persecution that would later define the region in the Second World War, were already beginning to take shape. In today's episode, we explore the siege of Przemyszl, how it unfolded, why it mattered, and how this single fortress city became a window into the brutal transformation of warfare in the 20th century. I'm really glad to say that joining us is Alex Watson.

• 5:22Dan Snow?

  He's a professor of history at Goldsmiths, University of London, an expert in 19th and 20th century East Central European history and prize-winning author of The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemyszl. Let's get into it.

• 5:47Dan Snow?

  Alexander, great to see you, thanks for coming back on the podcast.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 5:49Dan Snow?

  Oh, right, well, we're going to talk about, now, people talk about the Western Front, this is the decisive theatre of the First World War, that's what you're here to tell me today, aren't you? What's going on in the East in 14 and 15?

• 5:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so everyone runs as the West, but actually, if you want to understand the 20th century, the rest of it, it's actually, the East is where it's happening, this is where the Russian Revolution happens, this is where massive battles happen, and this is actually where the war could have ended in 1915, rather than going all the way to 1918. So the Eastern Front is the one that people want to look out for.

• 6:17Dan Snow?

  And the other thing is, this is where it all starts, right? This great clash between Russia, Serbia and then Germany, Austro-Hungary, this is sort of the, and many of the policymakers would have thought in those countries, this is the decisive front, would they have thought?

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is the cradle of where it begins. In some ways, the First World War is centred on Ukraine, is centred on Poland, this is absolutely about which empires are going to rule the 20th century, for sure.

• 6:45Dan Snow?

  Amazing, well, let's get into it. What is the plan? So in 1914, the autumn into the winter of 1914, the Russians get absolutely trounced by the Germans as they invade Germany, but they have more success against Austro-Hungarians, don't they? Just give me a sense, build me up, what's been going on in the year up to this point?

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Okay, so everybody at the start of the First World War believes that attack is the way forward, you've got to push the enemy back, you need a quick victory, you don't want battle on your own territory. And so the Germans go west, 80% of their army is situated on the western border, going through Belgium, France. The Russians, though, have been told by the French and have agreed with the French, you have to attack early, because of course the French know that the Germans are going to go for them, and they're desperate to divert as many resources, enemy resources where as possible. So the Russians have, they divide their army into two parts, a northern part, which goes for what was called East Prussia, it's now in Poland, Missouri, and that ends very badly.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  If anybody knows anything about the First World War and the Eastern Front, Tannenberg is the thing they may know about, this is the big battle.

• 7:53Dan Snow?

  Crushing German victories.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  Crushing German victories. But actually, the major front on the Eastern Front is not up north, but the place where the Russians put most of their soldiers is against Austria-Hungary down in the south. Because the Austro-Hungarians are the enemy that the Russians think that they can probably knock out quickest, that's one reason. But the second reason is that the Imperial Russian government's major war aims, their major ambitions, all centre around Austro-Hungarian territory too. There's this place called Galicia, this province called Galicia, which today covers what today is western Ukraine and southern Poland. And the Russians see, at least the eastern part of this particularly, as primordial

• 8:39Speaker 03

  Russian land, land which belongs to them or which should belong to them.

• 8:43Dan Snow?

  Interesting, Alexander, so you're saying that the Russians thought that this part of Ukraine was eternally Russian and should be under their control, fascinating stuff.

• 8:51Speaker 03

  They absolutely thought, they didn't even say, the Russians didn't use the term Ukrainian, they talked about Ukrainians as little Russians, and these were little Russian people who allegedly desperately needed Imperial Russian liberation.

• 9:04Dan Snow?

  They needed liberation, reincorporation into Mother Russia.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  As the invasion went on, that was the message that was given out.

• 9:10Dan Snow?

  Okay, so it goes wrong in the north, but how does this big southern strike go? Is this still in the autumn, the fall of 1914?

• 9:17Speaker 03

  So this starts pretty much immediately, the first Russian troops enter Austria-Hungary in the middle of August, okay, so just a few weeks in, and then the big invasion starts at the end of August. And the Imperial Russian army has a massive numerical superiority, massive, I mean, this is what people forget, you know, it's always the German army, it's naturally the strongest, the best trained, probably is the best trained in fairness, but the Russians have the biggest military machine on the face of the planet in 1914, nothing is bigger. And also, unlike the Germans, unlike the Austro-Hungarians, unlike the French, they've been at war just nine years earlier, 1905, against the Japanese, they've redone their

• 10:01Speaker 03

  doctrine, they have an understanding of what modern war is that actually most of their enemies don't have, so this is a dangerous force.

• 10:09Dan Snow?

  And how does it perform?

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Well, in Austria-Hungary, it performs pretty well, it gets to the gates of Krakow, so it covers, it advances very quickly through August and the first half of September, right across western Ukraine, right across southern Poland, Krakow is right over in the west of this province. And it looks really dangerous, it looks like the Russians, well, the Russians have options, they can go southwards, head to Hungary, or they can keep going westwards and head toward Vienna and Berlin. It's a real hinge point of the war.

• 10:44Dan Snow?

  And what happens?

• 10:45Speaker 03

  Do you want me to tell you now, this early in the podcast? We don't want that spoiler, surely.

• 10:50Dan Snow?

  So no, so winter of 1914, they're in this threatening position.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:56Dan Snow?

  And they've got, so the big decision is what to do in 1915, what are they going to do, where's that main thrust going to take place?

• 11:01Speaker 03

  Well, so- Really, actually, the key point is in the autumn of 1914. And to roll back a bit, and we also need to think about the Austro-Hungarians, because of course, as wars in our own time show, the enemy gets a vote. Austria-Hungary never used its vote terribly well on this one. I mean, the Austro-Hungarians make a hash of virtually everything. They've got their major general, their major commander is a guy called Franz Konrad von Hützendorf.

• 11:25Dan Snow?

  Don't talk to me about that clown.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  Okay, fine.

• 11:27Dan Snow?

  He's an absolute disaster, isn't he?

• 11:29Speaker 03

  He ends up moving the army in the wrong direction. So he's got two war plans, one to fight Serbia, one to fight Russia. And he implements the Serbian one. And by the time he's thinking, oh, actually, the Russians are coming, they're way bigger than us. Loads of these troops are heading down towards the Balkans. And they've got to do this weird triangle, going all the way down to the Balkans and then all the way up back to what is now Western Ukraine, which of course takes ages. It takes forever. And by the time these troops come in, they're just in time to participate in this massive defeat. The Russians overwhelm the much smaller Austro-Hungarian force in Western Ukraine and in the east of the Habsburg province on the eastern border.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  And they just come in crushing everything in their path. The Austro-Hungarian army loses hundreds of thousands of men in those first weeks of war. They're in action the entire time. And it's a military disaster. You know, you read the accounts, and this is a military which is fraying, falling apart. People are running, dropping their weapons. And the whole force, which also gets infected by cholera and dysentery and typhus, which are spreading across the front at this time, starts heading westwards in disordered retreat. And it's a real moment of crisis, just a month and a half into the war. Are the Austro-Hungarians actually going to be able to see this through in any way? Or is this it?

• 12:55Dan Snow?

  Just to pull back, so what dramatic months, they're just fighting in France, that the fate of Paris is in their balance. You've got hundreds, thousands of men being killed, wounded, brutalised, millions of men on all these different fronts, war as we've never seen in history before.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  And also, these are multi-ethnic armies. You talk about the Russian army, but actually, it's the Imperial Russian army. So you've got Ukrainians, Kazakstanis, Belarusians, Lithuanians, all in this. And on the Austro-Hungarian side, and this is an empire with 11 official languages. Just in terms of trying to coordinate and organise these guys, the way they do it in part is every Habsburg soldier has to learn 80 German or Hungarian words. They have tea towels, yeah, with these words printed on them. So when they're doing it.

• 13:41Dan Snow?

  Advance.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 13:42Dan Snow?

  Fire.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  I don't know if retreat is that. That would be interesting to know. Probably not, yeah.

• 13:48Dan Snow?

  Orderly withdrawal.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Bits of the rifle, you know, all this. So that's one of the ways in which they do it. They treat, they teach some basic German to these guys.

• 13:57Dan Snow?

  So the Austro-Hungarians are crushed in this great Russian offensive?

• 14:01Speaker 03

  They're absolutely crushed. The field army goes reeling backwards, like I said, right over to Western Poland. I mean, the only idea comes to get them as far as the way from Russians as possible in order to give the men a chance to rest, give the, a chance for the panic to subside, restore discipline, and then they'll be able to go forward. Because it's not that the Austro-Hungarians are out of men, it's that they're out of energy, they've got a lack of sleep, and they're out of courage at this point. They need to get things back together again. So the army goes back partly because that's just the way everybody is headed. But it also goes back because they need a fire break, a pause, a chance simply to

• 14:46Speaker 03

  get their stuff together again.

• 14:48Dan Snow?

  And where do they go back to?

• 14:49Speaker 03

  They go back to around, well, just in front of Krakow at this time in September. They're then pushed back later. But they're able to get some miles, tens of miles apart from the Russians, largely due to this place that we're going to talk about, this fortress, Pchemishl, having a garrisoned, protected fortification, huge fortification in front of them, which controls the logistical routes, controls the supply lines, the railways, gives them that break they need, that pause they need, and slows the Russians down just enough for the Austro-Hungarians to get themselves together and go forward and for the entire empire not to collapse.

• 15:32Dan Snow?

  So the fate of the empire almost now resting on the walls of this fortress. Tell me, how powerful is this fortress? People might be thinking of a medieval castle with high walls. Is this very modern, you know, spread out, low-lying, big defensive guns, barbed wire? Tell me about it.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  Okay, so we need to move away from the whole castle type concept, okay? Because in the 20th century, civilians and cities are just as important for the outcomes of battle as soldiers are, because soldiers rely on having continual supply. Soldiers need to eat, they need to drink. You need a populated base in order to be able to operate out of. So what this is, it's a kind of civilian military hybrid, a soft inner core, which has the supplies, the bakeries, swimming pools, training facilities, everything that an army needs. Absolutely, exactly, all of those things.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  And then a hard outer edge of 35 forts. And these forts are what were called at the time artillery forts. So they're kind of squat and low. Either the more modern ones, they've got these, you know, like battleships have turrets with these guns on them. So they've got kind of those types of turrets, but they're mounted on big, concrete, thick buildings. Or the older ones, because a lot of this fortress, unfortunately for the Austro-Hungarians, is obsolete. They simply have artillery stationed on the roofs of the forts. If listeners want to Google this, or even better still, go to Pchemishl. It's just an amazing place to be. You can walk around the fortress ring. Fortress ring is about 30 miles in circumference. It's a big, big area.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  And these forts were supposed to be able to be kind of self-contained. If they got surrounded by an enemy, they should be able to fight themselves. They had food, they had hospital rooms, they had enough munitions to keep themselves going for a couple of weeks. But above all, their job was to operate together and to keep the enemy out of this city. And the reason why that was important was that Pchemishl, this city, was a rail hub. It's where the major east-west roads go backwards and forwards in this area. And this area doesn't have great roads, so that's important. But even more crucial, it's where the railway goes and all armies in 1914. It's a railway war, exactly.

• 17:59Dan Snow?

  And so if the Russians had been able to walk into that city and keep going through it, there was nothing, I mean, the field army just kept retreating. This is a sort of, this is a hard line of defence that the Austrians have pre-prepared, and there's kind of nothing much beyond it.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  That's exactly it, that's exactly it, yeah. The Austro-Hungarians, they imagined, as everybody did, this was going to be a manoeuvre war. If you look back at Austro-Hungarians' training, the major emphasis is on getting soldiers to march fast and quickly.

• 18:30Dan Snow?

  Marching about, charging towards the enemy.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, so they hadn't actually invested that much in this fortress in the last 10, 15 years before the war, because the whole emphasis was, we're going to manoeuvre war, we're going to march around the enemy, we're going to take them in the flank. But of course, these are conscript armies, they're massive armies of millions of men. And that means that you don't just recruit the young and the fit 20-year-olds. You recruit people who are in their, exactly. That's such a delicate way of putting it.

• 19:00Dan Snow?

  Prime of life in many ways.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  Intellectually, I think, absolutely intellectually, yeah. And, you know, we're obviously not going to be doing tens of miles marches a day. So these guys, their job is simply to sit in this place and hold it. And the garrison is aged usually between, yeah, between 35 and 42. The vast majority of soldiers are in their middle age. They're not terribly fit. And the other thing as well that these armies know about middle-aged people, especially people with families, is unlike the younger guys, these are not people inclined to take risk. Once the fire starts coming over, generally you find them in prayer rather than going over the top.

• 19:38Dan Snow?

  So it doesn't sound, it doesn't sound like it's going to be a massive problem for the Russians. What happens, so the Russians arrive, do they surround it? Is there a sort of siege that we might call it, try and cut it off? What's the plan?

• 19:51Speaker 03

  So the war gets going, as we've talked about, in August 1914, in the east. And it's pretty clear, certainly by the end of the month, that things are not going well for the Austro-Hungarians. The fortress has to be prepared, because this will sound familiar as well in our own age. The Austro-Hungarian military is chronically short of funds in peacetime. It's not prepared for this war. And one of the ways this manifests itself in the fortress is you've got this fortress ring, you've got these thirty-five forts around, but there's gaps between them. There's holes between them. It's true in Belgium, actually, in the West as well. The Germans, this huge fortress that the Germans desperately need to capture, the Belgian city of Liege.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  And the forts are hard, but there are gaps between them. And Ludendorff, a big Russian general who becomes important later, simply walks between the forts and demands surrender. And the Austro-Hungarians see this and there's a panic. So they start frantically digging trenches between the forts to try and fill those holes. And so there's this frantic preparation. By the twenty, the field army passes through the fortress in disorder in early September, early and mid-September, mid-September really. And twenty-third of September, the fortress is cut off. It's completely surrounded by the Russians.

• 21:10Dan Snow?

  And are they bombarded? Is that they sort of hope to starve it out and wait and see what happens? Or do they quite actively try and take down these defences?

• 21:17Speaker 03

  Well, conveniently for our story, the one Russian general that people may have heard from the First World War in charge of this sector is a guy called Alexander Brusilov. Famous for the Brusilov offensive. And he really stands out among the Russian generals. If you look at Russian generals in nineteen fourteen, they're all kind of big, stocky, rather unimaginative looking men. And Brusilov is this thin, flighty, kind of energetic guy, crackling with energy. And he's determined to get to Vienna. You know, he's not going to mess around. And he says, we have to take this place. We've got to go for this. If we go for this, we control the rail routes right across Galicia.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  If we control the rail routes right through Galicia, that will then help an advance to the north and we can punch through Silesia, which is kind of an eastern industrial part of Germany at this time.

• 22:12Dan Snow?

  Very rich industrial part of Germany.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  Exactly. And keep going to Berlin. But we need to have this railway down the south in order to help do that. This is our role. But Plemmech is standing in our way. So he tells his subordinates, you've got to go for this. You've got to get ready and you need to assault. The fortress is obsolete. We've already had a clash with the garrison and we've seen how old and incompetent they are. This should take you a few days. Here's some artillery. You've got a few elite units. Go for it. And they take a week and a half or so to prepare, but the attack proper starts on the fifth of October nineteen fourteen.

• 22:54Dan Snow?

  And, I mean, the defending side, even when you're a bit old and a bit podgy and a bit scared, the defenders have great advantages in the First World War, don't they?

• 23:04Speaker 03

  They have massive advantages. Absolutely, yeah. Especially with the dominance of artillery. If you are underground or behind thick walls, you are relatively safe. But as soon as you're out in the open as attackers go, then you're in danger. But, you know, historians underestimate the Russians. They've seen this in the nineteen oh five war against Japan. And what the Russians do is actually quite modern at this time. The way that they advance toward the fortress is they get their soldiers together, squads of soldiers, and some, few of the soldiers will go forward, bit of the way, undercover, and then they'll start digging. And as they dig a big enough hole, others will follow to that hole. And they jump from hole to hole.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  Run, dig, run, dig, run, dig.

• 23:50Dan Snow?

  Given on the western front, the French and the Germans are advancing towards each other in neat lines. Get the machine gun, that's pretty impressive.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  It looks remarkably modern.

• 23:58Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the Russians, through the fifth of October, are able to get very close to the fortress walls and in a position to storm it.

• 24:08Dan Snow?

  Oh my, okay, so what happens?

• 24:10Speaker 03

  Well, on the sixth, they attack the fortress from three directions, from the north, from the south and from the southeast. They screw up the timing, the north and the south and, you know.

• 24:20Dan Snow?

  Inevitably.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  Inevitably. The north and the south are meant to be feint attacks to draw off the Austro-Hungarian reserves. But it's in the southeast, the forts which, most of which are now in Ukraine, actually, just on the other side of the border from Poland. Because Plemmech today is just in the southeastern corner of Poland. But these outer forts in the southeast are just over in a Ukrainian military area now. But it's that southeast, it's that southeastern corner that is the place that the Russians have decided to break through. They've got their biggest guns there, they've got their best units there, and they throw shell after shell after shell into the forts. And then at two AM, there's, the order for the general advance comes into force and

• 25:05Speaker 03

  they creep towards these outer forts ready to take them. And I've said they're modern, in the way that they're thinking about this, they're modern, but in technological terms, they're not very well prepared. These huge artillery pieces that dominate the western front in nineteen sixteen, the Russians don't have them. Hand grenades, again, very, very few. In some ways, it gets quite medieval. These Russian troops go forward undercover darkness, carrying siege ladders with them. It's kind of, this is what's so great about this point in history. You've got this weird mix of the very old and the extraordinarily new, yeah.

• 25:44Dan Snow?

  So not many hand, not many man portable machine guns, for example, at this point?

• 25:47Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no. I mean, machine guns for sure, but you know, the big, the big heavy ones, nothing, nothing light. But they go forward with siege ladders and with gun cotton, with explosives. And the idea is because the artillery that they've got isn't big enough to act, isn't powerful enough to actually punch holes.

• 26:05Dan Snow?

  Crack open the concrete fortifications.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  Exactly. What they're going to do is they're going to get to the forts and they're going to drop this gun cotton down ventilation tubes and around the doors and they're going to blow it open.

• 26:18Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  Two o'clock, the attack goes off. They creep forward. At three AM, sentries on one of the outer forts, here's something, they've got sentries posted outside, but they're not that worried. They know they've got listening posts whose throats by this point have been cut. They come forward and before the Austro-Hungarian defenders know, this is this one particular fort where the Russians get closest, Fort One One it's called, the Russians are on top of them. And this fort is really, really interesting because it's got a classic imperial garrison. It's got infantrymen from Hungary and Slovakia and it's got artillerymen, because they've got a kind of combined force from Vienna, yeah, German, Austrian Germans. And these guys don't talk to each other, in part because they can't talk to each other,

• 27:01Speaker 03

  but also because there's this kind of sniffiness, you know, the Viennese artillerymen who are kind of technologically trained and all the rest of it, they kind of see these Slovakian peasants from the back of beyond.

• 27:13Dan Snow?

  Well, even in a modern military, it's not easy for the different arms of the, you know, the armed force to talk to each other. So that's just times a million when it comes to Habsburg.

• 27:21Speaker 03

  So this is exactly it. And the Russians, anyway, they get on top of this fort, they manage to beat the infantry. The infantry retreats inside and locks the door and stays there quivering. But the Russians can't get in.

• 27:34Dan Snow?

  Wow.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  And the reason the Russians can't get in is that they've braved the barbed wire in front, they've got up the glasses, the slope, they've punched through the infantry defences, but it's a wet night and the explosives they've got have become damp. And when they, when they put them around the doors and set them alight, they fizzle, but they don't explode.

• 27:55Dan Snow?

  And that could be a turning point in the First World War.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  It probably is a turning point in the First World War.

• 27:59Dan Snow?

  That's one of those, you know, for want of a nail, the night couldn't go to the battle.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  It's exactly, they're just missing that one crucial thing that they need to break a hole in this fortress line.

• 28:09Dan Snow?

  Because it sounds to me like had they, had they taken that fort that night and pushed on beyond, I think for morale as much as anything else, the rest of the fortresses might have just gone, hang on a second, we're not going to hold it here, are we?

• 28:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, morale is key in a nutritional war. It becomes key, it's key right through the war. You know, Hindenburg, general who leads the Germans from sixteen to eighteen, he says, he who has the strongest nerves will win this war. And it's true in nineteen fourteen, and just as you say, you know, you think about what the Habsburg army has been through already, this massive defeat, this traumatic retreat, these fathers, I mean, this is a dad's army essentially garrisoning this fort, have seen this diseased force go back behind them. It looks like they're done for. An imperial Russia is intimidating to fight. So yeah, I think if the Russians punch a hole in it.

• 28:59Dan Snow?

  On the first night.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  On the first night, everything, there is the possibility of it could collapse.

• 29:04Dan Snow?

  But they hold out.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  But they do, which I think says something good about people in their mid-forties.

• 29:08Dan Snow?

  I know, I think we're tougher than, I'm not hoping to be tested in that respect.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  No, no, no, let's keep it theoretical.

• 29:14Dan Snow?

  Exactly. They hold out and presumably when daylight comes up, Austrian artillery are able to bring down fire on those Russians and sort of make it, make life a bit uncomfortable for them.

• 29:23Speaker 03

  Well, this is the Austro-Hungarian army, isn't it? So what the Austro-Hungarian army do is they send reinforcements, they send a counterattack force, their best troops, Hungarians, who are contemptuous of everybody else. And these Hungarians go in and they see, they see the standoff at the fort with the garrison quivering inside and the Russians on the roof but unable to get in. And they loop round and they start attacking the Russians who begin to, begin to surrender. But just at that point, the Austro-Hungarian artillery and the Russian artillery both start to fire on them. Because the Russians are trying to, the Russian observers see this Austro-Hungarian counterforce come in and trying to beat them off. And the Austro-Hungarians think the fort has been captured. And so they too put their, so at this point, both sides, both sets of infantrymen stop

• 30:07Speaker 03

  fighting because it's just, you know, it's, it's an atmosphere of steel balls flying everywhere.

• 30:14Dan Snow?

  Supersonic steel just flying.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  They drop the fight and infantrymen in green, the Russians infantrymen in blue, the Austro-Hungarians, they start hammering on the, on the, on the door and swearing and shouting, let us in, let us in. And the garrison, who is not, you know, have done a great job, but at the same time are not willing to take any chances already, they hang around a bit. But when they decide, okay, there is German we can hear, they do open the doors. And everybody kind of clambers into this, clambers into this fortress and the Russians are taken prisoner. They then move back, when the bombardment subsides, they are then, about a hundred, a hundred Russians are captured. They're then, they're then moved back, they're then brought back to behind the lines, at which point the second kind of line of the defences sees this horde of Russians coming

• 31:00Speaker 03

  towards them, they're prisoners, but doesn't realise that. And there's a massive panic and a flight to the rear of the second Austro-Hungarian line. But they are prisoners, so order is restored.

• 31:11Dan Snow?

  But that does go with our theory.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  It does go with that theory.

• 31:13Dan Snow?

  Had the Russians stormed that fort that night, it could have precipitated quite a general collapse in the Austrian position, the Austro-Hungarian position.

• 31:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're not feeling confident.

• 31:21Dan Snow?

  Yeah, interesting.

• 31:25Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We'll be back after this break.

• 31:34Dan Snow?

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• 34:26Dan Snow?

  So the Austro-Hungarians have hung, clung on by the skin of their teeth. The road to Vienna has been, everywhere else has been barred. So that's a, that's a turning point. What, do the Russians push home those attacks? Or is winter coming and they have to lick their wounds and think about next year?

• 34:41Speaker 03

  So they retreat, but then they come back again in November. And I think that there's, there's kind of two things that are important here. The first is, is just as you say, for the Austro-Hungarians, this is a massive victory, which can be seen as a turning point in the war. This, this stops an early Russian win over Austria-Hungary in, let's say, by the end of 1915. So that's one thing. Second thing, though, is that the Austro-Hungarians desperately talked a bit about morale. They desperately need this victory. And weirdly, given how difficult it is to pronounce, "Schemischl" becomes a household name. Everybody is talking about it. But the problem is, when the Russians come back in November, the Austro-Hungarian army retreats again. And the second time, the first time it retreats back in September, they desperately need

• 35:24Speaker 03

  the fortress to hold the Russians, so they've got a chance to reconstitute, to restore discipline, so on and so forth. In November, the retreat is a much more organized one. It's done for operational reasons. It's necessary, but it's organized. And what they should have done is taken the garrison back with them and left the fortress be. It's not necessary at any point. It doesn't have enough food to hold out for a long siege.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  But the problem is, is that it's become such a symbol.

• 35:51Dan Snow?

  That's the problem.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:52Dan Snow?

  You've turned it into a Stalingrad or Tobruk.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  This is the Stalingrad of Austria-Hungary's First World War.

• 35:58Dan Snow?

  So they, they attempt to hold it again.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  They attempt to hold it again. And it results in some of the most awful, in the attempts to relieve it through the winter of 1914, 15, result in some of the most awful battles that I think the 20th century sees.

• 36:11Dan Snow?

  And that's up against some pretty stiff competition.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  It is, it is. And, and, you know, Somme, Verdun, Eeps. But what we're talking about is we're talking about battles over the Carpathian Mountains in minus 20 degrees Celsius by armies which are not in any way equipped for winter warfare. You know, casualties are extraordinary. Million and a half, 2 million combined on both sides. And no one talks about this anymore.

• 36:41Dan Snow?

  No, totally forgotten.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  They're forgotten. I think, I mean, here, because the Western Front is more, is, is so vivid in, in kind of national memory, but, but even actually in Poland or Ukraine, you know, the, the greater horrors of the Second World War have kind of covered over that earlier history. But if we want to understand why this area of Europe becomes the epicenter of bloodshed through the 20th century, certainly through the first half of the 20th century, you know, 1914 to 1950. We can't do that without just thinking about the extraordinary violence that it sees in 1450 and afterwards, the norms that are broken, the dehumanization.

• 37:25Speaker 03

  It's, it's just the most remarkable, most awful period to live through.

• 37:30Dan Snow?

  And one of the worst places to be in that wider picture would have been presumably trapped in the city itself.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  I think it's one of the worst places to be in the entire of the first half of the 20th century. You know, we tend to separate, you know, First World War, Second World War, but actually there is, you can also talk about a continuum of horror, which starts in 1914. Problem is, once you unleash war, all of the norms and the rules and the standards that have gone before get swept away spectacularly quickly. And they don't, once things are broken, they don't come back.

• 38:01Dan Snow?

  What was it like through that winter for the defending force? Well, for both sides, but for the defending forces, because you say there's not enough food, so present food shortages, disease, I mean.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, this is, this is one of the, this is one of the places, one of the many places in which the experience of this city and these people kind of spans epochs. Because in some ways, this is a siege, so in some ways, it's almost like medieval warfare. You can, you can draw links between much this and much older sieges. But at the same time, the nature of modern war, whether we're talking about World War I, World War II, Ukraine war today, is attritional. It's about grinding down economically, but also psychologically. And one of the key characteristics of that is that war becomes total. Everything is mobilized in the course of the war. And as I've said, the norms and the standards and the rules break down.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  And I think one of the most powerful signs of this is, is that food itself becomes a weapon, denying food, not just to soldiers, but also to civilians, becomes a strategy of, of, food becomes weaponized. And we see that in 1914, 15, in "Schemischl." And we see it, that that acts as a precursor for the rest of the First World War, where a British blockade, France in the West, Russia in the East, creates what I've called in one of my books, a ring of steel, which, which creates the entire of Central Europe into this besieged zone where everything begins to run short.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  Food, the resources for, for, for weapons building, and ultimately resilience and hope. And, and "Schemischl" kind of encompasses that in a, sometimes you can understand that if you just look at a small community. But it's also important to recognize that it reverberates, this war, this, this type of war reverberates and grows bigger and, and eventually it expands the entirety of a continent in 16 to 18.

• 39:58Dan Snow?

  Yeah, a whole, a whole of that central core is under siege.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and, and, you know, that, that type of trauma, that type of, that type of sacrifice, even when the guns stop in 1918, that doesn't go away. Mentalities are changed. The violence in the head still continues.

• 40:21Dan Snow?

  So through the winter, savage fighting in those mountains. Austro-Hungarians trying to break through, get back, relieve that fortress.

• 40:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you've got savage, you've got savage fighting in the mountains to try and break through and relieve the fortress. In the city itself, you've got starvation. The city has about 30,000 civilians still living in it. It's meant to have fewer, but so many people hid and refused to go that they're, they're still there. There's about 130,000 soldiers. There's also 21,000 horses. Now, actually, that's, that's, that's saying that always makes me reflect about how, how we write history, because Most of us, me included, write history because of interest in human beings. Human beings are fascinating and especially in war. War is fascinating for me anyway, because you get those extremes of the human condition in war. It really brings that out. But it's worth thinking about how war affects the natural world and the non-human world as well.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  And ultimately, in Shemish, a fifth of the garrison are hospitalized due to malnutrition and starvation. And civilian death rates double. This is an awful, awful place to be as a man, a woman or child. But it's a particularly bad place to be if you're a horse. Because the horses are used for, well, this is, to a great extent, still a pre-int internal combustion age. There are lorries and cars, but mainly horsepower is literally what is used to get stuff around.

• 41:46Dan Snow?

  They're hauling the shells and...

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Absolutely, all of this, yeah. And then, as things get more desperate, those horses are eaten. Partly because what they want is to move over the fodder that they're feeding the horses to give it humans, but also because, of course, it opens up another food supply. And yeah, I mean, you know, maybe one in 10, something like that, of soldiers die from the garrison of Shemish. If you're a horse, the lethality rate is pretty much 100% by the end of the siege in March 1915.

• 42:18Dan Snow?

  Okay, take me to March 1915. What happens? The climax.

• 42:22Speaker 03

  Okay, so the siege has been going on since September. There's been a brief break in October. There's a relief of the fortress, the Austrian German army does come back briefly, but then retreats again. So the siege starts up again, 8th of November. And for those months from 8th of November until mid-March, this goes on. The fortress doesn't have enough food. It's got far too many people in it. And it doesn't have the strength either. The garrison doesn't have the strength to break out. There is an attempt to break out, a really extraordinarily heroic attempt, actually, to punch through Russian lines, through desperation, through determination.

• 43:00Dan Snow?

  So it's sort of abandon the city, but the garrison try and march out to safety, to their own lines.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  To get, to get back to the field army, exactly, and to link up with them. And again, I mean, yeah, listeners, don't underestimate men in their 40s. If there's one takeaway message...

• 43:15Dan Snow?

  Especially when they're trying to get home.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  Absolutely, exactly. Especially when they're trying to get home.

• 43:18Dan Snow?

  A square meal.

• 43:19Speaker 03

  You know, what these guys do to actually punch their way out of the fortress and nearly link up with the field army, and it's so agonizingly close. And then it fails. And in March 1918, sorry, March 1915, the fortress is out of food. And the commander, a guy called Herman Kusmenek, has to decide what to do. And he decides that they will have one last attack for honor, which weirdly goes eastwards. Yeah, he attacks, doesn't, doesn't attack back homewards.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  He's, they're heading towards Kiev and St Petersburg and Moscow. The reason for that is really simple. The territory in the east, sorry, in the west of the fortress is quite difficult. And these guys are starved. There is no way that they're going to be able to go forward in any meaningful way, except over very, very flat land, which is what the east has. So that's why he chooses that. That said, it's a criminal decision to get this starved garrison heading, heading in and...

• 44:32Dan Snow?

  To satisfy his sense of honor.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  To satisfy his sense of honor, that's exactly. And to create a legend. And he does it, and inevitably results in disaster. There's an immediate collapse of the attacking force. It's over in a night. And then they, the garrison command accepts the inevitable. And they, orders go out to destroy everything. Anything of military use is destroyed. The horses are shot, the remaining horses are shot. And the order goes out to place explosive charges in this ring of forts all around the city. These 35 forts all around the city. And also on the bridges.

• 45:15Speaker 03

  Of course, they want to make sure that when the Russians do get in, they can't, they still can't advance. We've talked about how this is a key logistical hub, a key supply hub. But Shemish is a city which has a river going right through it. The bridges of the city are the lifeblood of the city. So when you destroy those bridges, it's not just that you're doing something military. You're destroying the links that bind this city together as well. And the evening before the surrender, there is, it's one of noise, one of total noise as these big guns fire off the last of their artillery shells.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  And the accounts of the, there's diaries of civilians and soldiers who are in there. And they just talk about a wall of noise through the night that goes on and on and on. Sometimes you get the deep boom of the heavy artillery. Sometimes it's the quick whine of machine gun bullets being fired. But there is constant noise through this night, which never seems to stop, until shortly before six, when finally at last, these guns fall silent. And the police go around the city shouting, get out, get out. You need to leave your homes, you need to leave your houses. They're going to blow the forts, they're going to blow the bridges. And people are herded into sort of open spaces.

• 46:40Speaker 03

  Because, because as I said, the bridges, the forts, also the explosive depots, the munitions depots of the fortress, they've all been mined and ready to go off. Again, it's difficult to sort of act this without kind of keeping one foot in the modern world and one foot in the past. People talk about this as almost being like at Herculane or at Pompeii. At six o'clock on the dock, there is this flash of light from the north as the first explosive in one of the forts goes up. And it rises high above. And of course, because light travels quicker than sound, everybody first sees this, this, this laser beam light going up, this flare going up.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  And then there is enormous kaboom as it comes into the city. And that's followed by another and another and another. And they say it's like, it was like having a series of volcanoes going off all around the city. The last plane out of Shemish, they had aircraft, which, which took mail back. One of the ways in which this is a modern siege is it's the first time that a powered, that powered aircraft, that an air mail service is set up in history. That's how the garrison communicate with their, with their families during, during this long siege. Last aircraft out of Shemish, pilot and observer with mail and whatever else they can carry,

• 48:03Speaker 03

  takes off and they're over these forts as these, as these explosions start going. And the pilot left an account of that as, as well about very rocked in the air. And again, seeing, he too, just like people on the ground, he says, "It was like Pompeii, it was like Pompeii must have been." And when the, when the bridges in the middle of the city go up as well, of course, windows are smashed for miles, for miles around. And then the Russians march in. And that's, that's, that's the end of the siege. That's the end of the resistance.

• 48:39Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We'll be back after this break.

• 48:51Speaker 04

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• 49:20Speaker 02

  Hi folks, this is Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman. And I'm here to suggest that you host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are, as usual, no antibiotics ever in their meat department, so carve up turkey and spiral cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 Brand. And guess what? All of their fabulous, delectable pies are made with no high-fructose corn syrup. Where else are you going to find that? Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want, only at Whole Foods Market.

• 50:08Dan Snow?

  What was it like? Was it much relief for the people after that? Or what was the rustification process like?

• 50:15Speaker 03

  So, there's certainly some relief among the citizens, simply because it's been so hard and so awful and they're so close to starvation, or in some cases actually starving, that having the prospect of some sort of food and some sort of normality is the wrong word, but at least at least peace return gives some people some hope. The city, Pchemish today, has pretty much an entire entirely Polish population.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  In terms of the lay of the land, in terms of the population of this whole area, you know, it's very different today because of the bloodletting and the deportations and the horrors of of the Second World War and the aftermath. Hitler murdered the Jews as the epicenter of the Holocaust from 41 onwards. And then, in the immediate, at the end of the war and the immediate aftermath, Stalin is deporting Ukrainians and Poles and moving people around.

• 51:12Dan Snow?

  Or German or...

• 51:13Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Well, Germans to some extent, but also Poles are violently shifted westwards and Ukrainians are violently shifted eastwards. And Pchemish is part of that story. In 1914, about half the population identifies as Polish, about 30% as Jewish and about 20% as Ukrainian.

• 51:31Dan Snow?

  Oh, okay.

• 51:32Speaker 03

  Yes, it's mixed. And the Russians come in. And the plan is that this should be the capital of a new governorship in Russia. Russia is divided into into governorships. And they, the hope is, is that this area of what was then Eastern Galitsia, what is now Western Ukraine, would become an integral part of Russia. And this is, this is where things really get, I mean, it's not quite where things get to, the whole story is disturbing, but it gets even more disturbing. Because often there's a sense of the Imperial Russian Army and the Imperial Russian State is kind of old fashioned, you know, it's a monarchy, it's the Romanovs.

• 52:15Speaker 03

  They're old autocrats, they've got a court with all these traditions. But actually, by 1914, the Romanovs claim to keep on ruling Russia, which of course has been heavily challenged. There's a failed revolution in 1905 and there's going to be a revolution, another revolution in 1917.

• 52:36Speaker 03

  The Romanovs' claim to to to rule Russia is in part based on nationalism and on an idea of Russia as the imperial master of the Slavic world. And in particular, the Russian elites see Ukrainians as part of the Russian people. I mean, to understand this, we've got to go back to the early medieval period and think about how both the modern Russian state and the modern Ukrainian state trace back their heritage to Kiev, to to a medieval kingdom based in Kiev. So that there are these close links.

• 53:17Speaker 03

  But the Russians, of course, have an ideological imperative and incentive to claim that there isn't any such thing as Ukrainian people. These are just a branch of the Russian people. Not least because, and Putin knows this today, Russia can't be a great power, a major power, without control of Ukraine. Ukraine was the Imperial Russian Army's breadbasket. It's where a lot of the early industrialization of the Russian Empire is. And so Ukrainian nationalism was always incredibly threatening back in the 19th century, in the early 20th century, still today, to nationalist Russian elites. And snuffing that out was crucial.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  And what we get in 1914 is a very modern plan of population engineering. This isn't a world, this isn't the 18th century world where you have monarchs who simply want land because they want the land.

• 54:15Dan Snow?

  And tolerate the diverse ethnic minorities.

• 54:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's fine, no one cares, exactly. This is the 20th century world, in which if the population doesn't fit your ideological view of what this land should be, then that population has to be changed. And that's the programme that the Russians start on when they occupy this territory.

• 54:36Dan Snow?

  So we can use the word ethnic cleansing effectively?

• 54:38Speaker 03

  We can absolutely use the word ethnic cleansing. And and different varieties of ethnic cleansing. So there are all of the three nationalities, Poles, Ukrainians and the Jews who occupy this, who who live in this part of, part of the world, all suffer, but in different ways. The Poles, they suffer because in this part of Eastern Galitsia, Western Ukraine, today, they're the masters in this area. Conservative, Polish nobility have run this for ages. And so one of the first things the Imperial Russian Army does is arrest these people and disempower them. Ukrainians are also impacted, but in a different way. The Russians are determined to believe that Ukrainians aren't Ukrainians at all, they're

• 55:23Speaker 03

  Russians. And they're hopeful that the Ukrainians, Ukrainian population will welcome them, and rather disappointed when they, they really don't. There's a, there's, there's a neat line actually in one of the, one of the, one of the Polish reports of this invasion about what it was like. It says, "When the Russians came into this area, they announced themselves as the liberators of the Slavic peoples against against the German yoke. And then they marched in and death and destruction was in their trail. All they brought was misery, barbarism, the collapse of civilization." It's really felt on a visceral level, rape and and pillage.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  And for Ukrainians, and this part of the world, because the Habsburg Empire is very open to allowing national feelings within its borders, this in many ways is Ukrainian nationalist heartland. And when the Russians realise that, they arrest and remove Ukrainian intellectuals, teachers, lawyers, doctors, anyone who will say, "No, I'm not Russian, I am a Ukrainian", and anyone who has the organisational skills to be able to be an opinion former and to mobilise some sort of resistance against what's happening.

• 56:50Speaker 03

  Ukrainian schools, which have been allowed to teach quite happily in Ukrainian before the war, are closed down and only allowed to reopen if they teach in Russian. Ukrainian language textbooks are thrown away, they're burned, Ukrainian libraries are closed down, and Russian books replace them. Ukrainian newspapers, again, you know, Ukrainian language not allowed to publish in it. Even the word Ukrainian is banned. These people have to be referred to as little Russians. So Ukrainians are ethnically cleansed, in some cases among elites in a violent way, but there's a cultural ethnic cleansing going on. And of course, this isn't the first time in history that that's going to happen.

• 57:36Speaker 03

  And then there's the Jews. And the Russian Empire is the most antisemitic part of of Europe. The Romanian state gives it a run for its money in fairness, but in 1914, the Russian Empire is deeply antisemitic. There have been pogroms in in the Russian Empire in the early 1880s and again in 1903 to 6. There are pogroms in 1914. As the Russian Army mobilises, soldiers attack Jews living in the west of the Russian Empire. And Jews really suffer horribly under Russian occupation. What the Russians do is they discriminate against them, they dismiss Russian, they dismiss Jewish officials, but ultimately they start deporting people.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  And the entire population of Pchemish and the surrounding area, around 17,000 people, is, gets a notice, notice goes out at the end of April 1915, that they are going to have to leave and move eastwards. An overall, perhaps about 100,000 Jews in this area, probably the vast majority of the population that's left, given so many others have fled westwards, are forced out and deported. And that is because, that is because firstly, the Russian Army doesn't trust them, but secondly, because this is about reshaping the population to fit this idea of the land that the Russians have as primordial Russian land.

• 58:58Dan Snow?

  So massive deportation of Jewish people to the east did not start with Hitler's Holocaust?

• 59:03Speaker 03

  No, no. And we can't, I don't think we can understand Hitler's Holocaust, or for that matter what Stalin does. Stalin departs huge numbers of people without actually knowing that this isn't anything new in this area. People have seen this. It's been done, there is precedence, and militaries have experience of doing this. And of course, in 1941, when, well, I should say rather, 1939, when the Nazis and Stalin Soviet Union invade Poland at the start of the Second World War, both these evil empires invade Poland, the border runs, the border between them runs right through Pchemish.

• 59:44Speaker 03

  Pchemish is actually torn in half by concrete and barbed wire, with the Nazis on one side and the Soviets on the other. And these whole processes...

• 59:55Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  They repeat.

• 59:57Dan Snow?

  The Russian army is finally, the gateway to Central Europe is open. They've conquered this city. Did they keep advancing to the West?

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  They did keep, they did keep advancing for a bit after, after the fortress falls in nineteen, in twenty second of March, nineteen fifteen. But they've kind of already blown it. If they managed that in October, in September, October, the year before, at that point, the Germans had most of their units in the West. The Austro-Hungarians are on their own. By this point, the Germans, the whole situation has changed. The Germans are giving the Austro-Hungarians more support. And no, they don't actually get much further. They've missed that key window in the autumn nineteen fourteen. And there's a big, there's a big German-led offensive called the Battle of Golitsatarnov.

• 1:00:47Dan Snow?

  So the Germans sort of switched the defensive on the Western Front, bring all these guns and troops back and they can try and sort the situation out in the East.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  Exactly. And if it actually, again, you know, people, listeners, it's due the Second World War. If you want to understand where modern combat operations comes from, the modern world comes from, then actually it's World War One you need to be looking at. And Golitsatarnov is really interesting as one of, you can see it as almost one of the first modern battles. The Germans are getting, beginning to get now really good at coordinating artillery and infantry and planning their battles in order to move forward at really alarming rates. They smash into the, into the Russians and they send the Russians reeling. They capture Pchemish by June nineteen fifteen and they keep on going and they actually take over much of, they take over much of Eastern Europe.

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  We started off the podcast talking about how it's in, you know, forget the West, it's in the East that it happens, if you want to understand the twentieth century. And if you want to understand why the Poland, the state of Poland becomes a thing again after a hundred and, a hundred and twenty years of being partitioned between Russia, Austria and, and, and, and, and Prussia, Germany. If you want to understand the rise of the modern Ukrainian state, the rise of the Baltic States, obviously the Soviet Union and the later Cold War, actually the huge German advance of the summer of nineteen fifteen, which, which retakes Pchemish and beats its way into, into, into Poland and into the Baltic. This sets up the preconditions that's needed to have these states that are on all of our maps today.

• 1:02:25Speaker 03

  So yeah, you know, they're creating future geography here and the future power constellations as well, which are going to dominate the rest of the twentieth century.

• 1:02:34Dan Snow?

  And establishing precedence for the barbarism, the dystopian, the genocide, the upheavals that will, that will follow in, in, in the next, sadly, in the next decade.

• 1:02:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's, there's a great, great book, I'll give it a plug, by Timothy Snyder, The Bloodlands, who talks a lot about this in the, this barbarism that Hitler and Stalin perpetrate. And it's a wonderful book, but it starts in nineteen, it starts in nineteen twenty eight with Stalin. And we could perhaps go back even further and think of nineteen fourteen as the year zero of this. And Pchemish, and understanding what happens at Pchemish really, really opens a weather vein, shows us a weather vein for which way the winds of the twentieth century are going to blow.

• 1:03:17Dan Snow?

  And imagine that, imagine if the Russians had been able to advance that city in the autumn, the fall of nineteen fourteen. History could have been very different indeed.

• 1:03:24Speaker 03

  History would have been very different indeed.

• 1:03:26Dan Snow?

  Alexander, thank you very much for coming on. Tell everyone what your award-winning book is called.

• 1:03:30Speaker 03

  So the book about this, this siege and, and the bloodlands of East Central Europe is called, is called The Fortress, The Great Siege of Pchemish, and it was published by Penguin.

• 1:03:42Dan Snow?

  Well, go and get it, everyone. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:03:45Dan Snow?

  Well, what a story. Thank you so much, Alexander, for joining us. He really is just obviously the expert on this particular topic and indeed so many others, great friend of the show, always a pleasure. And he's going to be back, guys, so watch this space. The Siege of Pchemish is about much more than just the fall of a fortress. It's just, it's a window into a time and a place where massive empires collided and where the staggering violence of the mid twentieth century first began to take shape. Those same lands that saw imperial armies clash in and around that fort would later experience occupation, deportation, genocide at the hands of the Nazis and the Soviets on an even more devastating scale. And I think the siege and the fighting around it had, had broken taboos, had brutalized

• 1:04:30Dan Snow?

  people, had normalized bloodshed in such a way that later totalitarian regimes could sweep in and simply deepen and expand what the First World War had begun. Thanks for listening, folks.

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• 1:06:25Dan Snow?

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