February 2 1943 is the date of the Red Army victory at Stalingrad. From the moment of near-certain defeat the previous year the defence of the city had been turned into an encirclement of the German forces and their eventual humiliating surrender.
Up to this point in early 1943, despite the reverses in north Africa and the failure to launch an invasion of Britain, the nazi blitzkreig had appeared virtually invincible. Hyped up by the Goebbels propaganda machine German morale was at its height and the Allies could see no obvious end to the war. Stalingrad changed all of that, decisively.
This was a victory which all committed to the anti-fascist war could celebrate. Stalingrad inspired those working underground in the resistance throughout nazi-occupied Europe.
King George VI commissioned a sword that Churchill himself presented to Stalin. On its blade the inscription read: "To the steelhearted citizens of Stalingrad a homage of the British people."
The Communist Party was meanwhile engaged in what without doubt was the biggest and broadest campaign in its history, for a second front to relieve the awful pressure that the nazi onslaught continued to impose on the Russian people.
Almost all of this history was to be hidden first by the onset of the cold war in the late 1940s and then again during the second cold war of the 1980s era of Thatcher and Reagan. At the time Scottish folk singer Dick Gaughan put the need to reclaim this past from the rewriting of the history books rather neatly in his song Think Again: "Do you think that the Russians want war? These are the parents of children who died in the last one."
But the sentiments that Gaughan turned into such a moving song were not only submerged under the weight of the second cold war, they also had to contest with a bitter division in the Communist Party that revolved sharply around attitudes to the Soviet Union, while the Trotskyist left defined itself by how it would classify its critique of the USSR. Stalingrad and all it represented became almost lost.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was celebrated at the time by right-wing commentators as the "end of history." Neoliberalism - then at its height - would of course produce the present economic crisis and the austerity we are being forced to endure and resist as a consequence.
But 1989 had another perhaps less obvious after-effect. Unburdened by the cold war rhetoric that had adopted the so-called Iron Curtain as a means to divide the world into the free and the unfree the true legacy of WWII could be revisited by historians who previously might have been wary of according the eastern front the vital place it occupied in the defeat of nazi Germany.
Anthony Beevor's epic book Stalingrad, first published in 1998, was a surprise and runaway bestseller. This helped to establish a popular mainstream understanding of the epic heroism the Red Army victory at Stalingrad represented and more broadly the key role of the eastern front in the eventual defeat of nazi Germany.
However, the breakthrough in understanding that Beevor's book began was soon to be reversed by the aftermath of September 11 2001, the so-called "war on terror," the invasion of Iraq and the occupation of Afghanistan.
The popularisation of the "Help for Heroes" message has facilitated the militarisation of national culture - the FA Cup is carried on to the Wembley final pitch nowadays by uniformed members of the armed forces, while Remembrance Sunday has effortlessly connected Afghanistan to WWII and WWI with no distinction made of the causes served by these vastly different conflicts.
WWII has become an epic of nostalgia entirely disconnected from the cause of anti-fascism, the sacrifices made by the Red Army - the eastern front once again hidden from history. Stalingrad, forgotten, scarcely meriting a mention in the mainstream media despite its fixation with all things WWII.
Saturday February 2 2013 therefore represents an important opportunity to mark the 70th anniversary of victory at Stalingrad in a way that could form the basis for a much bigger celebration - in two years time - of the 70th anniversary of the Red Army's role in the eventual defeat of nazi Germany in May 1945.
Combining ideas, film and photography from the era with fiercely committed music the Victory at Stalingrad night out at east London's Rich Mix Arts Centre is nothing if not bold, ambitious and innovative.
Organisers Philosophy Football, in association with anti-fascist campaigners Hope not Hate, have teamed up military historian Geoffrey Roberts - author of Stalin's General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov - and writer Seumas Milne to discuss the meaning of Stalingrad. Thee Faction will provide the socialist R&B anthems to march or dance to supported by the infectious 13-piece spectacle that is the Trans-Siberian March Band. It all adds up to an evening with a difference, with the ambition of making a difference too.
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