History's great deceiver

On 8 May 1945, a week after the

Yelena Rzhevskaya kept a tight hold on her secret for the next 20 years. (Smersh was, after all, an acronym for "death to spies".) When she finally revealed to Marshal Zhukov, the general who had led the victorious Red Army into Berlin, that Stalin, his revered commanderin-chief, had always known of the whereabouts of Hitler's remains, he was shattered. Along with the rest of the world, Zhukov had given the body up for lost.

Zhukov's ignorance is emblematic of our own lack of historical knowledge of the war in the East, a lack which Antony Beevor has done much to overcome. Stalin's mocking

trick with his enemy's corpse is just one of the many novelistic details gleaned from previously unpublished materials that make Beevor's history writing so admirably readable and fresh. Many of his sources were kept from historians for the best part of 50 years by the now more or less dismantled Soviet structures of secrecy, fear, deceit and shame.

Beevor's compelling account tends to favour the drama, colour and pace of historical events over an orderly presentation of the complexities of warfare. Like a television documentary camera, he zooms in on evocative moments, cuts between voices - in the bread queue, the front-line and the bomb-shelter, as well as the innermost chambers of power - and fades out quickly when his analysis risks tedium.

When it comes to the wider geopolitical picture, we are, at times, shortchanged or led astray. Beevor makes much, for example, of another of Stalin's exercises in deceit. As the armies of Marshals Konev and Zhukov - 2.5 million men, 41,600 guns and mortars, 6,250 tanks and 7,500 aircraft - prepared to close fast in a massive onslaught on Berlin from north and south, Stalin told his Western Allies that he planned to send only second-rate forces against the capital, disingenuously assuring them that the city had "lost all its strategic importance".

This particular fib from the great liar would only have been "the greatest April fool in modern history", as Beevor sensationally describes it, if the leaders of the democracies had ever been truly fooled. But much as Stalin loved to betray and deceive those who considered themselves his friends, he did not always pull it off. Churchill grasped all too well the political and psychological importance of Berlin and foresaw its likely fate. The city had, however, already been conceded to the Soviet sphere of influence at the Yalta conference in February 1945.

Moreover, President Roosevelt and General Eisenhower, with a traditional American suspicion of "colo-nial" political ambitions, desired only a quick and complete military victory over Nazi forces in Europe and a three-way Allied settlement of the peace that would enable them to establish the United Nations and finish off Japan. Given the likely cost in casualties of fighting for Berlin, they were content to stop at the Elbe, west of the city. They also mistakenly feared that Hitler planned to stage his Wagnerian G?tterd?mmerung in an Austrian mountain redoubt , which would pull their forces into prolonged guerrilla warfare in a kind of Alpine prefiguring of the Tora Bora cave complex.

Though these concerns may seem naïve in the light of the Cold War, it was clear that Berlin was Russia's symbolic prize, the end of the victorious road that led from the ruins of Stalingrad. To put it simply, Stalin did not trick the Allies out of Berlin and its nuclear laboratories; they let him have it.

Beevor's great strength as a war historian is his skill in bringing us close to the human experience of its chaos, in disclosing the many varieties of suffering, cruelty and heroism which the lines and arrows on his (disappointingly perfunctory and one-sided) military maps cannot ever indicate.

The story he tells is dark and shocking. Nazi propaganda had dehumanised the Slavs as Untermenschen and licensed boundless atrocity on the Eastern Front during Operation Barbarossa. When their turn for conquest came, the Red Army, in an avenging rage inflamed by the Soviet propaganda machine, dehumanised the Germans. Beevor unflinchingly emphasises the horrifying extent of the unchecked mass rape of German (and sometimes non-German) women by invading Soviet troops. In publicly raping German women, the Red Army tortured and humiliated the entire nation.