Reviews for Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945

The average rating for Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-09-06 00:00:00 Vance Gosselin The story of the Soviet war experience from the ground up as recorded through dozens of interviews with octogenarian veterans has a distinctly polycephalic feel to it. The passage of time has left Catherine Merridale with a drop out of an ocean's worth of stories, but by the time you turn the last page it will become clear why this is for the best. It was not only dangerous to testify against the authorized tale of the war, it often became simply inconceivable for the survivors to recount those years from a different mental framework. This state of reference has survived the collapse of the USSR in some aspects. "Having a bit of fun with a woman" is one Stalinist expression still useful on the subject of the mass rapes in East Prussia. It is left to the interviewer to provide context, to touch upon the Puritan streak in Soviet ideology that produced a generation whose first sexual experience would often occur as part of a gang rape. She also chronicles in broad strokes the experience of the millions that gave in to the human urge to forget a harsh past that only led to an equally harsh present, devoid of realization of dreams that they nurtured between battles, as they went back to the plough or scraped out an existence as crippled beggars. The main course of the war runs in the background with a familiar rumble: Barbarossa, Typhoon, Stalingrad, Kursk, Bagration, Crimea, Berlin… In the foreground treads the proverbial Ivan as immortalized in the mythology of the Great Patriotic War: inured to hardship by his peasant roots, stoic in urban defense yet bold in attack, with a blood-curling "Hurrah !". There is little room for individuality within the colossal numbers that convey the scale of the fight on the Eastern Front. A handful of living individuals, reinforced by the letters of people long dead that they have preserved, cannot fully turn ink into blood, no matter how diverse their backgrounds; apart from Russian frontoviks from the ranks we find their former officers, pressed men from the satellite states, women in uniform or on the home front, even politruks . Yet they unveil so many aspects that were shared by millions in khaki that they make an invaluable contribution to our understanding of Russia's war. While malnutrition as a phenomenon can be recognized as part of front-line hardships, it is discomforting to see it result in dysentery, boils and sores, gingivitis and a greater death toll from feverish afflictions due to a vitamin-depleted immune system. Victims from methanol or antifreeze fit the stock image of the hard-drinking Russian. In an amusing recollection, these simple men could discriminate against a fine French champagne in favor of properly intoxicating cognac. Others developed a taste for Rhine wine; such men of refine would evolve into pivotal players on the black art market. It comes as expected that PTSD, contemporarily known as battle fatigue or shellshock, was ranked as a quantité négligable by the Red Army command, but it becomes surprising when the leading role of Russia's medical establishment in the last decades of Tsarist rule is taken into consideration, with the own war against Japan (1904-05) as well as the proxy wars in the Balkans (1912-13) as source material. The cry of Uri! Uri! is as common in the German memory as the photograph of a Red Army soldiers with a dozen watches on each arm that jerks a bicycle out of a German woman's hands, only to unaccustomedly pedal it into the first ditch. Yet parcels of plunder mailed home are a good reflection of private preoccupation that doesn't fit the indiscriminate looting: a selection of shoes that his children could grow into, wrapped in quality wool cloth to sew them winter clothing, or a rolled-up saw to rebuild a devastated farm. Even the attitude towards the Frau softened once the red banner flew over the Reichstag ruin, with men settling into a rudimentary form of playing house that differed from the casual polygamy of campaign mistresses. Either way, the Kremlin introduced another abrupt shift in policy within its zone of occupation that curtailed the worst excesses, even if it merely regimented the export of German machinery to rebuild the domestic industry west of the Urals. (one specific aspect, the NKVD-led search for Nazi Germany's atomic laboratories and their personnel, is sadly absent from this book) We are on murkier ground with the dissection motivation and beliefs. The forementioned fossilization of veterans' attitudes once again casts the historian in the role of main speaker. It is easy to trace the evolution of party rhetoric from internationalism (muted by the Nazi invasion) over Great Russian neo-patriotism (Stalin's first speech, addressing the peoples of the Soviet Union as "brothers and sisters") and back to a harder form of Soviet nationalism that neither the destalinization under Khrushchev nor the formalized commemoration under Leonid Brezhnev did much to alter. Hate for the enemy was readily nurtured by the devastated landscape of western Russia, but the notion of socialist brotherhood remained brittle in an army saturated with ad hoc replacements (a practice which eroded esprit de corps in all combatant armies of WWII) and plagued by 100% casualty rates on the bloodiest days of battle. The stabilization of the frontlines after Moscow and Stalingrad helped somewhat; tank crews especially reached a bounding level during long periods of training together. However, the subsequent battle of Prokhorovka signaled a switch to offensive operations where the universal 1:3 ratio indicted losses among the attackers that reached the old levels of 1941. Of course, with a certain typical Soviet disregard for human life is a factor not be neglected here, As Zhukov would demonstrate with the ill-illuminated frontal assault on the Seelower Höhen and later famously tell Eisenhower "We sent troops into a minefield as if there were no minefield. The losses are similar if we attack positions defended by machine-guns instead of minefields." The fatalism of the assault troops under these conditions is the hardest to dissect and, unfortunately, a part of war that does not feature prominently in veterans' stories. Like aging men everywhere, they filter out the sheer brutality and panic of combat. It is possible to reconstruct the effect of wartime indoctrination by political commissars on the troops, as they gathered around a little red flag on the pre-1939 border. The animosity of the 'liberated' Poles and Ukrainians came as a surprise to many. The sight of the neat German houses or even the well-stocked individual farms that dotted the countryside around Bucharest raised more alarming questions. The answer as to why any people who had it so well would choose to invade the motherland could be conveniently lost in the clouds of Hitler's warped Realpolitik, but the divide between the agricultural wealth of the West and the much deplored kolkhoz would oft awaken the unfulfilled ambition of a private farm on the rich soil of the Ukraine. The Balkan stirred up an emotion that the Baltics could not: the sense of crossing the line between the world that the Red Army had rightfully wrestled from the German invaders and the capitalist world, where its reason to exist was a lot vaguer. All tough some countries were former Axis allies, they did not feature on the mental map of Europe as the dim corners of "the Beast's Lair". This matter is dealt with lightly, as any justification occurred post-war. Stavka would reorientate the compass of several Soviet armies another abrupt time by sending them across half a dozen time zones to Manchuria. Cleaning the skeletons out of the closet is the third layer in the narrative. The voices of the past speak here, too, but they can no longer speak for the present. This is the level of the inferno shaped by the merciless Stalinist Empire, a place glimpsed from the outside by few and discussed by fewer, where Merridale guides us past unsung heroes such as the shtrafniki, the minefield fodder whose rehabilitation depended on the shedding of their own blood. Most infamously, the many atoned for the sins of the few. Contrary to the popular myth, the welcome extended by Ukrainian and Baltic nationalists was not an expression of enthusiasm but of caution. As the Polish fable goes, the cat only helped the bird out of the turd to eat it. Still, large Cossack formations took to the steppes in German service, Estonian SS-volunteers made a last stand in the ruins of Berlin and most nationalities between Oder and Dnepr were represented in the Vlasov Army. This proved ample justification for the NKVD to organize the deportation of entire ethnic minorities to the barren interior; it would equally prove good training to repatriate all Soviet POWs as traitors to the Gulags. How does oral history fit in here? Just as military comradeship was not as plentiful as propaganda proclaimed, so racism was not absent among the ethnic Russian conscripts. Conversely, anti-Semitism was relatively rare, which makes the official Soviet stand on the Holocaust all the more deplorable. Arguably, the western Soviet Union had witnessed an amount of suffering that was hard to surpass, but The Einsatzgruppen had operated on these lands and Babi Yar near Kiev has become a symbol of the 'wild' extermination of the European Jews (one of the interviewees' father was executed in the ravine). So it is awkward to stress the multi-national nature of the Majdanek concentration camp to guarantee that Soviet martyrdom reigned supreme in the post-war memory. Well, the collected stories cited are legion. They have one thing in common: sad or happy in nature, they leave a Western reader with a bitter taste in the mouth. We do not have a perfect record of reintegrating our troops into society. We can reconstruct disfigured faces and replace missing limbs with high-tech prosthetics, but we cannot heal their mental scars. We can offer them a good education and employment, but an honest reappraisal of the wars they fought in is only possible after a lifetime's worth of political debate. This is why the voices of veterans come only in old age, when only a minority is left to speak. Nevertheless, "Ivan" had seen a better world, only to return to the old world to face the continued oppression in the name of the collective, with little to help him build a new life.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-02-01 00:00:00 Angela Sas This book is an astounding examination of the Red Army during World War II. Ms. Merridale examines the prelude: the purges of the officer corps in the late 1930's, the invasion of Poland and the attack on Finland. She examines in detail the disastrous first years of the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union. She bases many of her findings on the now newly opened archives and interviews with surviving veterans. But she does not stop there, and realizes the limitations of these; veterans and letters home will not usually speak of executions of Soviet soldiers by their own or of mass rapes. The Red Army was ruthless in many, many ways and not only to the enemy. In all its battlefield encounters with the Wehrmacht (and the Finnish army) they inevitably lost far more men - either killed or taken prisoner - until the bitter end with the fall of Berlin. This loss of life meant little to the commanders and certainly not to Stalin. But it did to the front-line soldiers - whether he was a regular conscripted recruit or a Gulag prisoner who was designated to take part in a suicidal frontal assault. Ms. Merridale suggests that the Red Army replenished itself twice during the war. Recruits of 1941 seldom lasted more than one or two years, if that. What united them was "fear", of both the enemy and their own government; and an intense hatred of the invading enemy - Germany. This undying hatred is completely understandable, but it was manipulated as well by the Stalinists'. The cult of Stalin usurped the glory away from the common soldier. When the tide started to change after the victory at Stalingrad - it was not merely the Red Army and it's woebegone soldiers who were responsible, but also the government with it communist mantra and an overseeing Stalin. Throughout all this we come away with a vivid picture of a both brutal regime and army. Many soldiers would witness or hear of executions of so-called "shirkers, cowards...". In a speech by Stalin during the war: "After the war, our own people will not forget the ones who honourably served their homeland... [so far so good, but he continues later]... But the names of the coward, the panic monger and the traitor will be pronounced with hatred". There are several moving quotations from Red Army soldiers. Here is one: "I thought I was a good-hearted person, but it seems that a human being can hide within himself for a long time the qualities that surface only at a time like this". Ms. Merridale explores many of these dark qualities that arise, as the soldier said, at a time of war. The Soviet Union and now Russia, do not want to go that route. They have successfully blocked any attempt to reveal the barbarity of their side, such as the mass rape of women of all ages in Hungary and Germany. To this day they have cloaked the Red Army with an aura of saintliness - even avoiding discussion of the tremendous disasters of the first years of the war. Ms. Merridale delves into all of this history. This is an eloquently written book and I learnt much about the Red Army and its soldiers - and the epochal event of those years. This book takes us into the cauldron of this awful war, where the Soviets peoples were bravely fighting for their very existence. This book is better than many others I have read on the Soviet perspective of the war years.