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

by Catherine Merridale

ISBN13: 9780312426521
ISBN10: 0312426526
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

A powerful, groundbreaking narrative of the ordinary Russian soldier's experience of the worst war in history, based on newly revealed sources.

Of the thirty million who fought, eight million died, driven forward in suicidal charges, shattered by German shells and tanks. They were the men and women of the Red Army, a ragtag mass of soldiers who confronted Europe's most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. Sixty years have passed since their epic triumph, but the heart and mind of Ivan — as the ordinary Russian soldier was called — remain a mystery. We know something about hoe the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, how they saw the world, or why they fought.

Drawing on previously closed military and secret police archives, interviews with veterans, and private letters and diaries, Catherine Merridale presents the first comprehensive history of the Red Army rank and file. She follows the soldiers from the shock of the German invasion to their costly triumph in Stalingrad, where life expectancy was often a mere twenty-four hours. Through the soldiers' eyes, we witness their victorious arrival in Berlin, where their rage and suffering exact an awful toll, and accompany them as they return home full of hope, only to be denied the new life they had been fighting to secure.

A tour de force of original research and a gripping history, Ivan&'s War reveals the singular mixture of courage, patriotism, anger, and fear that made it possible for these underfed, badly led troops to defeat the Nazi army. In the process Merridale restores to history the invisible millions who sacrificed the most to win the war.

Review:

"Thirty million men and women served in the Red Army during WWII. Over eight million of them died. Living or dead, they have remained anonymous. This is partly due to the Soviet Union's policy of stressing the collective nature of its sacrifice and victory. It also reflects the continuing reluctance of most Soviet veterans to discuss their experiences — in sharp contrast to German survivors of the Eastern Front. Merridale, professor of history at the University of London, combines interviews, letters and diaries with research in previously closed official archives to present the first comprehensive portrait of the Red Army's fighters. She carefully details the soldiers' age and ethnic diversity, and she puts a human face on a fact demonstrated repeatedly by retired U.S. officer and Soviet military expert David Glantz: the Red Army learned from the experience of its near-collapse in 1941, and by 1945 its soldiers were more than a match for their Wehrmacht opponents. Most poignantly, Merridale reveals that frontline soldiers increasingly hoped their sacrifices would bring about postwar reform — 'Communism with a human face.' What they got instead was a Stalinist crackdown — and a long silence, broken now by this outstanding book." Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

"'If you attempt to erase the peculiarities and individuality of life by violence, then life itself must suffocate,' Vasily Grossman wrote in his epic World War II novel 'Life and Fate,' which was smuggled to the West for publication long after his death in 1964. Although he had been an immensely popular correspondent for the Soviet Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) all through the war, it... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) was hardly surprising that Grossman's last years were marked by rejection and threats. The KGB seized the manuscript of his novel and vowed that it wouldn't see the light of day for another 200 years. But as his newly published notebooks make clear, Grossman was far too keen an observer of life's peculiarities — and the violence done to individuals — to fade meekly into the night.

In fact, Grossman's stature as a writer has continued to grow with the passage of time and the revival of interest in the clash of the totalitarian titans Stalin and Hitler. 'A Writer at War,' which offers excerpts of Grossman's notebooks combined with first-rate explanatory narration by the British historian Antony Beevor, will only enhance his reputation.

It's no accident that almost every new book about the war on the Eastern Front quotes Grossman. The latest example is Catherine Merridale's 'Ivan's War,' which examines the war from the perspective of the ordinary Red Army troops, more than 8 million of whom died in the fighting.

Grossman had to play the role of the propagandist on occasion, but he was as honest a reporter as those horrific times allowed. He was also a masterly writer. 'That was a terrible dust, the dust of retreat,' he observed during the early days of the battle for Stalingrad. 'It ate up the men's faith, it extinguished the warmth of people's hearts, it stood in a murky cloud in front of the eyes of gun crews.' A little later, he added: 'The war's breath entered the city and scorched it.'

'A Writer at War' follows Grossman's remarkable journey from the earliest days of the Nazi attack on Germany's erstwhile ally right up to the Red Army's assault on Berlin. In between, there was the initial panic and retreat — 'Exodus! Biblical exodus!' as Grossman described it — that allowed the Germans to drive right to the outskirts of Moscow and inflict massive casualties; the dramatic turnaround at Stalingrad and the tank showdown at Kursk; and the drive through Poland that included the liberation of the death camps Majdanek and Treblinka, confirming Grossman's worst fears about the Holocaust. Arriving in Ukraine in the winter of 1944, he learned that his mother, who had remained in the town where he was born, had been killed in a mass execution in 1941.

Grossman genuinely admired the courage and tenacity of the soldiers he accompanied and vividly described their hardships and suffering. 'Who can read what is going on in the souls of these men advancing to replace those lying around in the snow?' he wrote. But he was also infuriated by the way his editors at Krasnaya Zvezda would 'cut and distort' his pieces and add propaganda phrases that skewed the picture he was presenting.

As the Red Army mounted its final push for victory, Grossman was increasingly disillusioned by the troops' behavior — particularly their drunken looting and raping, even before they reached German territory. 'Liberated Soviet girls often complain about being raped by our soldiers,' he wrote, adding that this included women freed from German concentration camps. Everywhere, especially in Germany, he observed 'horror in the eyes of women and girls.' But while his descriptions of Nazi atrocities had been given full play in Krasnaya Zvezda, his accounts of Soviet excesses were confined to his notebooks.

In the recent works of Western writers, those previously suppressed accounts are on full display — as are the other aspects of the fighting routinely squelched by Soviet propagandists. Merridale, a British historian, pokes big holes in the myth that all of Stalin's subjects were united in the struggle against the Germans. She notes the high desertion rates early in the war, the cases of self-mutilation to escape the battlefield and the 158,000 Soviet soldiers sentenced to death by their own side — a figure that doesn't include many more executed at random.

'Ivan's War' is overloaded at times, as Merridale attempts to chronicle the entire sweep of the war and examine almost every aspect of Soviet soldiers' lives. Drawing on numerous interviews and testimony of veterans, she offers revealing insights into the everyday life of soldiers but rarely conveys the kind of raw immediacy and passion that is so evident in Grossman's notebooks.

Nonetheless, her more detached analysis complements the eyewitness accounts. Most tellingly, she points out that, on average, the Red Army losses were at least three times as high as German losses on the Eastern Front — even when the Soviets won the battles. Near the book's end, she asks: 'Could a nation consider that it was triumphant when approximately twenty-seven million of its citizens were dead?'

Grossman never questioned the magnitude of that victory. But as his notebooks illustrate, he was tormented by the horrors he witnessed, whatever their origins. What doomed his efforts to publish 'Life and Fate' in his own country was its implicit parallel between Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism — 'two poles of one magnet,' as one of his characters noted. So long as the Soviet Union existed, even the hint of such a conclusion couldn't be tolerated. Today, at least among many Western historians of the period, those parallels are conventional wisdom." Reviewed by Andrew Nagorski, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

Review:

"Ivan's War combines, quite effectively, painstaking historical reconstruction and sympathetic projection....She provides a coherent picture of the tactical decisions and industrial adjustments that altered the course of the war." New York Times

Review:

"A powerful, intimate, and sometimes heartbreaking portrait of the archetypal Russian infantryman who suffered greatly, often at the hands of his own countrymen." Christian Science Monitor

Review:

"[Merridale] has packed 388 pages of text with a tightly edited, well-paced and very readable account." Seattle Times

Review:

"For this impressive book, Merridale has mined a vastness of resources on the Russian experience of World War II only recently opened to Western researchers." Booklist

Review:

"What this engaged study sometimes lacks in narrative thrust it makes up for in spades with its harrowing and deeply compassionate portrait of the individual Ivans." Library Journal

Review:

"Unprecedented in its approach, Catherine Merridale's research into the lives of Red Army soldiers combined with her perception makes this a most fascinating and important work." Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad

Review:

"Merridale's new book is excellent....It makes the soldiers of the Red Army come alive." Stanley Payne, Hilldale-Jaume Vicens Vives Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Review:

"Ivan's War is a marvelous book....Catherine Merridale is a superb historian, among the very best of her generation." Tony Judt, author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

Review:

"Catherine Merridale has done something very unusual. The Soviet war effort has been described many times but her new book tells the searing story from the bottom up. Her account of the sufferings of the Red Army soldiers and their families is unlikely to be bettered." Robert Service, author of Stalin: A Biography

Review:

"[Merridale] succeeds admirably in fashioning a compelling portrait, helped immensely by her talent as a writer." Foreign Affairs

Review:

"Newly opened archives; recently discovered secret diaries and letters; and interviews with more than 200 veterans enable Merridale to narrate in gripping detail the epic tank battle of Kursk." Kirkus Reviews

Review:

"This is an inventively researched and evocatively written study of the Soviet soldier on the blood-ridden Eastern Front....Merridale has provided an empathetic and realistic portrait of the men and women who, more than any other combat soldiers, brought down the Third Reich." Norman M. Naimark , author of The Russians in Germany and Fires of Hatred

About the Author

Catherine Merridale is the author of the critically acclaimed Night of Stone, winner of Britain's Heinemann Award for Literature. A professor of contemporary history at the University of London, she also writes for the London Review of Books, the New Statesman, and The Independent and regularly presents history features for the BBC.

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: gknenahoro, January 23, 2007 (view all comments by gknenahoro)
This is an excellent work giving real insight into the emotions & motivations of the rank & file Russian infantryman. It takes you right into the hopes and fears of a previously neglected and mysterious soldier. It humanizes that seething mass of humanity who walked the bloodstained path from the terrible defeats of 1941 to the bloodsoaked victories from Kursk onwards. It's not te same type of work as Beevor's "Stalingrad" or Hasting's "The Last Battle",buty in it's own way is equally pivotal in understanding a collective who changed history. Merridale has researched in great detail and laid out her findings in a gripping and easy to understand account of soldiers that were once dehumanized by our lack of familiarity with them. "Ivan" will become as real to the reader as the men of the 101st Airborne, The Big Red One, The Rangers and The Rag Tag Circus. We already have profound respect for men like Zhukov, Rokossovskiy, Konev & Vasilievskiy, and now we know about the men and women they lead.
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Product Details

ISBN:: 9780312426521
Subtitle:: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
Author:: Merridale, Catherine
Publisher:: Picador USA
Subject:: Military - World War II
Subject:: Russia (pre & post Soviet Union)
Subject:: Europe - Russia & the Former Soviet Union
Publication Date:: January 2007
Binding:: Paperback
Language:: English
Illustrations:: Y
Pages:: 462
Dimensions:: 8.26x5.54x.81 in. .85 lbs.

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