Cohen, Laurie R. Smolensk under the Nazis: Everyday Life in Occupied Russia (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 389 Midway or El Alamein in pivotal importance — and the epochal clash at Kursk in the summer of 1943. These chapters show the VVS going from strength to greater strength: industrial production came back on line, Lend-Lease aircraft were arriving in greater numbers, radios were installed in more aircraft, and the tactical reforms associated with air commander Alexander Novikov vastly improved performance. By the end of 1943, as the Soviets liberated Ukraine, the VVS was moving ‘At Full Stride’, the title of chapter six, which narrates the final triumph over the Luftwaffe in 1944–45. A seventh chapter discusses the USSR’s need to adapt to the new postwar realities of atomic and jet warfare. A set of informative and useful appendices follows. Red Phoenix Rising works best as operational and institutional history, and it convincingly argues that the VVS not only fought with greater dynamism and innovativeness than is commonly thought, but also proved adept at learning from their German foes without slavishly imitating them. The prose is crisp, shifting adroitly between combat narrative and deeper analysis. Of course, any single-volume study is bound to have some omissions. The authors deliberately sidestep naval aviation, operations in the Far North, and air offensives against Japan in 1945. The overall history of the Nazi-Soviet conflict is sketched in somewhat, but readers already familiar with that history will benefit most from Red Phoenix Rising. Biographical treatment of key individuals is minimal, as is — surprisingly — discussion of the technical qualities and combat capabilities of various aircraft types. Nor does Red Phoenix Rising use Soviet aviation as a prism through which to examine larger questions pertaining to the USSR as a whole, as many aviation histories have done in the 1990s and 2000s. For Hardesty and Grinberg, their subject stands on its own. None of which diminishes the value of Red Phoenix Rising. An old classic has had new life breathed into it, and the book in its new form has become more indispensable than ever. Southern New Hampshire University John McCannon Cohen, Laurie R. Smolensk under the Nazis: Everyday Life in Occupied Russia. Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe. University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY, 2013. xiii + 364 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $85.00: £65.00: €75.00. Eighty million Soviet citizens found themselves under German rule at some pointduringtheSecondWorldWar.20,000to40,000ofthem—mostlywomen and children — resided in the Russian town of Smolensk, some 200 miles south-west of Moscow. By offering a detailed account of their fate, Laurie R. Cohen’s book contributes to the literature on how the Soviets experienced their SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 390 ‘Great Patriotic War’. Based on Soviet and German archival sources as well as in-depth oral history interviews, contemporary eyewitness accounts, and postwar memoirs, Cohen sets out ‘to examine the uniquely human dimensions of the German occupation […] in specifically Russian territory’ (p. 3). As Cohen correctly stresses, most research on life in the German-occupied Soviet Union has dealt with Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics and Poland rather than Russia. The book consists of eleven chapters ordered thematically, covering the main military events, German plans and occupation policies, conditions of everyday life, popular attitudes and propaganda, as well as liberation and post-war restoration. While the author certainly succeeds in illuminating these topics, the absence of a clear, governing research question makes for a study that is rich in description but offers less in terms of argument. The area around Smolensk witnessed fierce battles in the first weeks and months of the war, with more than 320,000 Soviet soldiers taken prisoner. By 15 July 1941, Smolensk itself was in German hands. Cohen shows how the remaining population — those who were unable (or, less frequently, unwilling) to escape — was faced with a new and brutal regime as well as deteriorating living conditions. Many lived in bombed-out apartments, cellars and attics. Food, water, fuel and electricity were scarce. In order to survive, townspeople worked for the Germans, engaged in blackmarketeering, bartered for food in the surrounding countryside, and constantly manoeuvred to avoid the many pitfalls of living with the enemy. Cohen suggests that a minority of the Smolensk residents hoped...