Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad: Soldiers to Civilians by Robert Dale Stalin's Citizens: Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War by Serhy Yekelchyk (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 782 alternative evidence and views. Graziosi criticizes the Soviet and Chinese ‘official lies’ (p. 89) that concealed and distorted the history of these famines, yet none of the scholars mention the environmental disasters that drastically reduced the 1932 harvest (as documented in Tauger, Natural Disaster and Human Action in the Soviet Famine of 1931–1933, Pittsburgh, PA, 2001), even though the reduced harvest is very evident in their own table (p. 87). The authors’ one-sided interpretations are problematic for scholarly discourse, and readers should be aware that these histories are not nearly as settled as their essays imply. Department of History Mark B. Tauger West Virginia University Dale, Robert. Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad: Soldiers to Civilians. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2015. xvi + 266 pp. Illustrations. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £85.00. Yekelchyk, Serhy. Stalin’s Citizens: Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2014. xi + 270 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $61.00: £43.99. Historians have not reached a consensus about the post-war Stalin years in the Soviet Union — the time of ‘late Stalinism’, from 1945 to 1953 — but the fact that they continue to spend so much time researching it shows that they agree about its importance. The fundamental research question interrogates how the Stalinist system had to evolve as a consequence of the Second World War in order, first, to survive, and, then, to ensure that its old priorities — industrial advance, national security, coherent public culture, socialism-throughsacrifice — could be delivered. These two exemplary monographs, each of which focuses on a particular Soviet city, though in quite different ways, attest to the quality of work and varying approaches that historians are bringing to this question. Robert Dale’s first book is a precise, wide-ranging and formidably detailed study of the return of military veterans to Leningrad in the wake of victory. It draws on a very thorough engagement with archives in Moscow, St Petersburg and Vyborg, an illuminating selection of published material, a small number of oral history interviews, a mastery of the secondary literature and an imaginative field of comparisons. The book’s six chapters combine a chronological trajectory, in the sense that the first chapter concerns the initial homecoming, and the last takes the story through to 1953, with thematic analysis, covering housing, labour, disability, crime and ‘mental demobilization’ (a less clear formulation, which partly relates to political REVIEWS 783 opinions). The range of sources allows Dale to tell some intriguing and exciting personal stories, which bring events to life; it also allows him to pursue the problem systematically, using a large reserve of data. Dale reminds us about the extent of wartime damage to the fabric of the city, the breakdown of the barrier between the rural and the urban, and the sheer variety of experience of the returning soldiers and civilians in Leningrad in 1945. Veterans’ access to housing was one of the most intensely difficult and politicized of the issues that they faced. Dale shows how the frequent disappointmenttheyexperienced—believingtheyhadanentitlementtodecent housing upon their return, only to find themselves in miserable conditions while they waited for something better — required them to exercise their own initiative. Even when their status entitled them to some formal privileges, they often had little opportunity to exercise these, and a complicated, resentful relationship with the authorities resulted. Meanwhile, the Leningrad economy required veterans to return to work more-or-less immediately. There was plenty of work to be done, and the local authorities directed them towards employment in places where workers were needed, including reconstruction and the provision of basic services. Often the work was uncongenial or far below the level of skills that the veteran possessed. This created another disjunction between the needs of government and the hopes of veterans. Given the enormity of their experience, what they really needed was more generous welfare provision, and the time and space to restart their lives. But if they were disabled, they faced a recalcitrant bureaucracy and a struggle to assert their rights. Dale gives vivid examples of the fraught encounter between veterans and the welfare authorities. He writes...