Edele, Mark Stalin's Defectors: How Red Army Soldiers became Hitler's Collaborators, 1941–1945 (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 793 Edele, Mark. Stalin’s Defectors: How Red Army Soldiers became Hitler’s Collaborators, 1941–1945. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2017. xv + 205 pp. Figure. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £60.00: $80.00. 2017 saw the publication of a number of blockbuster tomes examining the history of the Russian Revolution or the Stalinist period, several of which exceeded a thousand pages in length. In this slim volume, Mark Edele succeeds in making no less an impact. Stalin’s Defectors is a remarkable book, in that it packs in masses of new empirical research, advances new methodologies for interrogating historical statistics, and offers a new interpretation of the behaviour of Soviet Prisoners of War (POWs), contributions which have implications for understanding Stalinism. All of this, and more, in fewer than 180 pages of main text. Sometimes good things really do come in small packages. Stalin’s Defectors offers the first systematic analysis of frontline surrender by Soviet soldiers to the Germans. The focus is on those soldiers who voluntarily laid down their arms and crossed over to the enemy, not POWs as a whole. The scale of this phenomenon, as Edele demonstrates, was unprecedented, representing a significant problem for the Red Army. Even the most conservative estimates dwarf the scale of defections in any other Allied army. Defectors, particularly Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army, have long sat at the centre of scholarly debates, but no previous study has drawn on such rigorous research. Edele weaves together German and Soviet archival materials, published and unpublished memoirs, diaries and interviews from both sides. This data helps reconstruct who Red Army defectors were, how many they numbered, how and why they crossed the lines. The actions of this group, although a minority in the Red Army, reveal much about Stalinist society, allowing a re-examination of whether the war served as an ‘acid-test’ for the regime. Despite a small minority of loyal and oppositional defectors, most Soviet combatants were motivated by physical survival rather than ideology. As Edele argues, ‘This might have been a war of ideologies, but not everybody caught up in it was ideologically motivated’ (p. 10). The book consists of nine short chapters, which methodically break down its research questions, placing them within a wider historiographical context. Chapter one serves as an introduction, detailing the problem, questions, and sources to be explored, and introduces Major Ivan Nikitch Kononov, a high-profile defector who crossed the lines with a regiment of his men. Edele returns to Kononov’s exceptional story regularly in subsequent chapters, but prefigures the outline of his remarkable story here. Chapter two evaluates the number of defectors, but in so doing confronts the difficulties of definition SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 794 and classification of captives, deserters and defectors. On the frontlines the boundaries between prisoners and defectors were very unclear; enemy troops had some flexibility in categorizing defectors. A distinction also needs to be drawn between the scale of desertions in 1941, for which systematic data is missing, and in 1942–45. Here, Edele makes his methodological pitch for carefully engaging with historical statistics, using them to supplement cultural methods. Chapter three examines the difficulties defectors faced in changing sides; the costs and risks of which were extraordinary. Getting across the lines amidst battle presented a practical challenge, but the Red Army and Soviet party-state also created its own barriers by combining, ‘atrocity propaganda with threats to the life and freedom of the defectors and their families’ (p. 39). German bullets, the reality of camp regimes and German war-crimes also served as a powerful disincentive. Chapter four follows on by examining a range of scenarios when these barriers were surmounted. Chapter five explores the composition of defectors in sociological terms, offering important insights: ‘The collectivity of deserters across the front line was considerably more complex than any collective singular could express’ (p. 94). Indeed, defectors ‘recruited themselves from all sectors of Soviet society’ (p. 77). Non-Russian nationalities, older age groups and labouring classes were more likely to defect than other groups, but young Russian men remained a high proportion of defectors. Interrogating the motivations behind defection, the subject of chapter...