Hard Labor on the Home Front

Abstract

Sometimes you read a book and get a sense that it didn’t have time to ripen—the author doesn’t seem to have taken the time to truly master the sources or craft the narrative. This book is about as far from that as you can get. Two well-established authors who have written on public health, labor, gender, and terror have combined efforts to create a truly masterful narrative of the gigantic task of mobilizing the home front for a war of unprecedented scale. The story that they tell is as dynamic as the unstable fronts of the war and yields numerous surprises. (Disclosure: I have collaborated with these authors in the past.) Our authors are tackling events of mind-boggling scale. Their story is full of superlatives: the largest labor mobilization in world history in the largest country on earth (occupying one-sixth of the globe), waging the largest war in recorded history. The issue of scale is one with which Soviet propagandists and leadership themselves sometimes struggled. How do you make the stakes of the war clear to so many different people over such a large landmass and inspire them to make the tremendous sacrifices required to win the war? How do you coordinate an economy of such gargantuan proportions over a continent? Goldman and Filtzer provide us with answers to these questions on multiple levels, concerned with how these processes looked not only from the Kremlin, but from factory floors and collective farms throughout the Soviet Union.