The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II through Objects by Brandon M. Schechter (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II through Objects by Brandon M. Schechter Gwendal Piégais (bio) Brandon M. Schechter, The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II through Objects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019). 315 pp., ill. Index. ISBN: 978-1-5017-3979-8. Most historians agree that the Soviet victory in World War II owed much to precise technical and material choices: above all the choice of weapons and devices that would be robust, easily manageable, and replaceable. In the book under review, Brandon M. Schechter goes further. Using ethnographic and anthropological methodology, he aims to analyze the experience of war through objects, from which he reveals the duties and obligations of a soldier toward the state and vice versa, as well as the bonds built between soldiers. By doing so he deepens our knowledge of the mechanism of Soviet victory and the regime's consolidation. In this history, based on a vast array of sources ranging from military orders, manuals, and reports to diaries and oral testimonies, objects are considered as the medium for communicating information concerning a variety of pragmatic and symbolic problems (P. 3). The progression of the chapters [End Page 283] follows the men's metamorphosis into warriors. Thus, the first part of the book starts from the army's most elementary resource, the soldier's body, moves the focus to military uniforms, stripes, and medals, and then to what the soldier eats. In the second part, Schechter addresses two elementary dimensions of the soldier's life: shelters and dwellings at the front, and his weapons. Finally, in the third part, the author draws our attention to the ordinary and extraordinary objects in a soldier's life, from letters to relatives, to booty and trophies taken from enemy territory. From June to December 1941, the Red Army lost more than 3.1 million men (killed, captured, or missing), and 5.6 million men of draft age were left behind enemy lines. In 1943, an infantry regiment had a loss rate of 243 percent (P. 21). Chapter 1 looks at the resources that had to be remobilized to constantly re-create the Red Army: men and material. A group of individuals had to be equipped and transformed into coherent groups of fighters capable of handling weapons – to build what has been called in the U.S. Army a primary group of soldiers. But the Soviet leadership oscillated between distrust and a desire to control the mass of soldiers: even if the commanders tended to prioritize experience and competence over the class origins of men, they were still concerned with the men's geographical origins, especially if they came from the occupied territories where they had relatives (P. 35). The army also continued to assert full ownership of the soldiers' bodies, as clearly expressed in orders 270 (August 16, 1941) and 227 (July 28, 1942) forbidding them to surrender or retreat. After all, commanders retained a great deal of discretionary power in their struggle against desertion, for which they prosecuted 376,000 soldiers (P. 38). The Red Army was in constant tension between the need to maintain a unit's cohesion and the understanding of a soldier as a dispensable resource (P. 42). In chapter 2, Schechter moves on to the aesthetic and symbolic reform in the Red Army that affected the design of banners and uniforms and introduced shoulder straps (pogony) instead of collar tabs. Taking an ethnographic approach, Schechter reads these innovations as a text deserving as much attention as archival documents (P. 50), which communicated a certain identity that the Soviet state attempted to forge. The significance of this wholesale rebranding was underscored by its timing between October 1942 and January 1943, when the Red Army was retreating and suffering terrible casualties. The textile industry was out of stock and it had to allocate additional resources for switching to the production of newly designed uniforms for the entire army. According to Schechter, [End Page 284] in this case, symbolism took precedence over pragmatic concerns (P. 59). For Stalin, pogony symbolized order and discipline and invoked the history...