Red Army Soldiers Research Articles

Działalność podziemia antykomunistycznego na Południowym Podlasiu (1944-1948)

The Southern Podlachia is understood as the area which administratively, politically and ethnically nowadays belongs to the Masovia Voivodeship, constituting its eastern part and Lublin Voivodeship. Course of military actions alongside the eastern front in July and August 1944 had a great impact on the future of the anti-communist conspiracy in the Southern Podlachia. Saturation of the area of Podlachia with the Red Army soldiers towards the end of 1944 did not encourage the activation of the resistance. The acceptance of the communist government by the Allies created a new image of Poland at an international forum. This was reflected by the perception of the political situation in the resistance leadership. Therefore already in August 1945, col. Jan Rzepecki gave an order to disband the Armed Forces Delegation. On account of a new political situation in Europe and Poland on the 2nd of September 1945, a new conspiracy organisation, Freedom and Independence, became constituted; it was expected to have a civil and political, and not military, nature. Overall, as a result of the activities of the independence resistance movement in the Southern Podlachia around 900 people were killed in 1944-1948, including 95 in the district of Łukow, 135 in the district of Siedlce, 98 in the district of Sokolow, 66 in the district of Wegrow, 282 in the district of Biala Podlaska and 130 in the district of Radzyn. According to my calculations the resistance movement conducted around 1500 actions targeting disorganisation of the communist authorities’ system. Spectacular actions were found amongst them, i.e. the action lead by the troops of Leon Taraszkiewicz, alias “Jastrząb”, on the 17th of July 1946, when the partisans stopped the car with Boleslaw Bierut’s sister, Zofia Malewska, and her family. Military activities of the anti-communist resistance in the Southern Podlachia 1944-1948 ended in bloody harvest on both sides of the political barricade. Around 240 people were killed at the hands of the communists in the district of Sokolow; the losses of people in the district of Siedlce in 1944-1954 amounted to 430, in the district of Radzyn around 120 people, in the district of Wlodawa more than 1300 people. Overall, around 2500 people died at the hands of the communist authorities in the Southern Podlachia between 1944 and 1948. It is necessary to add to that the victims of the people’s judicature, which condemned to death penalty 100 people, which gives us 2600 victims of communist in Podlachia. If to the sum of the communism victims we add around 900 people killed at the hands of the resistance movement, we will get a number of victims of around 3500 people. This is the price the society of the Southern Podlachia paid during the fights for power between 1944 and 1948.

Red Army Propaganda for Uzbek Soldiers and Localised Soviet Internationalism during World War II

During World War II, the Red Army, which had been a predominantly Slavic institution, felt the need to ‘learn the languages’ of its non-Slavic Central Asian soldiers when a large number of recruits from Central Asia arrived at the front. The Red Army authorities mobilised Central Asian political and cultural apparatuses to produce propaganda materials targeting these non-Slavic soldiers. The mobilised Uzbek propagandists and frontline entertainers reinterpreted the Soviet motherland (rodina) using the local metaphor of the Uzbek fatherland (el/yurtt/o‘tov). In this process of reimagining the Soviet/national space, Soviet heroism and internationalism, promoted as a part of Soviet patriotism, reshaped the Uzbek national identity as an Asiatic liberator. This paper explores the propaganda materials and frontline entertainment tailored to the Uzbek Red Army soldiers and traces the nationalised war hero narrative in Komil Yashin’s 1949 playGeneral Rahimov.

Soviet children of occupation in Austria: The historical, political and social background and its consequences

Soviet children of occupation were born between late 1945 and mid-1956 in Austria, some following voluntary sexual relations between local women and Red Army soldiers, others as a result of rape. They were considered by many to be ‘children of the enemy’ and encountered various forms of discrimination and stigmatisation. The children involved were largely a ‘fatherless’ group of war children. By the time of their births even fathers who wanted to stay in touch had generally either been sent home or transferred to another barracks in line with the Kremlin's view that intimate relations between Soviet soldiers and Austrians were politically and ideologically reprehensible. Even after the signing of the Austrian State Treaty and the end of the occupation in 1955, the political situation largely ruled out further contact. This situation was exacerbated by the onset of the Cold War. In many cases, the children of occupation were hemmed in by a wall of silence that in some cases persists to this day. This has led to widespread questions about personal identity and searches for their ‘roots’. Against this background, the article analyses the impact of the specific historical, political and social background of the lives of Soviet occupation children.

The Great Patriotic War and Soviet Society: Defeatism, 1941–42

In October 1941, David Kaufman, a Moscow student and aspiring poet, wrote in his diary: Civil War was our fathers. The Five Year Plan, our older brothers. The Patriotic War of '41, this is us.... The people of our generation, from diverse walks of life, now have but one path: everyone to front. Here are heroes, cowards, and ordinary people. Nobody is excluded from If I must write, I will write about how this sense of duty came to govern us. There is only one feeling that should be instilled in people from cradle: duty. (1) Kaufman, later published under pseudonym David Samoilov, would become one of most beloved poets of Soviet intelligentsia. His generation was raised under Soviet power and did not know or recognize any other. He belonged to a cohort of educated, urban young people, many of whom rushed to recruitment offices on 22 June 1941, fearful of missing out on On that very day, when so many young enthusiasts were rushing to sign up as volunteers, Olimpiada Poliakova, a resident of town of Pushkin, outside Leningrad, wrote in her diary: Could our liberation be at hand? Whatever Germans may be, they can't be worse than our own. And what are Germans to us? We'll live somehow without them. Everyone has sense that, at last, thing we have awaited for so long but did not dare to hope for-although we did hope for it very much in depths of our consciousness-has finally arrived. Without this hope it would not have been possible to live. And there is no doubt about coming German victory. Lord forgive me! I am not an enemy of my people or my homeland. I'm not a degenerate. But you have to look truth straight in eyes: of us, of Russia, fervently desires victory of enemy, whoever he may be. This accursed regime stole everything from us, our feelings of patriotism. (2) Clearly, Poliakovas claims about all of Russia wishing for victory of enemy are grossly exaggerated, as are Kaufman's touching words about spirit of duty animating his entire generation. What is clear is that, more than 20 years after revolution, Soviet society was still not homogenous: a significant part of it would have been happy to witness disappearance of Bolsheviks. Historiography The war was to be most serious test of Stalinist systems durability, becoming, in words of Robert Thurston, the acid test of (3) The nature of public opinion about Soviet regime and outbreak of war continues to be one of most important, and consistently controversial, questions for history of Soviet society during war period. Meanwhile, year 1941 constitutes an important chronological boundary for scholars of Stalinism. According to Stephen Lovell, among historians the war is usually recognized as traumatic and important, but ultimately is granted status of a cataclysmic interlude between two phases of Stalinism: turbulent and bloody era of 1930s and deep freeze of late 1940s.... Nonmilitary historians do not quite know what to do with war. (4) Historians whose work relates to history of Soviet society during war years have starkly different assessments of popular attitudes toward state and In literature of early 1950s, one already finds idea that defeat of Red Army in 1941 and vast number of prisoners taken at that time reflected unwillingness of Soviet soldiers to fight for regime. (5) According to Martin Malia, Soviet soldiers in 1941 felt no ardor for defense of Stalinist system, and even clearer signs of collapse appeared among civilian population. (6) In accordance with authors who argue that Red Army soldiers in 1941 were forced to fight under threat of reprisals, Mark Edele and Michael Geyer have claimed that desertion and evasion of service were not restricted to catastrophic events of 1941-42 but were in fact characteristic, albeit to a lesser degree, of entire war period. …

German and Soviet Losses as an Indicator of the Length and Intensity of the Battle for the Brest Fortress (1941)

According to the official Soviet historiography, the defenders of the Brest fortress (today in Belarus) resisted the German troops who attacked on 22 June 1941, for 32 days. The Soviet soldiers would rather perish than surrender; hardly anybody would be captured. On this basis the Fortress was granted the title ‘Hero-Fortress’, and a huge memorial was built on the site of the battles of June 1941. The author of this article analyzed German documents concerning the daily losses in dead and wounded of the Wehrmacht and captured Red Army soldiers. He concludes that these numbers can be used as an indicator of endurance and intensity of the fighting for the Brest fortress. The conclusions differ strongly from the assertions of the official narrative.

Differing Views among Red Army Personnel about the Nazi Mass Murder of Jews

Red Army soldiers' and officers' perception of civilian casualties in World War II, including the Nazis' mass murder of Jews, or the Holocaust, was in large measure a function of the prevailing views of society more generally. Russocentrism and statism--the dominant trends in propaganda from 1937 on--reached their logical conclusion during the war years. The existing prewar balance between the principles of nationality and class shifted distinctly in favor of the former. As early as the first months of the war, the words and Soviet became synonymous, and the concept of the Great Russian people, introduced into propaganda in the second half of the 1930s, became a way of signifying the special place that Russians occupied in history, including in the war with Nazism--or as discourse called it, German fascism. (1) This Russocentrism actually proved entirely compatible with the regime's preoccupation with ethnic minorities. On the one hand, this preoccupation was the legacy of 1920s politics, with its hypertrophied concern for the symbols of ethnic equality. On the other, it was driven by a purely practical interest in mobilizing ethnic minorities in the USSR and abroad for war with Germany and its allies. Throughout the war, discourse emphasized that the of the peoples of the USSR was a central factor in successfully opposing the enemy. Moreover, in the early phases of the war the non-Russian press (Ukrainian, Jewish, etc.) created a series of its own national traditions of military valor rooted in the past, built on the same model as the Russian tradition. (2) As Russocentrism grew, however, the propaganda space allotted to national minorities notably narrowed. David Brandenberger has demonstrated that if the first two years of the war featured merely Russocentric tendencies rather than an explicitly articulated policy, then later--especially from the summer of 1944, when the outcome of the war was already obvious--accentuation of the Russians' special role in the war became much more pronounced. (3) Anything that did not correspond to these general trends in propaganda was terminated. Any deviation from the concept of friendship of peoples--particularly any reference to the heroism of one ethnic minority without reference to the heroism of other ethnic groups--was regarded as a malicious manifestation of nationalism, especially from early 1944 on. (4) A similar tendency was observable in the internationalization of Nazism's victims. From late 1941 to early 1942, any reference to the murder of Jews was customarily accompanied by reference to the destruction of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, and so on. Nor did published sources anywhere state that the murder of Jews was a function of a specifically antisemitic component of Nazi racial policies. On the contrary, propaganda depicted this repressive policy as a universal one, directed against all citizens of the socialist state. The frequency of references to the murder of Jews in contemporary texts depended not only on general party policies but also on local practices, as determined by mid-level political workers and newspaper editors. Not infrequently, newspapers concealed the murder of Jews, just as documents published in order to expose Nazi crimes left out the topic of transgressions against Jews. Yet even when the decision to eliminate the Jewish component from such publications came from the highest levels of bureaucracy (as with the case of Babi Yar in late 1943--early 1944), this did not set a precedent for the complete prohibition of reference to the murder of Jews. (5) Brandenberger has noted the difficulty of identifying a direct link between increasingly Russocentric propaganda and the growth of nationalist feelings among Russians. (6) It is likewise difficult to determine how much that propaganda intensified xenophobic sentiments, including antisemitic ones. …

School for Democracy: Interactive Theater in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

notion of introduced by Augusto Boal in 1960s. As Bruce Weber notes, Boal was especially intrigued by relationship between spectator and actor, and his career a steady march toward a greater partnership between two. his philosophy, life and theater are related enterprises; ordinary citizens are actors who are simply unaware of play, and everyone can make theater, even untrained. his work audience often became an active participant in performance itself. Boal called this sort of theater the Theatre of Oppressed, whereas today such theater is usually referred to as interactive. (1) Russia this term first used at beginning of 2000s with development of so-called new drama and theater of verbatim, as well as spread of talk shows, and teaching, therapeutic, and entertaining programs, especially for children. However, this phenomenon has not yet been fully analyzed in Russian theater or social studies. Here we trace main stages of its development beginning in 1910s. Since Boal defined interactive theater as the Theatre of Oppressed, it is only natural that in Russia we find sources of such theater in first years following 1917 October Revolution. Interactive dialogue involves breaking fourth wall separating audience and stage. This is exactly what happened in Russia during first post-revolutionary years. Theater spectacles came out into streets and squares. Many shows were staged on haphazardly built platforms or trucks. The whole of Russia is acting! reported Anatoly Lunacharsky, Commissar of Enlightenment in first Soviet government in autumn, 1920. (2) Recalling this time at First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, playwright Vsevolod Vishnevsky said, In 1919 our ragged country, deprived of bread and light, in one Yaroslavl province had more theaters than whole of France. (3) Amateur theaters were most numerous. Alexander Boguslavsky and Vladimir Diyev suppose that this due to fact that in Russia of those days only two people out of ten could read, and so stage took over role of newspapers. (4) During years of Civil War (1917-1922) theater existed in three major forms, which were prompted by revolutionary experience of those times. Spectacles could be mass marches, parades, or meetings dedicated to memorial days of revolutionary calendar and celebrating victory of people over its oppressors. Thus, in November 1918, on first anniversary of October Revolution, there were performances of Mystery-Bouffe by Vladimir Mayakovski, directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold; a pantomime, Great Revolution; and, in Voronezh, Glorification of Revolution. While Mystery-Bouffe had a text and fixed mise-en-scenes, latter two were based on improvisations. shows pictured revolutionary actions of masses, featuring symbolic images of Labor, Capital, and Revolution, designed to bring home to public meaning of revolutionary process. Thousands of spectator-actors took part in these performances, their focus being on people reforming world. author of and participant in one these mass actions, playwright Dmitry Sheglov, left a detailed account of a play staged in honor of Congress of Comintern (the Third International), acted by Red Army soldiers: huge natural amphitheater of Krasnoye Selo made it possible for audience of a thousand soldiers to see everything comfortably sitting on grass. Below, in a wide clearing, a vast space for actions of infantry and cavalry. A wooden platform built for featured scenes and pantomime. After fanfares workers headed towards palace'-platform. They were attacked by Tsar's cavalry. Then, there a scene of Red Army forming and assaulting White Army. …

RED ARMY SOLDIERS POLITICAL EDUCATION DURING THE CIVIL WAR IN RUSSIA: AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF THE PROBLEM STUDY (second half of 80th. of the XX century - up to date)

Objective: To study the dynamics of the results of the increment of historical knowledge on the issue of political education of military in the Civil War in conditions of its origin, domination and methodological pluralism in Russian historical science(second half of 80th. of the XX century - up to date). Methodology of the research: the research is carried out in problem-chronological manner, using cliometric techniques to explore historical and historiographical narrative material. The paper presents the elements of kliodeskriptics to reflect rizomorfic relationships using spatial-historical stochastic models based on kliopanel data. Results: The main results of the study are the distinguishing characteristics of the analyzed historiographical stage. Area of application: results of the study can be used for integrated historiographical research of the Russian Civil War, as well as - for researches in other branches of the military history.

Example of human individual identification from World War II gravesite

This paper presents the procedure elaborated by our team which was applied to the mode of identification of Red Army soldiers who were taken as prisoners by the German Army during World War II and deceased in captivity. In the course of our search the unmarked burial of ten Soviet prisoners of war was found. Historical, anthropological and genetic research conducted by us led to the personal identification of nine of them, including two by means of DNA analysis.

Stan bezpieczeństwa terenów przygranicznej Lubelszczyzny po delimitacji granicy państwowej w latach 1944-1947. Próba analizy problemu

The most common reason for armed conflicts outbreak is the desire to expand the territories. “The scars of the history” – the new areas which are the results of such actions create many problems of social or cultural nature. Due to the fact that minority population lives at the crossroads of two states causes that the most significant difficulty is safety. In the paper an overview of the Lublin border ethnic relations, including the Polish - Ukrainian relations during the Second World War and the tragic period just after its end are presented. What is empathized is the fact that the mentioned period was a time when in the common Polish-Ukrainian history numerous examples of kindness, compassion, or even good neighborly relations occurred. These gestures proved peaceful coexistence between the two nations was possible. An unknown number of Red Army soldiers, maybe a small group, committed crimes on Polish territory. The fact is important and verified with a specific documents. The used scans of documents and photos come from the New Acts Archives of Tomaszow Lubelski and the Regional Museum in Lublin.

Cultural Borders in an Autobiographical Narrative

This article examines the life story of a woman born in a village in southern Estonia in 1918. It is based on two life stories told in Estonian and one told in Russian, as well as a story about her home. The stories were written at the initiative of the researcher between 1996 and 2004 and are stored in public archives. These texts have been chosen in that they are characteristic of the multifaceted phenomenon of inter-cultural contact: the narrator is of Estonian de- scent; she was imprisoned during the German occupation and taken to Germany, where she lived among local Germans and Red Army soldiers after the war; she married a man of Russian descent who served in the Red Army; from 1948, she and her family lived in a culturally diverse environment in Kohtla-Jarve. The focus of this research is on the manifestation of cultural borders at the levels of life history, self-description and cultural context. The narrator presents herself as a person who is not constrained by cultural borders. The relative importance of various cultures in her life and her self-perception is dependent on the general historical and political context and the context of everyday life at the stage of her life that is being described. This aspect emphasises the flexible and volatile nature of cultural borders; however, the analysis of the text reveals the permanence of cultural borders - the narrator cannot step out of her cultural background when describing a culture that she sees as 'other'.

Homecoming as a National Founding Myth: Jewish Identity and German Landscapes in Konrad Wolf’s I was Nineteen

Konrad Wolf was one of the most enigmatic intellectuals of East Germany. The son of the Jewish Communist playwright Friedrich Wolf and the brother of Markus Wolf—the head of the GDR’s Foreign Intelligence Agency—Konrad Wolf was exiled in Moscow during the Nazi era and returned to Germany as a Red Army soldier by the end of World War Two. This article examines Wolf’s 1968 autobiographical film I was Nineteen (Ich war Neunzehn), which narrates the final days of World War II—and the initial formation of postwar reality—from the point of view of an exiled German volunteer in the Soviet Army. In analyzing Wolf’s portrayals of the German landscape, I argue that he used the audio-visual clichés of Heimat-symbolism in order to undermine the sense of a homogenous and apolitical community commonly associated with this concept. Thrown out of their original contexts, his displaced Heimat images negotiate a sense of a heterogeneous community, which assumes multi-layered identities and highlights the shared ideology rather than the shared origins of the members of the national community. Reading Wolf from this perspective places him within a tradition of innovative Jewish intellectuals who turned Jewish sensibilities into a major part of modern German mainstream culture.

“Counter-revolutionary agitation” in the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War

This article examines the politics of legal prosecution of politically subversive speech qualified as “counterrevolutionary propaganda and agitation” according to Article 58.10 of the Soviet Criminal Code in 1941-1942. These years saw a marked rise in the number of trials under this article, which reflected negative popular opinion about the initial Soviet war losses. The increased severity of punishment was dictated by fears of a popular uprising. At the same time, the supreme judicial organs were aware that the excessive punishment of civilians might undermine the morale of Red Army soldiers, most of whom had families on the home front. Soviet courts, therefore, had to strike an uneasy balance between ensuring state security and preserving the loyalty of the population. To do so, the Supreme Court provided detailed instructions that admonished lower courts to assess the crime in view of its social danger, determined by the “personality” of the accused rather than the nature of the offense. However, the article argues, this emphasis on “personality” should not be interpreted as an attempt to reshape society in a radical way. In fact, the main objective of the legal repression of “counterrevolutionary agitation” was to preserve the status quo in the relationship between the Soviet population and Stalin’s regime. The courts were advised to consider the culprit’s personality in terms of age, gender, and class, which affirmed traditional social hierarchies. Transforming the population’s consciousness was not a priority for the judicial system, and it contributed to this transformation only indirectly, by involving broader population in trials as witnesses and audience.

The Liberating Experience: War Correspondents, Red Army Soldiers, and the Nazi Extermination Camps

The Liberating Experience: War Correspondents, Red Army Soldiers, and the Nazi Extermination Camps

"Real Men Go to the Bania": Postwar Soviet Masculinities and the Bathhouse

In earlier times real men went to riding school to prance on gelded horses, headed off to the firing range to shoot at the ace of diamonds, to fencing halls to fight with swords, to the English Club to do battle at the card table, or, in extreme cases, to the ballet. Today real men go to the bania. --El'dar Aleksandrovich Riazanov, Irony of Fate or Enjoy Your Steams In the spring of 1945, as the Red Army approached Berlin, the Soviet writer and war correspondent Aleksandr Trifonovich Tvardovskii contemplated how to commemorate in words the various ways that Soviet men had contributed to the Great Patriotic War. As he noted in his journal, controversy swirled around the question of whether men had seen combat at the front would have a greater claim to sacrifice and honor than those had remained behind the lines. At first Tvardovskii had a hard time figuring out a context for discussing the issue. He wanted to bring it up as part of his ongoing and extremely popular poem Vasilii Terkin: A Book about a Soldier. (2) But the poem's eponymous hero was an everyman, not prone to political statements. Terkin both reflected a Red Army soldier's life and helped servicemen and civilians alike make sense of the war. Tvardovskii struggled to find a way to address the question of relative sacrifice while maintaining the folk rhythms that gave the poem its wide appeal. Then he noted in his journal on 19 March, This morning I was spurred on by last night's bania to remember all the various banias where I had cleaned myself in the war, and I suddenly decided to write a chapter [of the Terkin poem] 'In the Bania.' The Russian steam bath was ideal for his purposes: [The bania is] half-fantastic, forgiving, and softening of the sharpness of the discussions and thoughts about counts for in war and the differences are between this and that contribution. Since ancient times Russian people have spoken in the bania (I mean the village bania, the kolkhoz bania--not the commercial town bania) about strength, often about a specifically masculine strength, they have spoken in aphorisms, in exclamations, in short breaths. (3) Tvardovskii, of course, was not the first writer to recognize the degree to which the bania--whether rural and traditional or urban and commercial--provided a useful setting for addressing questions of who counted for what in Russian culture. The bania had been a favorite setting for prerevolutionary Russian and foreign writers, artists, and poets. (4) The bania's place in early Soviet culture was more ambiguous. On the one hand, it was associated with elements of the prerevolutionary Russian past that were anathema to the Bolsheviks and that they hoped to expunge. Urban banias, in their more elaborate incarnations, had been social clubs catering to the decadence of elite society. (5) Peasant banias were ideologically no better--their connection with ancient customs, folklore, and magic earned the disdain of the Bolsheviks hoped to weed out rural backwardness. On the other hand, the bania was often the only place where the New Soviet Man could get clean after work. As such, it fit neatly into the new state's conceptualization of modern hygiene. (6) The renewed emphasis on Russian culture as a central component of Soviet identity that emerged in the 1930s and blossomed during World War II set the stage for the bania's own triumphant return as a (Russian/Soviet) sacred space. (7) Long associated with Russia but successfully Sovietized, the bania could serve many different functions to many different people. (8) Not least of all, the state supported bathhouses as a necessary hygiene measure, and after the war it turned to building new ones. According to the Ministry of Communal Services of the RSFSR, the Russian Federation went from having 122,000 spaces in banias in 1946 to 131,871 spaces in 1953 and 464,566 spaces by 1964. …

Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier’s War on the Eastern Front (review)

Reviewed by: Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier’s War on the Eastern Front Lee Baker Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier’s War on the Eastern Front. By Boris Gorbachevsky. Translated and edited by Stuart Britton. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. ISBN 978-0-70061605-3. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. Pp. xix, 453. $36.95. There is an enormous amount of material upon which historians of the Second World War can rely when researching and writing. In addition to official documents there are numerous memoirs. Those written by German veterans of the Second World War have been published ever since the end of the war, but until fairly recently there were no memoirs from Soviet veterans, and those which did exist could not be [End Page 1379] read without great care as to intent, censorship, and a host of issues which made them problematic (some of the same problems can be seen in German memoirs). While still requiring careful reading, many of the memoirs coming from the Soviet veterans of the east have proven to be very valuable in understanding the war. This memoir is an addition to the Modern War Studies series put out by Kansas over the last few years. It is an excellent addition to the literature, in this case the memories of Red Army veterans. While no memoir can satisfy everyone, this one goes a long way towards answering the questions most historians would pose if given the chance to interview a veteran of the fighting in the east. This inclusiveness makes the book not only lengthy for a memoir but also one of the best available because it addresses so many issues. It begins, as usual with this genre, with some background family information (Jews from the countryside outside of Moscow) and then continues with the author’s training experiences. The remainder of the book segues back and forth between the war years and the immediate pre-war years. This allows the author to weave both his personal and professional life into the narrative. His initial engagement, and the bulk of his combat experience, came near Moscow in the great battle at Rzhev during the summer of 1942 and lasted until March 1943, during which time entire Soviet armies disappeared into this meat grinder. The author then participated in the battles which drove the Germans from Moscow and Smolensk and on to Orsha, where the Soviet summer offensives of 1944 smashed the entire central front. His unit then drove westward into Poland and Prussia, finally ending up in Silesia by the war’s end. The author thus participated in some of the largest and most important battles in the east, but instead of focusing too heavily on fighting, which in memoirs tends to become the mere description of local events (think of Guy Sajer’s memoir), he focuses on Soviet fighting techniques and the inanities of army life, including both its highlights and low lights. He is especially careful to point out the stupidities of army leaders and the pointlessness of much of their effort to stop the Germans. His criticisms form a large part of the narrative, which makes it both useful and an interesting addition to memoir literature. But the descriptions of the various battles, of which the battle for Rzhev forms the bulk of the book, are worthy of being read by both specialists and the general reader. Lee Baker University of Cincinnati, Raymond Walters College Cincinnati, Ohio Copyright © 2009 The Society for Military History

Veterans and the Village: The Impact of Red Army Demobilization on Soviet Urbanization, 1945–1955

AbstractThis article re-evaluates a classical historical question: the impact on the process of urbanization of the demobilization of Red Army soldiers after 1945. One historical school focuses on the mass return to the village, while a rival interpretation claims that demobilization led to a further spurt in urbanization as soldiers refused to return to collective farms. Archival data now suggest a two-part process: first, soldiers returned to the village, expecting a loosening of the kolkhoz regime; once their expectations were frustrated, they left the village, leading to a resumption of the prewar trend of forsaking the village.

The Americanization of the Soviet Living Newspaper

This article examines the migration of a Soviet agitational theatrical form from Russia to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. The Soviet living newspaper, or zhivaia gazeta, began during the Russian Civil War as a method to act out a pro-Soviet version of the news for mainly illiterate Red Army soldiers. During the 1920s, it evolved into an experimental form of agitprop theater that attracted the interest of foreigners, who hoped to develop new methods of political theater in their own countries. In the United States, the living newspaper format was first adopted by American communist circles. Eventually, the depression-era arts program, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), incorporated an expanded and altered version as part of its many offerings. Living newspapers eventually became one of the FTP’s most celebrated and criticized performance genres. The political content of American living newspapers was a major factor in the government’s elimination of the FTP in 1939.

Stalin's guerrillas: Soviet partisans in World War II

When the Wehrmacht rolled into the Soviet Union in World War II, it got more than it bargained for. Notwithstanding the Red Army's retreat, Soviet citizens fought fiercely against German occupiers, engaging in raids, sabotage, and intelligence gathering - largely without any oversight from Stalin and his iron-fisted rule. Kenneth Slepyan provides an enlightening social and political history of the Soviet partisan movement, a people's army of irregulars fighting behind enemy lines. These insurgents included not only civilians - many of them women - but also stranded Red Army soldiers, national minorities, and even former collaborators. While others have documented the military contributions of the movement, Slepyan is the first to describe it as a social phenomenon and to reveal how its members were both challenged and transformed by the crucible of war. By tracing the movement's origins, internal squabbles, and evolution throughout the war, Slepyan shows that people who suddenly had the autonomy to act on their own came to rethink the Stalinist regime. He assesses how partisan initiative and self-reliance competed with and countered the demands of state control and how social identities influenced relations among partisans, as well as between partisans and Soviet authorities. Slepyan has tapped newly opened Soviet archives, as well as wartime radio broadcasts and Communist Party publications and memoirs, to depict the partisans as agents actively pursuing their own agendas. His book gives us a picture of their day-to-day struggle that was previously unknown to all but those few who personally survived the experience, paying special attention to questions of nationality, ethnicity, and gender to illuminate the sociopolitical relations within this diverse group. Through these varied accounts, he demonstrates that Soviet citizens reinterpreted Stalinism and the Soviet experience in the context of total war. Offering numerous fresh insights into the partisans' multifaceted relationship with the state, Slepyan's book reveals the ways in which the war simultaneously reinforced and undermined both Stalinism and the Soviet system. Ultimately, his study rescues the Soviet partisans from obscurity to depict the complexity of their lives and underscore their vital contributions to the defense of their homeland.

Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945, and: Plen: Sovetskie voennoplennye v Germanii, 1941-1945 (review)

Reviewed by Mark Edele Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945. 462 pp. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006. ISBN 0805074554, $30.00 (cloth); 0312426526, $15.00 (paper). Aron Shneer, Plen: Sovetskie voennoplennye v Germanii, 1941–1945 [Captivity: Soviet Prisoners of War in Germany, 1941–45]. 620 pp. Moscow: Mosty kul´tury; Jerusalem: Gesharim, 2005. ISBN 5932731958. The Great Patriotic War, or to put it in Western language—the Soviet experience of World War II in Europe—is having a renaissance among historians. After the long hiatus that followed such classics as Alexander Werth's Russia at War, and after the wave of research on late Stalinism looked at the war years largely from the perspective of their impact on postwar society, more and more historians are now starting to explore the war itself.1 Recently, two new and important additions have been made to this emerging literature on the Soviet experience of World War II: Catherine Merridale's Ivan's War and Aron Shneer's Plen: Sovetskie voennoplennye v Germanii, 1941–1945.2 These are two very different books. Merridale attempts the delicate balancing act of targeting an educated audience beyond academe without losing sight of the latter. Her book is beautifully written, illustrated with [End Page 209] interesting photographs, and minimally footnoted. Following the lead of Elena Seniavskaia, it tells the story of frontline experience from below as well as from the East—a long overdue counterpoint to Omer Bartov's work on the Wehrmacht.3 Shneer's book is at the other end of the spectrum. It is a classical monograph with long, careful, and detailed footnotes, drawing on primary and secondary sources in an impressive range of languages (Russian, German, English, French, Latvian, and Polish). It is targeted to a specialist audience and part of an already established research field: the history of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs).4 In terms of source base and conceptual problems, however, the two volumes have a lot in common. Both combine as wide a range of sources as they can muster—memoirs, letters, diaries (in the case of Merridale), archival evidence, and interviews with survivors. Merridale worked in Russian and German archives and talked to Russian survivors. Shneer worked in Israel, contacting Jewish survivors and exploring the holdings of the Yad Vashem archive—clearly a rich archival repository that more historians of Russia should note. Aside from geographical differences, the two source bases contain similar types of documentation, and both historians attempt to compensate for the problems of one genre by supplementing it with documentation of a different type. The two volumes also share a similar conceptual problem, a problem well known to any historian dealing with group experience: on the one hand, one needs to tell a story common to all; on the other hand, knowledge of a wide variety of primary sources alerts the historian to the many differences cutting across the group. Red Army soldiers were far from undifferentiated. Men of three generations served alongside a significant minority of (mainly young) women; Russians served alongside Ukrainians, Belorussians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Moldavians, Armenians, or Jews (to list just a few); peasants served together with urban dwellers, intelligenty alongside those barely literate; party members served together with non-party people, internationalists alongside antisemites; those who had profited from the Stalin revolution and the Great Terror served alongside those who had been victimized by one or the other or even both of these upheavals. To tell the story of such a diverse group of people, to find a common denominator, to distill a typical experience out of this diversity is a serious challenge to any historian. [End Page 210] The two books deal with this problem in fundamentally different ways. Merridale starts with the assumption that there is a collective singular—"the true Ivan"—which the historian can set out...