The Soviet army
Blood meridian
Oct 20th 2005
From The Economist print edition
A new history exposes Russia's wartime agony from the bottom up
Ivan's War: The Red Army 1941-1945
By Catherine Merridale
To be published in America by Metropolitan Books in January
Faber and Faber; 374 pages; £20.
WHAT was the second world war like for Russian soldiers? That simple question has a complex answer. Soviet official accounts overlaid the real human, political and military history of the war with a thick layer of gooey, self-congratulatory myth. There are tales of comradeship and heroism aplenty, but little that tells a modern-day reader what the greatest war in history was really like.
Catherine Merridale, a British historian, has picked the locks that kept this history hidden. Through hard work with official archives, diaries, letters and hard-won interviews with veterans, she brings to life the soldiers' war: the chaos and panic of the retreat before the German onslaught, when up to 3m Soviet troops were taken prisoner; the brutal punishment of deserters and their families; the early days of the war when shortages of equipment, clothing and munitions were matched by relentless sloganeering and political meddling; the epic drunkenness and black marketeering; and the orgies of destruction and cruelty on both sides.
Obtaining first-hand accounts of all this required skill and perseverance. The “Great Patriotic War”, as Russians still call it, has such a sacred place in the national mindset that any questioning, particularly by a young foreign woman, would have struck many people as indecent.
The result is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of the time, or modern Russia's dependence on it. Ms Merridale's earlier book, “Night of Stone” (2000), was a definitive account of the Russian attitude to the death and suffering that drench its history. Now her feel for human nature and her excellent knowledge of Russian language and culture, combined with her research among Russian (and German) sources, have produced a worthy sequel.
Whereas other historians have focused recently on the salacious details of life at the top of Stalin's Soviet Union, Ms Merridale's approach is from the bottom up, coupled with her own careful but incisive analysis. She illuminates one of the great puzzles: what Russians really thought of Stalin. Even under the Terror, his personality and Soviet patriotism fused to inspire not just fear, but respect as well as a kind of love. People survived, she writes, by “evolving to fit the framework of a monstrous state. It was far easier, even the doubters found, to join the collective and share the dream than to remain alone, condemned to isolation and the threat of death.” When the war started, Stalin retreated from public view. One soldier quoted in the book, Ivan Gorin, laughed when asked if soldiers really yelled in unison “For the motherland, for Stalin” (as the official myth says) before going into battle. “I'm sure we shouted something when we went to the guns. But I don't think it was that polite.”
Ms Merridale highlights the increasingly savage response of the authorities when defeat loomed after Hitler's surprise attack. The state's answer, she writes, “was to prepare a war against its own people. If they would not behave like epic heroes of their own accord, then NKVD guns would force them to.”
Eventually, that changed. Political commissars were reined in, and professionalism returned. In a telling passage, Ms Merridale describes the return in 1942 of proper training and military ethos to the army. Drill replaced “comic-strip heroics”, she writes. “There would be no more suicidal leaping on to the barricades, no more distracting competitions to see which unit could march fastest or form into the straightest line.” The authorities brought back medals, and even officers' epaulettes—which before the war had been a hated symbol of tsarist privilege. Some soldiers hoped, vainly, that the next step might be the abolition of collective farms.
For all her efforts, some details of life in the Red Army are as unremembered now as they were unrecorded then. Nobody wrote down the unofficial songs, the jokes or the slang, and veterans find it hard to disinter them from memories overlaid with decades of official pomp and invention. Ms Merridale has a bit more luck in plumbing the darker depths—the rapes, destruction and looting that the Red Army meted out, first on the countries seen as having collaborated with Hitler's Reich, and then on Germany itself. “Rape combined the desire to avenge with the impulse to destroy, to smash German luxuries and waste the fascists' wealth. It punished women and reinforced the fragile manliness of the perpetrators.”
The blandness of many soldiers' memories, though they were vivid raconteurs when they talked of life outside the war, seemed puzzling. Ms Merridale came to see it as a secret of their resilience. “The path to survival lay in stoical acceptance.” Sadly, that stayed true for some time. As she notes, “The motherland was never conquered, but it had enslaved itself.”
Ivan's War: The Red Army 1941-1945.
By Catherine Merridale.
Faber and Faber; 374 pages; £20.
To be published in America by Metropolitan Books in January
