Post by sciwriter on Apr 10, 2006 10:55:20 GMT -7
I think what really happened to the Soviet military in WW2 was in between the official account and C. Merridale's research (see book review below). Keep in mind that the unprepared, ill equipped Soviet military defeated Hitler's well prepared, better equipped forces. While the Soviets had help from USA, Britain and France, Hitler had the full industrial resources of the Nazi-conquered countries in Europe and various South American countries mainly Argentina. Also Hitler had pre-WW2 help from some major international corporations even in the USA such as Ford Motor Co., Standard Oil, Dupont and ALCOA.
IMO the horrible, unjustified atrocities that various Soviet soldiers committed in Eastern Europe reflected the abuse and frustrations that the Nazis previously inflicted on them, and were not influenced by the Soviet Communist Party as Merridale suggests or Stalin as others have suggested.
What is your view?
Thanks. Carl
www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/books/review/09fitzpatrick.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
NY TIMES
April 9, 2006
'Ivan's War,' by Catherine Merridale
Saving Private Ivanov
Review by SHEILA FITZPATRICK
THE Great Patriotic War - as World War II is known in Russia - was the ultimate
test of the resolve of the Soviet state and the heroism of its people. Victory
in May 1945 was the Soviet Union's finest hour. Or so goes the story that the
state's propaganda machine cherished and that generations of citizens believed.
But Catherine Merridale, an English scholar whose earlier book, "Night of
Stone," examined death in the Soviet Union, is skeptical. Believing that the
official version is sanitized and untrue, she set out in "Ivan's War" to show
the underside of the conflict as it was experienced by ordinary soldiers. She
draws on a rich body of memoirs and oral testimonies. And if her informants tend
to have positive memories of comradeship in battle, the official archives she
has consulted provide her with plentiful evidence of screw-ups and
irresponsibility, not to mention callousness toward human life on the part of
politicians and military leaders. Finally, and most touchingly, she finds
immediate testimony of what the war was like in the letters and diaries of
frontline soldiers (frontoviki), for many of whom the war never became a memory
because they were among the more than eight million servicemen and women who
died in it.
For Russians the war began horrifically, with a chaotic retreat before the
German invasion of June 1941. It continued through a year of military disaster
and plummeting morale, culminating in Stalin's notorious Order 227 of July 28,
1942, which forbade retreat under any circumstances and mandated the harshest of
punishments for "laggards, cowards, defeatists and other miscreants."
The German advance was stopped at Stalingrad early in 1943, but it was not until
the spring of 1944 that the front was pushed back beyond Soviet borders. The
"march to Berlin" then began, with Soviet soldiers starting to feel like
conquerors. This phase of the war was marked by looting, disorderly rampages and
raping of civilians on a scale that shocked the populations of Eastern and
Central Europe. Soviet authorities, Merridale argues, did little to hinder these
activities, and may have encouraged them.
The story of the war has never been told before from the standpoint of the
common Soviet soldier, though Russians already have an emblem of the ordinary
infantryman. He is Vasily Tyorkin, the eponymous hero of Aleksandr Tvardovsky's
immensely popular wartime poem. Merridale doesn't think much of the fictional
Tyorkin, seeing him as an unrealistically optimistic figure drawn with
exaggerated patriotism; she says Tvardovsky ignored the worst privations of army
life and the stupidity of army command. But there is more of the Good Soldier
Schweik in Tyorkin than Merridale recognizes, especially in Tvardovsky's later
poem, "Tyorkin in the Other World," in which the hero dies and goes to heaven,
only to find exactly the same idiotic bureaucrats he had known in the army. This
Tyorkin, like Merridale's composite soldier, Ivan, is wily and resourceful but
essentially innocent, a paradigmatic "little man" at the mercy of forces beyond
his control.
Yet when the Soviet Army crossed the borders into Europe, it started on a
drunken rampage. Lovable innocents should not rape, loot and wantonly destroy,
so how is this appalling behavior to be explained? Merridale's interview
subjects are of no help; they decline to share memories of atrocities. And
Merridale herself is loath to blame the soldiers, taking issue with historians
who have called Soviet frontoviki "bestial and crude, as if they acted from some
instinct, like animals." Really, she suggests, it is the Communist Party that
should be blamed. Having sown hatred for Germans through "deliberate and
sophisticated flooding" of the soldiers' minds, the party now "gave them
license" to take out their anger on the civilian populations, and offered
indemnity by not publicizing the outrages. Yet Merridale seems a little uneasy
with her own argument, for she notes elsewhere that while "it would certainly be
convenient, now, to lay the blame" for war crimes on Stalin and the leaders in
the Kremlin, there must nevertheless come a time when, like the Germans,
Russians will "have to grapple with the question of individual responsibility in
conditions of totalitarian rule."
Merridale has done an admirable job of collecting testimony from war veterans
(she and her assistants conducted about 200 interviews). One can see how
difficult this was from her account of making her pitch to a sea of "closed"
faces at a Kursk veterans' association; as a foreign, female, middle-aged
academic she must have seemed as alien as Mary Poppins. Her sample was not, and
could not be, comprehensive; like most other people doing oral history in
Russia, she talked to whoever would talk to her, and then made other contacts
through her initial interviewees.
The result, inevitably, is skewed. Merridale notes, for example, that her
informants were disproportionately Jewish (as it happens, Jews are
overrepresented in the Russian intelligentsia and that skewing toward informants
from the intelligentsia is a perennial problem for foreigners doing oral history
in Russia). But the distortions in her sampling give her "Ivan" a rather
contradictory character: on the one hand, the oral testimonies and memoirs show
him to be generally thoughtful and sensitive, likely to have a volume of poetry
in his knapsack; on the other, material from the archives suggests an ignorant,
fearful, undisciplined foot soldier, living a squalid life in subhuman
conditions.
A bias toward the intelligentsia finds its way into Merridale's interpretation
of postwar aspirations as well. Like many other historians of Russia, she
assumes that the intellectuals' hope for more freedom of speech and for a more
open government was shared by a majority of the population. But food and shelter
were surely what was uppermost in most soldiers' minds when the war ended (with
peasants hoping additionally for the disbanding of collective farms).
AS for the Soviet myth of a heroic and patriotic war, one of the ironies here is
Merridale's discovery that while her evidence from Soviet archives often
supports her debunking approach, her informants uniformly reject it. The
veterans she interviewed were by no means as critical of the regime as their
interviewer was, and even after the Soviet Union collapsed, they retained "a
sense of pride so powerful that few could see how thoroughly it disinherited
them."
The veterans clearly chose to remember the war in a heroic light. No matter how
much the interviewers pushed for gory details of combat, "there were bodies, and
there were tears, but there was no blood," Merridale says, "no nervous strain,"
let alone any rape, brutality or cowardice in the ranks. The myth, she
concludes, "keyed into some basic human needs," and besides, she adds, it was
"partly true, or true enough to make successive generations grateful." So much
for debunking. Still, it is to Merridale's great credit that she lets us listen
to what her veterans had to say, even when it wasn't what she herself wanted to
hear.
Sheila Fitzpatrick, who teaches history at the University of Chicago, is the
author, most recently, of "Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in
Twentieth-Century Russia."
IMO the horrible, unjustified atrocities that various Soviet soldiers committed in Eastern Europe reflected the abuse and frustrations that the Nazis previously inflicted on them, and were not influenced by the Soviet Communist Party as Merridale suggests or Stalin as others have suggested.
What is your view?
Thanks. Carl
www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/books/review/09fitzpatrick.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
NY TIMES
April 9, 2006
'Ivan's War,' by Catherine Merridale
Saving Private Ivanov
Review by SHEILA FITZPATRICK
THE Great Patriotic War - as World War II is known in Russia - was the ultimate
test of the resolve of the Soviet state and the heroism of its people. Victory
in May 1945 was the Soviet Union's finest hour. Or so goes the story that the
state's propaganda machine cherished and that generations of citizens believed.
But Catherine Merridale, an English scholar whose earlier book, "Night of
Stone," examined death in the Soviet Union, is skeptical. Believing that the
official version is sanitized and untrue, she set out in "Ivan's War" to show
the underside of the conflict as it was experienced by ordinary soldiers. She
draws on a rich body of memoirs and oral testimonies. And if her informants tend
to have positive memories of comradeship in battle, the official archives she
has consulted provide her with plentiful evidence of screw-ups and
irresponsibility, not to mention callousness toward human life on the part of
politicians and military leaders. Finally, and most touchingly, she finds
immediate testimony of what the war was like in the letters and diaries of
frontline soldiers (frontoviki), for many of whom the war never became a memory
because they were among the more than eight million servicemen and women who
died in it.
For Russians the war began horrifically, with a chaotic retreat before the
German invasion of June 1941. It continued through a year of military disaster
and plummeting morale, culminating in Stalin's notorious Order 227 of July 28,
1942, which forbade retreat under any circumstances and mandated the harshest of
punishments for "laggards, cowards, defeatists and other miscreants."
The German advance was stopped at Stalingrad early in 1943, but it was not until
the spring of 1944 that the front was pushed back beyond Soviet borders. The
"march to Berlin" then began, with Soviet soldiers starting to feel like
conquerors. This phase of the war was marked by looting, disorderly rampages and
raping of civilians on a scale that shocked the populations of Eastern and
Central Europe. Soviet authorities, Merridale argues, did little to hinder these
activities, and may have encouraged them.
The story of the war has never been told before from the standpoint of the
common Soviet soldier, though Russians already have an emblem of the ordinary
infantryman. He is Vasily Tyorkin, the eponymous hero of Aleksandr Tvardovsky's
immensely popular wartime poem. Merridale doesn't think much of the fictional
Tyorkin, seeing him as an unrealistically optimistic figure drawn with
exaggerated patriotism; she says Tvardovsky ignored the worst privations of army
life and the stupidity of army command. But there is more of the Good Soldier
Schweik in Tyorkin than Merridale recognizes, especially in Tvardovsky's later
poem, "Tyorkin in the Other World," in which the hero dies and goes to heaven,
only to find exactly the same idiotic bureaucrats he had known in the army. This
Tyorkin, like Merridale's composite soldier, Ivan, is wily and resourceful but
essentially innocent, a paradigmatic "little man" at the mercy of forces beyond
his control.
Yet when the Soviet Army crossed the borders into Europe, it started on a
drunken rampage. Lovable innocents should not rape, loot and wantonly destroy,
so how is this appalling behavior to be explained? Merridale's interview
subjects are of no help; they decline to share memories of atrocities. And
Merridale herself is loath to blame the soldiers, taking issue with historians
who have called Soviet frontoviki "bestial and crude, as if they acted from some
instinct, like animals." Really, she suggests, it is the Communist Party that
should be blamed. Having sown hatred for Germans through "deliberate and
sophisticated flooding" of the soldiers' minds, the party now "gave them
license" to take out their anger on the civilian populations, and offered
indemnity by not publicizing the outrages. Yet Merridale seems a little uneasy
with her own argument, for she notes elsewhere that while "it would certainly be
convenient, now, to lay the blame" for war crimes on Stalin and the leaders in
the Kremlin, there must nevertheless come a time when, like the Germans,
Russians will "have to grapple with the question of individual responsibility in
conditions of totalitarian rule."
Merridale has done an admirable job of collecting testimony from war veterans
(she and her assistants conducted about 200 interviews). One can see how
difficult this was from her account of making her pitch to a sea of "closed"
faces at a Kursk veterans' association; as a foreign, female, middle-aged
academic she must have seemed as alien as Mary Poppins. Her sample was not, and
could not be, comprehensive; like most other people doing oral history in
Russia, she talked to whoever would talk to her, and then made other contacts
through her initial interviewees.
The result, inevitably, is skewed. Merridale notes, for example, that her
informants were disproportionately Jewish (as it happens, Jews are
overrepresented in the Russian intelligentsia and that skewing toward informants
from the intelligentsia is a perennial problem for foreigners doing oral history
in Russia). But the distortions in her sampling give her "Ivan" a rather
contradictory character: on the one hand, the oral testimonies and memoirs show
him to be generally thoughtful and sensitive, likely to have a volume of poetry
in his knapsack; on the other, material from the archives suggests an ignorant,
fearful, undisciplined foot soldier, living a squalid life in subhuman
conditions.
A bias toward the intelligentsia finds its way into Merridale's interpretation
of postwar aspirations as well. Like many other historians of Russia, she
assumes that the intellectuals' hope for more freedom of speech and for a more
open government was shared by a majority of the population. But food and shelter
were surely what was uppermost in most soldiers' minds when the war ended (with
peasants hoping additionally for the disbanding of collective farms).
AS for the Soviet myth of a heroic and patriotic war, one of the ironies here is
Merridale's discovery that while her evidence from Soviet archives often
supports her debunking approach, her informants uniformly reject it. The
veterans she interviewed were by no means as critical of the regime as their
interviewer was, and even after the Soviet Union collapsed, they retained "a
sense of pride so powerful that few could see how thoroughly it disinherited
them."
The veterans clearly chose to remember the war in a heroic light. No matter how
much the interviewers pushed for gory details of combat, "there were bodies, and
there were tears, but there was no blood," Merridale says, "no nervous strain,"
let alone any rape, brutality or cowardice in the ranks. The myth, she
concludes, "keyed into some basic human needs," and besides, she adds, it was
"partly true, or true enough to make successive generations grateful." So much
for debunking. Still, it is to Merridale's great credit that she lets us listen
to what her veterans had to say, even when it wasn't what she herself wanted to
hear.
Sheila Fitzpatrick, who teaches history at the University of Chicago, is the
author, most recently, of "Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in
Twentieth-Century Russia."