Catherine Merridale - Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army 1939-1945

In the Second World War the Soviet Union lost almost 27 million people. The majority of those were civilians, but some 9 million were the men and women of the Red Army and other Soviet armed forces. The Soviet Union's sacrifice broke Nazi Germany's military machine and defeated Hitler, but at enormous cost. Catherine Merridale's book Ivan's War is a history of the troops who fought against fascism. It is based on hundreds of interviews in the 1990s with veterans (though it should be noted that of the interviews that made it to the book they are all Red Army soldiers, no one from the Navy or Air Force is interviewed, and all combat veterans).

At the outset Merridale sets out to counter the traditional story of the Red Army representing a cross section of Russian society willingly fighting against fascism. In fact her account demolishes a number of myths - the all powerful Red machine is shown, especially in the early stages of the war, to be badly organised, ineptly led, fearful and inexperienced. But even after the tide was turning, she shows how the men and women of the Red Army were frequently far from the heroic figures depicted in much Soviet propaganda. In particular she does not shy from describing the mass sexual assaults and rape that took place of German women when the Red Army entered the Reich. 

What is striking is that while Merridale has uncovered plenty of evidence in the archives for the less noble tale of the Red Army; records for executions, crime and so on. Few of those she interviews acknowledge this in their accounts. In fact they all very much subscribe to the official view of a united army of principled fighters for socialism against fascism. She writes:

When veterans talk of the good old days, the great communal struggle, they never mention the sleeplessness and long-term malnutrition that afflected almost everyone. They also forget the untreated toothache, the chronic infestations of lice, the diarrhea and boils. The soldiers who survived to tell their stories for this book were a small elite in physical terms. War injuries, poor diet, and strain would shorten millions of lives.

Few of them spoke of arbitary executions of prisoners, rape or sexual assault. 

There were of course, millions of acts of bravery and heroism. While much is often made of the Red Army's lack of prepardness or the role of its political officers in forcing men to fight, it must also be remembered that millions of people fought to stop Hitler, and did so bravely. This was a racialised war of genocide. The barbarity of the Nazis was met in kind by the Red Army. The savage nature of the fighting did not lend itself to the small platoons fighting together through the conflict. Merridale notes that there's nothing like the memoires of Vietnam or US troops in the Pacific were men spent years together. Survival rates were far too small. This means that memories of those who survived tend to be highly individual. 

That said I was disappointed by the book. Despite the huge number of interviews I felt that we heard the voices of the individual soldiers far to rarely. I thought Merridale took up some fascinating aspects to the Red Army - she explores the role of antisemitism among Soviet troops for instance, and shows how the Soviet Union propaganda distorted Nazi crimes by emphasising them as anti-Russian crimes. But there is almost nothing here about ordinary troop's experiences when they liberated Concentration Camps. Perhaps Merridale wasn't able to find any accounts by those who reached Auschwitz in the interviews, diaries or reports she studied. But that seems unlikely. Thus despite this being a book based on interviews, it was not really a book that gave us their voices very often.

Finally, while I thought Merridale's revisionist account that tried to find the real Red Army was interesting - I felt her book was weakened by a flawed understanding of Soviety history. There was a tendency to lump Stalinism together with the revolutionary socialism of 1917, rather than see the former as a bloody break with the later. Stalin's pact with Hitler would have been something that shocked Lenin's Bolsheviks, and was itself a great crime by a man who murdered many and casualy threw lives away in the name of socialism. 

At the end of the book she argues that the outcome of the conflict was to enshrine a "tyranny" in place. Here she ends up victim blaming. While writing that the "human cost was paid by Stalin's people, and whether they were willing soldiers or not, all but a small minority believed that they were on the right side in a true just war". But she concludes that "the Soviety peoplem who had acquiesced, however unwillingly, in the emergence of Stalinism, and who had also fought and suffered to defend it, would now permit the tyrant to remain. The motherland was never conquered, but it had enslaved itself."

This really is a strange conclusion. The Stalinist state was a powerful, brutal and dangerous beast. Merridale's book shows how it was able to use violence to drive the Red Army forward. To blame an exhausted people for the ongoing existence of that State after WW2 and to see them as "acquiescing" in Stalin's victory is unfair and historically inaccurate. It also undermines the bravery of those troops who did fight to stop Hitler. These flaws thus make for a disappointing book.

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