|
|
|
Review this Book
1 review (below) |
IVAN'S WAR
by
MERRIDALE, CATHERINE
Catherine Merridale's book is the first to put the experience of the ordinary Russian soldier at the heart of a narrative of the war on the Eastern Front, displacing the dictators and their generals who have dominated books on the subject for the past sixty years. Ivan, the archetypal Russian infantryman, emerges at last as a human figure. Merridale has explored letters, diaries, military records, the documents of the secret police and the testimonies of hundreds of surviving witnesses in an attempt to let us hear the voices of those who lived through the worst war in history. She found reports on morale by the NKVD, Stalin's secret police, medical surveys of illness and wounds (and denial of the reality of shell shock), and confiscated letters that said unguarded things about Stalin and sent their authors to punishment battalions. We hear the testimony of men and women about to die in suicidal attacks, facing German tanks with inadequate weapons and clothing, surviving terrible prison camps whose only purpose was to starve captives to death or living rough in the woods as partisans.
Stock: Currently Out of Stock, Allow 7-10 Days for Delivery
Format: Hardback
Published: 20/10/2005
Publisher: FABER AND FABER
ISBN: 0571218083
|
Our Price £15.00
List Price £20.00
Your Saving £5.00 (25%)
|
Click here to view associated books
Return to Previous Page |
|
|
Reviewed By: |
History Today |
|
Date: |
07/06/2006 |
|
Reader Rating: |
|
Review:
|
As the editors of A Writer at War assert, ‘Vasily Grossman’s place in the history of world literature is assured by his masterpiece Life and Fate, one of the greatest Russian novels of the twentieth century. Some critics even rate it more highly than Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago or the novels of Solzhenitsyn.’ No doubt, cold war prejudices have played their part in giving a greater reputation to works which take a negative stance towards the Russian Revolution and the Soviet regime that emerged from it rather than to those that depict the sacrifices and ultimate victory in what is still known as the Great Fatherland War. Indeed, this is a subject insufficiently discussed in the West until recently.
Grossman’s wartime notebooks could hardly be more evocative. Near the beginning of the war, a doctor identifies human flesh picked out from an aircraft radiator as ‘Aryan meat!’. Grossman comments: ‘Everyone laughs. Yes, a pitiless time – a time of iron – has come!’. In autumn, mud becomes ‘a liquid, bottomless swamp, black pastry mixed by thousands and thousands of boots, wheels, caterpillars.’ While ‘General Mud and General Cold’ helped the Red Army soldiers brought up to hardship, their German opponents had become too accustomed to easy victories. The generosity of peasants sharing their last potatoes with visiting soldiers, the selfless heroism of ‘a kind of monastic austerity’ born at the front, even among the smertniki, the dead men of the punishment companies composed of deserters and the disobedient, are vividly caught, along with the more negative features of the German war for ‘race extermination’. Stalingrad, the centrepiece of Life and Fate, inspired some of the finest writing in the notebooks: ‘The white ice of the Volga is carrying tree trunks, wood. A big raven is sitting sulkily on an ice floe. A dead Red Fleet soldier in a striped shirt floats past. Men from a freight steamer take him from the ice. It is difficult to tear the dead man out of the ice. He is rooted in it. It is as if he doesn’t want to leave the Volga where he has fought and died.’ Treblinka and other death camps are described in graphic detail, as is some of the revenge inflicted in ‘The Lair of the Fascist Beast’ on the road to Berlin. Grossman could only hint at Stalinist deportation of suspect nationalities and other excesses, but enough to arouse suspicion and delay publication of Life and Fate. His descriptions in that novel of various kinds of bravery, of different orders of time in war, of a wide range of participants, all fitted into a towering structure, owe much to the author’s experiences as a war correspondent set out in his notebooks.
Official commemorations of the Great Patriotic War, even today have tended to concentrate on pious patriotic cliché. Reluctant to criticize their officers, even Stalin himself, surviving participants speak sparingly of their hellish experiences. When Catherine Merridale asked a war museum curator what veteran visitors talked about, she received the answer ‘They don’t talk much.... They don’t seem to need to. Sometimes they just stand and weep.’ Nevertheless, Merridale and a succession of Russian research assistants have managed to extract reminiscences from veterans to supplement unpublished material and books by such eyewitnesses as Alexander Werth and more recent investigators such as Omer Bartov. The result is an impressive work that tells the story of Red Army soldiers from recruit to veteran, from the Nazi invasion to the fall of Berlin. Those who joined up with enthusiastic patriotism were soon disabused. While a senior sergeant might teach a tyro to wrap the footcloths that were the substitutes for socks, harsh, even sadistic basic training was more often the lot of the recruit, who could be subject also to inadequate food and shelter. The ‘black market’ and all kinds of corruption made Ivan’s lot even worse, and suicide was not unknown even before the first experience of the front. The opening Winter War against Finland exposed the many failings of the Red Army, but it became a much more efficient fighting force before the final drive into Germany.
Take, for example, the tankisty, given the highest appraisal by the SS general Max Simon: ‘It was amazing to see the primitive technical means with which the Russian crews kept their tanks ready for action and how they overcame all difficulties’. Yet more than three-quarters of the tankisty died, their bodies frequently incinerated beyond identification. ‘Have you burned yet?’ a tankman would ask a comrade at first meeting, and black humour abounded. On being told by a political officer that nearly everybody in his group has been consumed in the white-hot flash of an explosion, a young man offers an apology, adding ‘I’ll make sure I burn tomorrow.’
Recollections of the epic tank battle of Kursk follow those of the first defeats and counterattacks, and of Stalingrad, although the chronological progression is somewhat hidden in allusive chapter titles. Then, the excesses of the final phase of the war are graphically presented. But in the end, an awkward question has to be asked: was the fate inflicted on innocent civilians in Berlin worse than the incinerations of their counterparts in Eastern European village halls or death camps, not to mention the bestial treatment of Soviet POWS? The war and its end were more inhuman in the East than in the West, but perhaps too there should be a comparative examination of Ivan’s behaviour in the hour of victory with that of Tommy and GI Joe.
Paul Dukes is the author of Paths to a New Europe (PalgraveMacmillan, 2004).
|
We found 6 associated Books. Displaying results 1 to 6 of 6
Displaying results 1 to 6 of 6
|
|
