UBC: Ivan's War

[truepenny]

Merridale, Catherine. Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. New York: Picador-Henry Holt and Co., 2007.

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This book makes a good pairing with Hitler's Army, which is about German soldiers on the Eastern Front, and in another direction, a good pairing with The Gulag Archipelago, since it is from that same front that Solzhenitsyn began his journey into the strange and desolate archipelago he writes of, and Merridale provides context for the world which he left.

But this is also an excellent book read solely on its own. Merridale did her research among the primary sources that are only now becoming available to scholars and in interviews with veterans. She is thoughtful and compassionate, both about what the men and women of the Red Army did (and were done to) during the war and about how they remember it now. It is, almost incidentally, a scathing critique of Stalinism and of Stalin himself, and reinforces my feeling that the history of Russia in the twentieth century is a history of one betrayal after another. It is full of vivid details and evidence from as wide a variety of witnesses as Merridale could manage: officers, infantrymen, tankmen, women soldiers. And she talks very explicitly about the gaps which cannot be recovered. For example, although the soldiers' songs were preserved by ethnographers, none of their curses survive, and almost none of their jokes, because the censors forbade it.

I will be looking for her first book, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia.

Comments

[sovay]

Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army

I have probably asked you this before, but have you seen a film called The Cuckoo (2002)? I suspect you should, if you have not; it contains three mutually unintelligible languages and a journey to the underworld.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

You're right--that sounds like something I would enjoy.

[nipernaadi.livejournal.com]

I liked that movie, even if the strong whiff of woman as a noble savage made me angry.

As I am sure I am an human being, not a noble savage, well equipped to show men where they went wrong!

But leaving that one out - I felt really sad that I could not urge any of my Western correspondents to see that one, as I would have been interested to hear what would a Westerner notice in that one.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

That sounds fascinating: thank you.
Do you know Eugenia Ginsberg's accounts of her time in the gulags? (Into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind.) They give an interesting counterpoint to the male accounts of Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov. There's also a collection of writings by other women prisoners, Till My Tale is Told, ed. Simeon Vilensky, covering the period from the late Tsars to the 1960s. Amazing women.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I know of them (Solzhenitsyn mentions them, for one thing), but I have yet to find them. I have somewhere on my shelves Irina Ratushinskaya's Grey is the Color of Hope (1988), which I hope eventually to get around to reading. And thanks for
mentioning Till My Tale Is Told, which I hadn't heard of.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

And the current regime in Russia seems bent on rehabbing Stalin . . .

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Sort-of paralell to this, have you ever read much of Akhmatova's poetry? There's one about standing in line to see her son in prison that I am reminded of here.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

She's on my Infinitely Expanding List.

[penrynsdreams.livejournal.com]

"the history of Russia in the twentieth century is a history of one betrayal after another"

Man, given my current reading of nineteenth century Russia, I don't think it's just the twentieth that could be described like that.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Very very true. But at least the czars weren't PRETENDING to be empowering the workers.