From the Publisher

A powerful, groundbreaking narrative of the ordinary Russian soldier’s experience of the worst war in history, based on newly revealed sources

     Of the thirty million who fought, eight million died, driven forward in suicidal charges, shattered by German shells and tanks. They were the men and women of the Red Army, a ragtag mass of soldiers who confronted Europe’s most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. Sixty years have passed since their epic triumph, but the heart and mind of Ivan—as the ordinary Russian soldier was called—remain a mystery. We know something about hoe the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, how they saw the world, or why they fought.
     Drawing on previously closed military and secret police archives, interviews with veterans, and private letters and diaries, Catherine Merridale presents the first comprehensive history of the Red Army rank and file. She follows the soldiers from the shock of the German invasion to their costly triumph in Stalingrad, where life expectancy was often a mere twenty-four hours. Through the soldiers’ eyes, we witness their victorious arrival in Berlin, where their rage and suffering exact an awful toll, and accompany them as they return home full of hope, only to be denied the new life they had been fighting to secure.
     A tour de force of original research and a gripping history, Ivan’s War reveals the singular mixture of courage, patriotism, anger, and fear that made it possible for these underfed, badly led troops to defeat the Nazi army. In the process Merridale restoresto history the invisible millions who sacrificed the most to win the war.

The New York Times - William Grimes

Ivan's War combines, quite effectively, painstaking historical reconstruction and sympathetic projection. Ms. Merridale, proceeding from campaign to campaign, describes from the top down and from the bottom up. She provides a coherent picture of the tactical decisions and industrial adjustments that altered the course of the war, and at the same time focuses on how such changes were reflected in the day-to-day experiences and feelings of the troops on the ground.

Publishers Weekly

Thirty million men and women served in the Red Army during WWII. Over eight million of them died. Living or dead, they have remained anonymous. This is partly due to the Soviet Union's policy of stressing the collective nature of its sacrifice and victory. It also reflects the continuing reluctance of most Soviet veterans to discuss their experiences-in sharp contrast to German survivors of the Eastern Front. Merridale, professor of history at the University of London, combines interviews, letters and diaries with research in previously closed official archives to present the first comprehensive portrait of the Red Army's fighters. She carefully details the soldiers' age and ethnic diversity, and she puts a human face on a fact demonstrated repeatedly by retired U.S. officer and Soviet military expert David Glantz: the Red Army learned from the experience of its near-collapse in 1941, and by 1945 its soldiers were more than a match for their Wehrmacht opponents. Most poignantly, Merridale reveals that frontline soldiers increasingly hoped their sacrifices would bring about postwar reform-"Communism with a human face." What they got instead was a Stalinist crackdown-and a long silence, broken now by this outstanding book. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

Considering the number of shelves laden with books on the Soviet Union in World War II, it may be surprising that few convey the war as experienced by the foot soldiers, tank operators, and pilots who fought it or the peasants who endured it. Merridale's chronicle is not so much of the sights and sounds of war or of the agony and gore — although all this is there — as it is an attempt to fathom war's meaning, effect, and legacy for the peasant boy or girl sucked from his or her village or factory dorm and sent into the maw, often ill equipped and ill trained, to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with comrades who sometimes came from ethnic worlds apart, to master war's forms and tools, to do war's awful deeds, and then to somehow resume a normal life at war's close. Not surprisingly, she finds it difficult to penetrate the psychological shields war veterans erected. Nonetheless, she succeeds admirably in fashioning a compelling portrait, helped immensely by her talent as a writer.

Library Journal

The Soviet Union lost far more men in World War II than any other power, Allied or Axis. Yet for all the ink spilled over the Red Army's role in defeating the Nazis, very little has dribbled onto the Soviet soldiers themselves-onto the everyman combatant dubbed "Ivan"-owing in no small part to the secrecy and myth in which the Soviet system enshrouded them. Merridale (history, Univ. of London; Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia) seeks here to unravel the riddle of how they lived and why they fought, especially for a regime that notoriously devoured its children. The reasons that emerge are legion: Ivan fought out of fear and necessity, pride and patriotism, because he believed his cause was just, because he knew nothing else. Ultimately, while no one picture emerges, Merridale has effectively captured the lives of these ordinary, and extraordinary, soldiers as they face bitter defeat in Hitler's surprise Operation Barbarossa attack and victory at Stalingrad, reap vengeance in Berlin and return home, forever altered. What this engaged study sometimes lacks in narrative thrust it makes up for in spades with its harrowing and deeply compassionate portrait of the individual Ivans. Recommended for public and academic libraries; essential for all Soviet and World War II collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/15.]-Tania Barnes, Library Journal Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Glorified by Soviet myth-makers as simple, heroic "Ivan," the common soldier in the Red Army in fact grappled with despair and his own government as well as the Nazis. Merridale (Contemporary History/Univ. of London; Night of Stone, 2001) has rescued this legendary generation of Soviet soldiers from history's black hole-a remarkable achievement, given government censorship and citizens' desire to forget the horrors of WWII combat and civilian atrocities. Ivan and Ivana (women served on the Eastern front, too) matched America's "greatest generation" in hardships endured and sacrifices made. The Soviet army began the war under significant disadvantages. It was virtually devoid of commanders (purged by Stalin), its rank-and-file were untrained and it was caught completely off-guard by the Nazis' "Operation Barbarossa" in June 1941. Merridale carefully traces the successive responses of soldiers reeling from overwhelming blows: initial "tank panic" in the face of Nazi might, desertions, the grim realization that they faced a war of annihilation and growing self-confidence. Newly opened archives; recently discovered secret diaries and letters; and interviews with more than 200 veterans enable Merridale to narrate in gripping detail the epic tank battle of Kursk, the siege of Stalingrad and the unexpectedly bloody final drive to Berlin. She poignantly tallies the scars left on the Soviet soul by the carnage. The Red Army suffered eight million deaths, its losses exceeding the German army's by more than three to one. Revolted by the damage the Nazis inflicted on their families and communities, chafing under political operatives in their midst, Soviet soldiers engaged in their own orgies oflooting and rape as they pushed into Germany. In other ways, however, the ordinary soldier was positively transformed by the war. Merridale notes that Ivan grew more sophisticated through contact with foreigners and more hopeful that peace and brotherhood would result from the Soviets' sufferings. Revealing history that renders the struggles on the Eastern Front in telling detail and with searching moral scrutiny.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0312426526
  
• ISBN-13: 9780312426521
• Format: Paperback, 480pp
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Pub. Date: January 2007
• Edition Description: Reprint
• Sales Rank: 131,646

• Table of Contents
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Table of Contents

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     It was Kamenshchikov’s wife who woke him.
     Perhaps it was her inexperience, she said, but she had never heard so many planes flying above the town at night. Her husband assured her that what she was hearing were maneuvers. There had been lots of exercises lately. All the same he threw a coat over his shoulders and stepped outside to take a closer look. He knew at once that this was real war. The very air was different; humming, shattered, thick with sour black smoke. The town’s main railway line was picked out by a rope of flame. Even the horizon had begun to redden, but its glow, to the west, was not the approaching dawn. Acting without orders, Kamenshchikov went to the airfield and took a plane up to meet the invaders at once, which is why, exceptionally among the hundreds of machines that were parked in neat formations as usual that night, his was brought down over the Bialystok marshes, and not destroyed on the ground. By mid-day on June 22, the Soviets had lost 1,200 planes. In Kamenshchikov’s own western district alone, 528 had been blown up like fairground targets by the German guns.

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Ivan's War

Metropolitan Books

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