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

By Catherine Merridale

Book Overview

A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Arthur Goodzeit Prize
Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize

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 in the eastern front of World War II, 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 Soviet Union 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 restores to history the invisible millions who sacrificed the most to win the war.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312426526
• ISBN13: 9780312426521
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Picador
• Length: 462 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Impressive! The most complete work on the common Red Army soldier I have read.

What must be clear from the start is that this book is not an operational or staregic history of the Great Patriotic War but a magnificent attempt to shed light on the millions of anonymous Soviet soldiers who fought and died on the Eastern Front during World War II. Ms Merridale has the gift of a powerful prose and her research is astonishing in terms of depth and historical accuracy. Her story begins from the '30s decade, when the Soviet people were assured by Stalin that a future war would be fast, easy and of course victorious, only to be shocked with the Finnish experience in 1939. The author uses the most critical historical events of the Great Patriotic War (initial phase of Barbarossa, battle of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kerch, Kursk, operation "Bagration", invasion of Romania, battle of Berlin) as simple stepping stones in order to build her social history of the Red Army and she succeeds in a fine way. The amount of information is overwhelming and it will certainly change your views on the Red Army of the 1940s. This book is much more complete and wide in scope than any memoir of that period and is destined to be a classic on the subject. The attitude of many soldiers regarding the Stalinist regime is especially revealling as are the terrible fates of many innocent people labeled as "traitors". Ms Merridale has done also a terrific job analysing the brutal behavior of Red Army soldiers in Germany and their reactions after the excitement of battle and revenge had subsided. Highly recommended!

What does a Cog in the Machine of War Think?

Ivan. Fritz. GI Joe. Tommy Atkins. The prototypical, sterotypical, mythical soldier in the Russian, German, American, and British Army. Who was he, how did he make sense of war, and how did he see himself? Catherine Merridale introduces us to Ivan, the Russian Soldier, from 1939 to 1946, in the postwar, and in his most recent, veteran version. She adopts a roughly chronological approach. We see Ivan first in his pre-War version -- the child of the Revolution, a peasent mite in the Stalinist horror, the first of the New Soviet Men. Merridale adroitly describes the pre-war Soviet state and shows the incredible contradition between Soviet reality and Soviet propaganda. Then she shows us Ivan and how he sees the world and the German threat through the distorted lenses of Stalin's self deception and lack of preparation for war. When it hits the fan, pre-war Ivan dies in droves, often confused and unmotivated and lost -- and is replaced by an Ivan who is angered by the German atrocities and influenced by the Communist appeal for patriotism and sacrifice. Ivan becomes a soldier who has an ideological viewpoint and an eyes-on appreciation for the cost of war to Russia. This mid-war Ivan is also squandered in unimaginable numbers. Ivan morphs into a combat veteran, motivated by the myth of life back home, by unit cohesion, by raw fear of the NKVD at his rear, and by a belief that the sacrifice he makes must have a compelling meaning. He learns and adapts and assumes power that contradicts and threatens Soviet expectations. He makes accomodations and takes risks that acknowledge the precariousness of his life. The triumphant Ivan, exposed to the riches of conquered countries, indoctrinated in revenge, and hardened in the forge of war, descends upon his enemy to ravage his women and his possessions and his way of life. He begins to accomodate the conflict between what he has become and what the Soviet state asks of him. The Ivan who returns home, betrayed by Stalin for his ethnicity or his nationality or his experiences, must reconcile the belief that he fought in a noble cause for great purposes with the knowledge that he had become a pawn for the latest Communist version of reality. What Merridale does, and does so very well, is take us into the mind of these Ivans and let them tell us why they fought and how they saw themselves. This is not a book of campaigns or equipment or tables of battle -- it is a book that examines the universal human experience of war, of life and of death, throught the specific eyes of Ivan, the Russian soldier. She provides us enough historical and sociological background to illuminate Ivan. She quotes enough excerpts from letters and from interviews to let us eavesdrop on Ivan. She shows us that Ivan, the Russian peasant, is a different character than Ivan, the Estonian conscript -- but she relentlessly focuses on the Russian Ivan as the soul of the Soviet Army. I agree that she does not cover all of t

An excellent social history of the wartime Red Army

Merridale has written an excellent social history of the Red Army and why Russian soldiers continued to fight throughout the war. Merridale believes that songs about missing loved ones,a personal faith in God, and a belief that Stalin's Russia would change after the war contributed to the fighting spirit of the Red Army soldier. Merridale also describes vividly the hell of the battle of Kerch in which thousands of Russian soldiers suffocated to death and Kursk in which tank crewmen suffered serious burns to their bodies. Merridale also writes about how these soldiers missed and distrusted their wives and this sense of sexual frustration ultimately contributed to the raping of Berlin in 1945. The only weakness of Merridale's book is that she leaves out the works by Dale Herspring which detail how commissars kept alive the morale of Russian soldiers and skims over the works by Robert Thurston who states how the Red Army soldier fought the war for ideological purposes. Despite these flaws this an important contribution to the study of the wartime Red Army.