Customer Reviews

Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (Vintage)

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I have read at least 50 books on the German Russian War---the major component of World War Two in Europe. My first novel, An Honorable German, a World War Two saga told from the point of view of a German UBoat commander, will be published in May. In order to write a novel told in a convincing way from the German POV, I spent 25 years reading German history. I say this to demonstrate my competence to write this review.

First and foremost: if you are looking for a superb general history of the Ost Krieg as seen by the Russians, then buy and read this book. There was a brief window in the the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union when scholars such as the author( whom I do not know) had access to previously top secret information about Russia in World War Two. Putin shut this window and much of this information was reclassified. Professor Bellamy scrambled through this window of opportunity and did an amazing amount of original research from the original battle reports, NKVD reports sent to Stalin, records of discussions of the Stavka, etc. Because he was able to examine unredacted material, indeed the actual reports which Stalin had held in his own hands, Dr. Bellamy was able to shatter certain myths of this period---the most hallowed being the tale of Stalin panicking and retreating to his dacha and staying incummnicado for a week till the Politburo begged him to come back and lead the nation. Piece by piece Professor Bellamy takes apart this myth based on the actual communications in their original between Stalin and the key members of the Politburo. I use this as an example to show how carefully he did his homework and in doing so swept away a number of myths people have accepted for decades. Second, Professor Bellamy pauses on a regular basis and specifically cites the verified casualties on each side, how those numbers affected the belligerants within the specific context of that time of the war and then shows the Allied figures for the same period. Anyone who has read deeply into the literature of WW II in Europe knows that in my phrase, "the Americans did the supplying and the Russians did the dying." While many scholars point this out they do it in an unconvincing way because they cannot bear to let go of the cherished myth that the Allied landing on D-Day was the turning point of the war, which is patently absurb. The Normandy landings were a side show compared to what was happening in the East. Two weeks after Normandy the Russians literally destroyed most of Army Group Center in four days---27 German divisions and various corps HQs simply vanished. Over 300,000 men gone--not accounted for to this day.

Dr. Bellamy is very, very clear on this point: World War Two in Europe was won in the East. By showing the verified statistics and expalining them in detail and comparing them to the other powers, he demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Ost Front was the decisive theatre of the war in Europe. He further points out that as terrible and ruthless and bloodthirsty Stalin and his men were, they did win the war and for political reasons we in the West have never wanted to acknowledge the sacrifice the Soviets made.

Another especially interesting part of this history is the personal interplay between the major figures on the Russian side. Because of his research, he is able to really show how these personalities functioned together and often made horrendous mistakes due to juvenile vanity.

A far more nuanced portrait of Stalin also emerges. Stalin was as evil a human being who ever walked the planet. It is almost as if the devil himself had spawned Stalin. But he was a human being with his own emotions---which is the most frigntening thing since Stalin demonstrates the evil humans are capable of. But the author reaches through this record of evil and extracts the actual decisions Stalin himself made at critical times and how critical those decisions were to both Soviet victory and soviet losses. Being able to see Stalin up close working with his cabinet so to speak one sees a man who, reluctantly, begins to listen more and more to what he is being told and act on verified information and not fantasy. Using Stalin's personal office diary which notes who saw him and when, the author is able to correct a number of scholars and participants about who met with Stalin and when and what was decided.

Perhaps the most original contribution in this book to the history of the time is what a critical role the NKVD played in the war and how this was all thought out before hand. To win the war, Stalin had to stay in power and the population had to be both cowed and controlled. The author shows through numerous original documents exactly how the NKVD did this, how accurate their reports were, and how well organized and motivated they were. Without the tens of thousands of NKVD fighting units and undercover agents, Stalin simply could not have been able to harness the energy of the entire population to repell the germans.

This highly orignal examination of the NKVD and how it fit into the larger scheme is fascinating and no one else save Professor Bellamy has done it.

I will end by saying no histroy is perfect and there are certainly points I would contest with Professor Bellamy. However, given the originality of his work and given what Dr. Bellamy ferreted out and disclosed for the first time, I would rank him above all other historains of the war in the east and I would go so far as to say he is only one rung below Col. David Glantz who is the greatest historian of the Soviet struggle in World War Two.

This book, even at almost 700 pages of text, is a page turner. It is a superb, balanced history using recently opened sources from the former Soviet Union. Having read the memoirs of many of the German generals who fought during World War II, this book greatly helped to round out my understanding of the fighting on the Eastern Front. Not only is this book an outstanding military history, but it also deftly addresses key social, economic, and diplomatic issues. It is superb at explaining why the Soviets defeated the Nazis -- as opposed to books that focus on Hitler's mistakes. Having served as both an armor (tanks) officer and history professor while in the U.S. Army, I found this book to be invaluable.

This book aims to present the Second World War from the Soviet perspective by using documents from formerly closed Soviet archives and memoirs only recently published in their full length (ie those written by Zhukov and Rokossovsky, respectively).

While the non-Russian reader can only welcome such an attempt, Prof. Bellamy's book suffers from some major shortcomings, one of which is the apparent inability of its author to read German language sources. Some errors (German ambassador von der Schulenburg is misspelled as "Schulenberg" throughout the book) could have been avoided.

But the major shortcomings are in the material presented for the Soviet side. Bellamy avoids discussing the Soviet pre-war military strategy and doctrine in a separate chapter, even though he rightly writes about the entirely offensive deployment and strategy vis-à-vis Germany. When military strategy is discussed, however, he erroneously attributes the Soviet's doctrine on the eve of the war to Svechin ("Strategy") instead of to Vladimir Triandafillov ("The nature of operations of modern armies") and Isserson.

Another major topic that is missing in this book is the Soviet Order of battle on June 22, 1941. Strangely enough, the well known German Order of Battle is given in the book, but no details about the Soviet deployment along the German, Hungarian and Romanian border. This is a very disappointing fact, especially because one would have wanted to compare the striking similarities in the deployment of the opposing forces. For very detailed information about the Soviet Order of Battle I can only refer the reader to the detailed works of Charles Sharp and Craig Crofoot for the ground forces and to Christer Bergström's about the Soviet Air Forces.

Overall, this book is not bad, but full of missed opportunities.

This is an interesting book on the Second World War covering, and focusing, on the Eastern Front, largely from the Soviet perspective. The author, apparently a protege of the late John Ericson, is a university professor in England. Bellamy states, in the introduction to the book, that he's not going to try to cover the tactical aspects of the War in the East, largely because he thinks others have covered this ground pretty well. Instead, the author decides to concentrate on other aspects of the conflict, discussing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the state of the Army on the brink of the war, the various plans the Soviets had in 1941 and whether any of them involved attacking Germany, and other aspects he feels haven't been covered enough, or correctly.

The book does spend a lot of time discussing the operational, and especially strategic aspects of the war, but the author avoids discussing tactics pretty much at all. He also spends a lot of time discussing the first year and a half of the war, up until Stalingrad. He takes the position that the Soviets were more precarious politically, and economically, in 1942 than is generally realized, and that they were very close to collapse when the Axis armies outside Stalingrad crumbled and left the Sixth Army encircled. It's an interesting point of view, anyway.

The book is written in a breezy, conversational style that seems to be stylish now with books that are supposed to be scholarly. I don't know how well this will work in a book half a century from now. Right now, it's kind of jarring but I will say the book reads relatively fast. It does suffer from some annoying typos (Kluge giving way to himself as Army commander, Field Marshal "Kodl", and so forth) and the grammar is frankly odd, with incomplete sentences abounding in odd places. This is tough to read (for me anyway) because you don't know if you should be looking for a verb when you read a sentence. The book could have benefited from a strong editor, overseeing the way the prose was constructed and acting as a brake on the author's preference for fragmented sentences.

I generally enjoyed this book. I found much of the information interesting, and his arguments, while I didn't agree with everything he said, interesting. I would recommend this book to specialists, though of course you have to be aware of the shortcomings.

Absolute War is impressive (in size, if nothing else) -- but disappointing. This book is like the Russian military strategy it chronicles; it marshals vast numbers of facts and hurls them straight at you until you're bludgeoned into submission. It's a fine choice if you want a comprehensive timeline of the German-Russian front from 1941-1945, a catalog of all the battles, the code names of every attack and counteroffensive, and a down-to-the-last-corpse list of causalities.

But if you want a book that explains the war in human terms -- what it felt like to struggle at -40º in the icy Russian winter, or to fight in a partisan force behind enemy lines, or to be a terrified civilian caught in the steel maw of a German offensive -- keep looking. Other than a few, brief quoted letters, the "ordinary person" viewpoint is ignored. Absolute War's author, Chris Bellamy, sacrifices human drama for a surplus of details, and substitutes dry scholarship for storytelling flair.

The book has other flaws, too. First, it's sloppily edited, with information frequently repeated. One example: On page 278, Bellamy writes: "...by 1 November 1941, the Germans had lost 686,000 casualties, or one-fifth of the original Barbarossa force and all the replacements received since 22 June." On page 301, he writes: "By [October 30], the Wehrmacht had suffered 686,000 casualties -- one-fifth of the force that had launched its proud crusade in the small hours of 22 June, plus all the replacements sent since then." Yes, we got it the first time.

Second, the book contains much new information from archives unsealed after the fall of the Soviet empire. Unfortunately, Bellamy tends to focus on the new at the expense of the important. In one instance, he spends a full page debunking a "famous" Russian story about 28 heroic members of the "Panfilovtsy" rifle division who fought near Volokolamsk. Newly uncovered NKVD documents reveal the story to be fabricated. But the Panfilovtsy skirmish -- whether real or fake -- was an insignificant part of the war. WWII scholars may be impressed by the new information, but the typical reader won't care.

Third, Bellamy has a strange preoccupation with the Iraqi war. At least a half-dozen times he draws some labored comparison between the Russian front and the American invasion of Iraq. But except for some similarities between the anti-German partisan efforts and the Iraqi insurgency, the parallels are farfetched. A war between millions of soldiers and thousands of tanks on the frozen plains of Russia is as unlike a guerilla campaign waged with IEDs in the dusty heat of Iraq as you can imagine. I don't know if this is Bellamy's attempt to make the book more "relevant," but it's jarring and unnecessary.

Fourth, Bellamy displays a curious blindness about the horrors of the Soviet regime. While acknowledging in passing the deportations and arrests, the mass killings, and the suffocating blanket of surveillance, Bellamy writes that, after surviving WWII, the Soviet Union was a "very successful exponent of a new political and economic system." Yes, communism was "successful" -- if you overlook the estimated 93 million people slaughtered around the world by its adherents. Similarly, Bellamy obliquely praises the USSR's post-war occupation of Eastern Europe. He writes: "...the meticulous Soviet arrangements for 'state-building' and establishing security in the immediate wake of military conquest or reconquest -- for example, in Poland, the Baltic States and post-war Germany -- compare quite favorably, in terms of their organization and effectiveness, with recent efforts in Iraq." (There's Iraq again!) I can only hope that Poland and the Baltic nations appreciated the "meticulous" way the Soviet Union occupied their countries for decades, looted them for natural resources, and ruthlessly squashed all opposition. Which part of that Soviet strategy is the U.S. supposed to emulate?

Finally, the book is sometimes just odd. The best example is on page 430, when Bellamy recounts Winston Churchill's first visit to Moscow to meet Stalin. He writes: "Churchill had not known quite what to expect in the land of workers and peasants which was bearing the brunt of the war with Germany, so he brought some sandwiches." Thus, another crucial sandwich-related fact about WWII is documented. (I was just relieved that Bellamy didn't regale us with newly uncovered NKVD documents revealing what kind of sandwiches Churchill brought.)

The bottom line: If you're interested in the Eastern Front and you want plenty of numbers, maps, and charts, sloppy editing, quirky digressions, and irrelevant new information, then Absolute War is the book for you. But if you seek effective storytelling, a focus on essential information, an understanding of the human dimension of war, and a clear-eyed view of the Soviet Union, keep looking.

The author, who is the leading British savant on the subject, wrote a history book which also is a disguised philosophical treatise. However it didn't quite work and after successful opening salvos, as Bellamy's focused becomes blurry and he slides into some obscure Russo-German war trivia and even conspiracy theories (was Stalin on the brink of attacking Hitler in 1941?) to cover up for the lack of a reliable theory. As a result, the book becomes unconvincing very quickly. If you persevere through all 700 pages, you will likely end up as puzzled as the author himself.

The theoretical underpinnings of the book are shaky. The most important problem - he desperately wants to have a firm philosophical-ideological framework into which he wishes to tidily slide in all the facts. Mr. Bellamy also wants to be even-handed, without taking sides. To me he sounds like someone who isn't convinced either way and as a result unconvincing. Mr. Bellamy relies on the "absolute war" theory by Carl von Clausewitz. He makes a claim that the Russo-German was "absolute". Hence is the title of the book. I think this is too simple. Clausewitz thought that the Absolute war was a virtual ideal, not a practical reality. Absolute war is impossible, because it's a pure war where only purpose is to crash the will of your opponent and subjugate it to your own will. But it's impossible because in reality the struggle of two wills always got mixed up with moral principles, political goals, and even irrational factors. We get "real" war.

I have very serious doubts that the Russo-German war COULD even be explained in terms coined by Clausewitz. In any event, the Hitler's war against Russia wasn't "absolute" a la Clausewitz. Actually it was an opposite. The Fuhrer didn't care about clashing his will with the Russians. It was the "war of annihilation" - a brutal neo-colonial war, with the new colonial Empire in the East completely cleared of the natives (like one clears an apartment from cockroaches).

Hitler and his entourage of like-minded home-grown Ubermenchen thought that the Russians were inferior creatures, like rabbits or cockroaches. Does one clash wills with them? The Russians didn't suppose to have will or power to resist the invincible Wehrmacht.

That is why the German army was prepared only for a light war, a cakewalk. The Soviet resistance was a big surprise. Germany's screeching dive bombers and humming panzers were supposed to paralyze the Russians like rabbits in the headlights. Hitler went to war gladly. He did it because he thought he could very easily win it. He and his generals believed that the Soviet Union was "ripe for dissolution". Bellamy is on the wrong track resurrecting some moth-eaten idiotic ideas about Hitler wanting to deliver a "preemptive" strike at Russia.

Bellamy annoyingly calls it "the war on the eastern front", albeit the book is supposedly an account of the war from the Russian point of view.

His conclusion is paradoxical - he believes that Russia won because of the "draconian measures imposed by Stalin" and Beria's NKVD. He appears to think that the German army organization was better, industry was better; the Soviets prevailed because of the security apparatus. I think he needed to ask more questions. Wasn't the Soviet Union, as Sir Halford Mackinder wrote, ranked among the greatest land powers on the globe and it was the power "in the strategically strongest DEFENCIVE position"? The Soviet Union, the Heartland in a strategic sense, was a vast natural fortress with a garrison adequate to deny entry any invader. What did the Germans have, except the Blitzkrieg tactics and racist claptrap, to counter that? Even with successful Blitzkrieg in the long run - nothing, especially if the garrison was consistent, resolute and tenacious. Add to that help form the Allies...

The Russians were actually savvy. They had built powerful vertically-integrated factories in the Ural Mountains BEFORE the war using Detroit as a model. In these factories they built tanks and planes which were 3-4 times cheaper to produce than the German equivalents. In 1942 (while most of the European Russia still occupied) they produced 27,000 tanks, while the Germany produced 5,000. These figures tell the story. Did Germans know about the giant factories? If not, why not? The author doesn't seem to ask the questions. For example, why the Germans had such a terrible intelligence on Russia? Why the Russians ultimately out-produced and out-fought the Germans? He seems to me stuck in some philosophical conundrum, in his hart of harts believing, I think, that Russians should have lost the war. I think he is on the wrong track. If he had carefully read the American authors Walter Dunn or David Glantz, I think, it would have put him on the right track. The newest is not necessarily the best. I am standing by my favorites - the classic "Barbarossa" by a gifted amateur (and later, British politician and a Member of Parliament) Alan Clark and "When Titans Clashed" by Glantz and House.

Chris Bellamy's 'Absolute War' truly fills up a big 'white spot' in our knowledge of the Hitler/Stalin-conflict from 1941-'45: the workings of the Soviet-Russian leadership.

Up to now, we always had to deduct from German sources what happened at the other side of the front. Recently granted access to Russian archives doesn't make this necessary anymore.

I'll provide just one example: during the period from June 22 up to July 3, 1941, Stalin kept silent. Up to now, we always assumed that Stalin needed this period to recover mentally from his error in underestimating Hitler's determination to wipe out his Soviet-rule. Mr. Bellamy shows us quite the contrary: Stalin used these days to convert the Soviet-Russian society into a complete war-economy.

By the way, the Hitler/Stalin-conflict from 1941-'45 is that immense, that any writer cannot avoid to make a selection. As I pointed out above, Mr. Bellamy's choice is a very happy one.

I have about 80 pages left (it's 680 long!) to go, and I've thoroughly enjoyed the book. Please bear in mind that this is not so much a book on the movements and battles of divisions, corps, Army Groups, etc. as some readers would like. There is some of that, along with some decent maps, but don't buy the book for that. This book is sort of the complement of a David Glantz book. While a Glantz book is strictly troop movements and operational strategy, Absolute War is everything else. Heavily covered topics are: the strange Alliance between Soviet Union and the West, including how much did the West's material really help; the role of Soviet women in the war; the Non-Aggression Pact between Germany&Soviet Union, and the partion of Poland; the role of partisans; etc. These are the types of topics (and there are many more) that are dealt with here, that perhaps have not been dealt with enough before. The author also has relied on the newer material released from Soviet archives. All in all, even though I'm usually read the Glantz-type books, I am really enjoying this book, and I give it the thumbs up for any military reader.

I enjoyed this book immensely. It was very well written and had no major errors that I am aware of. It was also very liberally supplied with fairly clear and lucid maps. In fact, this is the best mapped book I've read in quite some time. Another thing I really liked about the book was Bellamy's analysis. He describes the events, then lays out what he thinks they mean. For example, his analysis of Lend-Lease is that it had very little effect in 1941, and only small effect in 1942, but that small effect might have been the margin of Soviet Survival. Another example is his chapter on the costs of the war, he believes the cost of defeating the Germans and necessity of rebuilding put the Soviets in an economic hole they never managed to crawl out of. This economic hole, combined with the escalating cost of the arms race with the West, doomed the Soviet system.

There are one or two things prospective readers might want to know. First, the book is heavily focused on the first two years of the war. 1941 and 1942 are covered in quite a lot of detail. Coverage of 1943 is detailed, but not to the level of 41 and 42, and only up to Kursk in July. Pretty much everything after Kursk is dumped into one or two chapters, with the exception of the campaign for Berlin which is also covered in some detail. The other thing to know is this book really focuses on the 10,000 ft view. There is very little "man on the ground" stuff where "Sgt Pavlovitch grabbed his tommygun and charged the German trench" sort of stuff.

I recommend this book for pretty much anyone interested in a new look at the Eastern Front in WWII.

The author begins with an extended introduction that expands seven chapters and include demographics, concept of absolute war, the relations of Germany and Russia since the early 1920s. He is also provides some comparisons between Hitler and Stalin. The story then moves up to late 1930s when Hitler steps up his aggressive ways. France, Great Britain and Russia discuss an alliance but it falls through. Munich 1938, the Soviet war on Finland and Baltic occupation are discussed as is the Russo-German peace agreement just prior to the Polish invasion. This is just a small sampling; the prewar coverage is fairly extensive and quite good. Anybody reading about the war for the first time will have a good foundation of the prewar essentials.

After the conquest of Poland, a further discussion is made on Stalin's preparations for the inevitable war with Hitler. Much emphasis is given to troop deployments along the the border. The planning of Operation Barbarossa is discussed as well. Almost a whole chapter is devoted to the theory that Stalin was preparing a preemptive war with Germany and Eastern Europe. The author acknowledges the avalanche of pundits who claim the idea of a preemptive war against Germany is nonsense but this appears this to be a favorite topic of the author and plays devil advocate. Using circumstantial evidence from speeches, diary entries, other essays like "Icebreaker" plus knowing Stalin's aggressive nature, the author believes Stalin was probably planning to attack Hitler not in 1941 but in the summer of 1942 when he would have more tanks and his troops would be better prepared. It was an interesting exercise. Later in the book, a discussion of the detour to Kiev in 1941 before moving on Moscow was presented; also the debate of stopping for the winter in early November 1941 or continuing the assault on the capital was also given.

Though both sides were discussed throughout the book, this overview was clearly Russian oriented.
For a general history book, the author provides good tactical overview of: Brest Citadel, Minsk, Smolensk, Uman, Kiev, Vyazma, Bryansk, Moscow, Leningrad, Operation Blue, Stalingrad, Rzhev, Caucasus, Kursk, Dnepr River Offensive, Operation Bagration, Budapest and Berlin. The tactical is improved by the insertion of anecdotal experiences. This coverage was further improved by the addition of many related but obscure facts. I found these little known facts interesting and something that experienced people who are looking for new information would probably also appreciate. It's also a sign that the author actually scoured the archives of primary sources that are listed in his Bibliography. (I noticed the works of John Erickson and David Glantz are two favorite sources for Mr Bellamy.)

The author has a special interest in the first two years of the war for it appears the poor results to be a product of Stalin's interference with the military, the purges, Russia's War Doctrine etc and it was at the end of this period that the Russians started to improve their War Doctrine. The author will spend a lot of his time in this period while thinning out his coverage of the last two years. This slackening of this later coverage could be a negative for some but he is not the first author to do this. The events up to Kursk are well covered.
Also included are 72 large scale maps, some are double page size. They're good and should be helpful to most. The over 50 photos and illustrations were also good.

While I've given the positive side to this book, there are also some small negatives to explain. There are several typos and once the author was referring to von Bock but called him Kluge. Another time the author was referring to Manstein but said Guderian. Also, the author doesn't provide and Order of Battle for the Red Army. This is surprising when you consider the author's predilection for Russia. These miscues are unfortunate but the vast majority of the book is solid.
I know some of the reviewers were critical of this book and its source documents but I liked the book. It will make a nice reference. For a single volume general history of the war, the book is good and anybody looking for that level of detail should consider it.