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

Catherine Merridale (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312426526 | ISBN-13: 978-0312426521 | Publication Date: January 23, 2007

They died in vast numbers, eight million men and women driven forward in suicidal charges, shattered by German shells and tanks. They were the soldiers of the Red Army, an exhausted mass of recruits who confronted Europe's most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. For sixty years, their experiences were suppressed, replaced by patriotic propaganda. We know how the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, how they saw the world, or why they fought. In this ambitious, revelatory history, Catherine Merridale uncovers the harrowing story of who these soldiers were, and how they lived and died during the war.

Editorial Reviews

From 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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Doing research in the Soviet archives seems like a trying task, but critics revere the work Catherine Merridale did to prepare Ivan's War. The professor from Queen Mary, University of London, conducted over 200 interviews with Soviet veterans and visited major battle sites, but the most enlightening information came from tireless vetting of diaries, transcripts, and officers' reports. That Merridale can plait all this information into "an attempt to fathom war's meaning, effect and legacy" (Foreign Affairs) proves her acuity as a social historian, a skill she displayed previously with the admirable Night of Stone (2002). Only a curious absence of maps mars an otherwise compelling testament to these tragic, unsung warriors.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 462 pages
• Publisher: Picador (January 23, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312426526
• ISBN-13: 978-0312426521
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (63 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #34,378 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #47 in Books > History > Asia > Russia

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Good Start, but sluggish ending for this `Social' History, March 28, 2006

By 

R. A Forczyk (MD, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (Hardcover)

Catherine Merridale, a professor of contemporary history at the University of London, has written a nuanced social history of the Soviet soldier in the Second World in Ivan's War. This volume is not a military history and readers expecting such will be disappointed, but Merridale does offer an insightful glance into the soul of "Ivan" - the "G.I. Joe" of the Red Army. Overall, Ivan's War does provide context that is often lacking in other works about the East Front and this is a worthy effort, although the results that Merridale does achieve are open to debate. The main idea that Merridale's work conveys is that the sacrifices made by both the Soviet soldiers and citizens were betrayed by a Stalinist regime that saw them as only "little cogs in a machine." In the end, thanks to Ivan's tenacity, Merridale writes, "the motherland was never conquered" by the fascists but it had been enslaved by its own communist leaders.


The driving concept between this type of approach to history is to use oral accounts from veterans to add texture to broad themes that the author can then develop. To be honest, Merridale does not seem to have much flair for oral history and too many of her accounts are rather tepid. I get the impression that the Soviet vets either didn't want to talk to her since she was a foreigner - she hints at this - and those men she did interview were not the most desirable subjects. Given the availability of better Soviet accounts that have appeared since the fall of Communism, I find it hard to believe that Merridale could not have gotten some better material. Readers should note that Merridale's examination of "Ivan" is far from comprehensive - not only are there no accounts from the Red Air Force or Navy, but important branches such as artillery and cavalry are all but ignored. One need only go to "the Russian Battlefield" website to find dozens of veterans accounts, sorted by branch, that provide better detail than the accounts offered in Ivan's War. It is also odd that Merridale rarely mentions specific Soviet army units, even though Soviet vets are often proud of having served in this or that unit.


It is clear that Merridale has researched Soviet archives carefully. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that she knows how to use much of the information that she has gathered. For example, on page 215 she writes that 310,000 Soviet tankers were killed in the war out 403,000 trained, which seems like 76% fatalities. However, when I checked the footnoted source I realized that these numbers referred to only the period 1943-45 and also included personnel from mechanized units. Readers should treat her facts and figures with some circumspection.


Overall, the first two-thirds of the book, which covers the pre-war period up to 1944 is fairly interesting and well-written. This part of the book is quite enjoyable. Unfortunately, the last one-third of the book covers the period 1945 up to the current day and seems interminable. Somehow, the author's description of how Russian women wanted to marry wounded veterans for their pensions seems neither unique to the USSR or pertinent to life in the Red Army in 1939-45. In the last 70-80 pages or so the author appears to be wandering, having lost her focus once she passes VE Day.

37 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars When memory fails, February 25, 2006

By 

A Reader (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (Hardcover)

This is a great book; it's been well-reviewed both in the press and here on Amazon.

However, the reviews have failed to mention what I found to be one of the most important features of the book: The significant lacunae in the historical record of the Red Army. Merridale shows how completely the historical reality of the Red Army experience has been replaced by the state-sanctioned mythology. Merridale describes sorting through the archives, sealed for sixty years, and finding that even the confidential reports by the internal Party spies are filled with bland pious generalities. Even as they were fighting and dying, the Army was selectively editing its official memory, removing any evidence of venality, cowardice, war crimes, insubordination and so on.

More disturbingly, the veterans Merridale interviews have edited their own memories, often describing scenes from propaganda movies as if they actually experienced them first-hand. Merridale's sympathetic treatment of the veterans' accounts makes this crime against memory all the more disturbing. In fact, Merridale's most vivid primary sources are the letters and diaries of front-line soldiers (most of whom were killed in action), preserved by grieving families.

In an odd way, Merridale's book is the perfect complement to a political-theoretical book like Hannah Arendt's "Totalitarianism". Arendt describes how the totalitarian state can control every aspect of human existence. Merridale shows that this control extended even to the chaos and relative freedom of the front line.

46 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent social history of the wartime Red Army, February 7, 2006

By 

1. "John Henninger" (Littleton, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (Hardcover)

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.