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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Go to Communism!, May 15, 2008
We all know what happens when far-right fanatics get into power, and we couldn't avoid this knowledge if we wanted to. However, what happens when the extreme left jumps in the saddle is rarely discussed in any detail, perhaps because 90% of university professors in America label themselves as being "liberal or very liberal" in their political opinions, and are generally sympathetic to the iconic figures of communism (Che, Castro, Marx, etc.) if not to communism itself. You could take a course on Nazi Germany at my undergraduate alma mater, actually several of them, but there were no courses on Stalin or the history of applied communism. Perhaps because of this sympathy, and because it failed so catastrophically everywhere it reared its ugly head, the topic is smothered in silence.
Viktor Suvorov, who grew up under communism, has never kept silent on what it was like to live in a society operating under Marxist-Leninist philosophy. THE "LIBERATORS" is one of the earliest works by the controversial Suvorov, a former member of the Soviet GRU who defected to Britain during the height of the cold war. Like his better-known books, INSIDE THE SOVIET ARMY and AQUARIUM, it should be mandatory reading for anyone still clinging to romantic fantasies about communism, or for that matter, any middle-class college student who thinks wearing a Che t-shirt makes an intelligent political statement.
"THE LIBERATORS" is a rambling but hugely entertaining account of Suvorov's entry into, and life inside, the Soviet military during the early-mid-1960s, beginning with the story of how he obtained acceptance to a military academy and ending with his part in the 1968 "liberation" of Czechoslovakia by Soviet tanks. Although the point of view shifts frequently to others, occasionally taking on a novelistic format, it always returns to Suvorov, a Ukranian farmboy whose brutally cynical sense of humor was forged by a system whose unofficial anthem was: "This is our hammer and this is our sickle, these are our Soviet emblems; reap if you like and sew if you must, whatever you do you'll get [expletive]!"
Suvorov revels in exposing the Soviet leviathan as lumbering, corrupt, unspeakably cruel and yet almost comically inefficient - a year's supply of anti-magnetic paint is used up whitewashing rocks because an admiral wants an improved-looking coastline; thousands of tons of chemical fertilizer are dumped into the Volga River (creating an environmental catastrophe) because the Party didn't make adequate preparations to store it; military exercises are run which leave the country defenseless; soldiers are sentenced to barbarous punishments for the slightest infractions; generals keep private harems and use military resources to construct fabulous dachas; incompetent drunks are promoted to important posts simply to get rid of them. Nothing works, the bureacracy is suffocating, one has to bribe officials to get them to do their jobs and secret police stooges are everywhere, ignoring corruption and crime but mercilessly punishing political unorthodoxy. By the time Suvorov was a young lieutenant, he understood the Soviet habit of substituting the word "hell" with "communism." So you can imagine his feelings when, in the summer of '68, the Soviet army was sent to Czechoslovakia to crush the burgeoning democratic movement there. Expecting to be greeted as liberators, the naive Soviets were pelted with eggs, rocks and rotten tomatoes, cursed roundly and told to stop doing to Eastern Europe what they had done to their own country. That, and seeing how much better off Czechoslovakia was than Russia, was so psychologically devastating to the liberators that the Soviet government sent most of them to the Chinese frontier for the rest of their military service, lest they start asking too many unfortunate questions.
THE "LIBERATORS" is a half-tragic, half-comic book, one which shows the amusing and yet painful coming-to-consciousness of a young man who wakes up one day to discover that he is not a liberator but an inmate, and his country a prison. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who ever wondered what life was like behind the Iron Curtain, or what it would have been like for us had the "world revolution" taken place.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Only one, and not the most fascinating one, December 9, 2000
For those who think that russians are fools: you have been fooled yourselves. This book gives an insight in the life of a soldier in Soviet Army AFTER the WWII, but if you want to know why WWII started, and the interiors of Soviet politics before 1941, I recommend the following books by him: "The Icebreaker" "The Last Republic" ""M" Day" and several others.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very funny, excellent read., April 23, 2000
By A Customer
This is a facinating book on the Soviet Army, and a must read for military history buffs. While it is obviously out of date now, the stories are still hilarious and shows a facinating insight into how the Soviet Army worked, and most often, how it didn't work. It's amazing that the USSR survived as long as it did, which Suvorov's book details.
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by Viktor Suvorov
