Stalinism at War

Robert W. Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch, eds. The People's War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union. Urbana, IL and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 275 pp. + x. ISBN 0-252-02600-4. $39.95.

Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, paper edition 2002. 416 pp. + xv. ISBN 0-691-05702-8 (cloth); 0-691-09543-4 (paper). $49.50 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Nazism was vanquished by the Red Army. The Eastern Front in World War II was by any measure -- scale, intensity, brutality -- the decisive theater in the struggle against Nazism in power. It has rightly been called the "war of the century." ¹ Soviet victory came at a terrible price: 26.6 million Soviet dead. ² The "Great Patriotic War," as Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov declared it in June 1941, has been a forgotten Holocaust in the West, the consequence of 40 years of Cold War reinforced by the demise of the Soviet Union. Yet it left an indelible imprint on post-war Soviet society, which has survived the demise of the USSR.

The Great Patriotic War was clearly a watershed in Soviet history. It forged the Soviet Union as nation-state rather than revolutionary citadel. During the Brezhnev years a "cult" of the war eclipsed the "Great October Socialist Revolution" itself as regime-legitimating mythology. ³ Yet the war years have been largely neglected in Western historiography on Stalinism. Even the most recent studies of the Stalin period generally stop short at the war. ⁴ This focus, as Amir Weiner has argued, undoubtedly reflects the view that the 1920s and 1930s were the "formative and enduring moments" for the Soviet Union. ⁵ The result has been that the war itself has been treated as an epilogue to the 1930s or a mere hiatus in the story of Stalinism.

Much of this recent scholarship, primarily social history based on newly accessible archives, has been devoted to the repressive relationship between Stalin's party-state and the Soviet populace in the 1930s. The most recent social history of Stalinism, focusing on the "subaltern strategies" by which in that decade ordinary people connived to thwart the authority of party and state, has generated what has been dubbed a new "resistance genre" in the Western historiography of Soviet society. ⁶ The net impression generated by these studies of everyday resistance to Stalinism in the 1930s is of a state with little or no social or political support, except perhaps for the vydvizhentsy -- the upwardly mobile beneficiaries of industrialization. By rights, such a state, abandoned by those it repressed -- such as, for instance, many Ukrainians initially did after the Nazi invasion -- should have collapsed with the German onslaught in 1941. Instead, it snatched victory from rout. The "resistance genre" of social history, focusing as it does on quotidian subversion of the coercive Stalinist state, cannot explain the ability of this same state to turn around the debacle of 1941-42, mobilize an armed populace in its defense, and ultimately prevail.

This extraordinary feat of Soviet arms confronts us with a paradox in Soviet state-society relations: massive mobilization in defense of a repressive state. How could Stalin's draconian state mobilize such large numbers of Soviet citizens who were willing to give everything in its defense?

Robert Thurston has quite rightly called the Great Patriotic War the "acid test of Stalinism." ⁷ Shifting our focus from the 1930s to the war years radically recasts the fundamental questions being asked about Stalinism and society. Identification with the state, rather than resistance to it, becomes the starting point for analysis. It is certainly the departure point for a collection of essays Thurston has edited with Bernd Bonwetsch, The People's War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union.

The editors introduce their book as an exploration...