And Their Mothers Wept: The Great Fatherland War in Soviet and Post Soviet Russian Literature (review)

One of the most profound tragedies in modern historiography has been the longstanding absence of an accurate and unbiased study of what actually occurred on Germany’s Eastern Front, the most extensive, complex, and brutal theater of military operations during World War II. For more than sixty years after war’s end, the Soviet Union, arguably the most important participant in the Allies’ ground war against Hitler’s Germany, cloaked its military in a dense veil of secrecy in the name of state security and to protect the reputation of its Red Army and its senior commanders. Fortunately, this tragedy ended in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell. Since this time, in the name of truth and objectivity, its successor, the Russian Federation, has begun releasing the fetters on their military archives, thus permitting historians in the East and the West to describe the war with greater candor and accuracy.

This new wave of historical “glasnost’” [publicity, implying clarity] has produced tens of fresh studies investigating virtually every dimension of the war with unprecedented accuracy. Collectively, in addition to dispelling the war’s mysteries and refuting its myths, these archival releases and the books derived from them promise to revolutionize our understanding of the Soviet Union’s role in the world war, in general, and the conduct of its self-styled Great Fatherland War, in particular, in a process that is likely to extend far into the future.

Unlike most new histories, which address primarily military themes, Frank Ellis’s And Their Mothers Wept, stands at the forefront of a new genre—history with a human face—which describes the everyday lives of Red Army soldiers and Soviet citizens as they endured the terrible privations of total war. Like Catherine Merridale’s book, Ivan’s War, which describes life and death throughout the war from the perspective of common Red Army soldiers, and Antony Beevor’s twin studies, Stalingrad and Berlin, which convey the same images, albeit in narrower context, Ellis’s new book is social history at its best.

Exploiting the vast Soviet and Russian literature on the war, juxtaposed against a broad range of hitherto unobtainable archival sources, Ellis shapes an elaborate and entirely credible mosaic of warfare from the human perspective. Eschewing a chronological approach, the author studies the human side of the war topically, beginning with an exhaustive survey of Soviet wartime literature, then turning to works written by veterans and soldiers’ declassified letters, and finally by analyzing the work of wartime journalists and Russia’s finest war novelists. Understanding, however, that context shapes and often warps content, Ellis wisely adds two chapters containing declassified NKVD reports on Red Army discipline and morale, in this case, associated with the battle for Stalingrad. As a fillip to this fine book, Ellis includes appendices with verbatim translations of the Soviet Union’s infamous disciplinary Orders Nos. 270 and 227 (“Not a Step Back!) of August 1941 and July 1942, together with materials on the infamous counterintelligence organ SMERSH (Death to Spies) and Stalin’s employment of blocking detachments (to prevent unauthorized retreat) and penal units.

This poignant but justifiably raw exposé goes a long way toward lifting the veil from the human dimension of combat in the most brutal theater of what was arguably the most terrible of the Twentieth Century’s wars. It is a “must read” for those interested in the Soviet-German War, in particular, and World War II and military history, in general.