Red Warriors

Let me put my cards on the table at the outset. Catherine Merridale's study of the Soviet army during World War Two is a tour de force. In one sense it is embellishing a story that has already been extensively chronicled, even in English. In a field that might seem glutted, especially after the relatively recent appearance of Richard Overy's large-scale study and Anthony Beevor's two books on Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin,¹ Merridale has managed to produce something quite new: an accessible and gripping military history of the USSR's struggle with Nazi Germany and a study of how the 'ordinary soldier' experienced it. She is confident enough in her professional standing to make extensive use of secondary sources (in a way that most Ph.D. students, I suspect, would be frightened to do), but what gives the book its unique quality is the way she weaves together a vast array of primary sources culled from archives, published document collections, unpublished and published diaries and memoirs, and around 200 interviews. One of the book's novel aspects is that she traces the experiences of roughly half-a-dozen individuals from the beginning of the war to its very end. In some cases these people left diaries which were either published or held in the archives. In other cases their letters to their families have been preserved. In a few others they wrote memoirs whose accuracy Merridale – who otherwise intrinsically distrusts memoir material – credits sufficiently to use them as a source. This gives the book a special flavour. For while she is describing the great battles and campaigns, she is able to enrich the picture with the accounts, the thoughts, and the reactions of participants.

Those whose parents or grandparents fought on the Western front, or even in the Pacific, and who have listened to tales of combat, daily life on the home front, or imprisonment as POWs, might think they are on familiar territory here. They are not. What my own father, for example, experienced in combat in France, Belgium, and Germany, or when tending the sick in just-liberated Nazi concentration camps, simply bears no comparison with what combat was like on the Soviet side. British, Canadian, and US soldiers had ample supplies of food, proper uniforms, adequate transportation, and weapons that worked. They may have lived in relative squalor, but it would have been a squalor that they could put up with, at least for a while. Red Army soldiers lived for years in woods and fields in incredible filth, battling with rats, lice, bitter cold and damp, and going into battle with inadequate supplies of often obsolete weapons and ammunition. Thanks in large part to American Lend Lease the quantity and quality of the weaponry eventually improved, as did the food, the uniforms, and the boots, but the levels of human misery would have been incomprehensible to a British or North American soldier. If we are looking for a point of comparison it might be the trenches of the First World War, not the Second, although I suspect even this would not really suffice. Levels of casualties were also on a different plane. We think of the Battle of the Somme as the epitome of carnage, when 20,000 British soldiers died on the first day. Soviet dead, by contrast, routinely numbered in the hundreds of thousands in battle after battle after battle. Units were continuously decimated, reformed, and decimated again.

The same was true on the home front. In Britain people tightened their belts by eating baked beans and an occasional egg. In the Soviet Union they starved. Merridale describes a government leaflet she found in the archives telling people how to cook nettles. This is not the worst of it. Most Westerners know of the starvation deaths in besieged Leningrad, but what is less well known, perhaps to a certain extent even by Merridale herself, is that millions more people starved to...