Saving Private Ivan: From What, Why, and How?

"The Soviet Union might have been waging a cold war with the United States for almost 40 years, but when [my] grandchildren play war games, Germany remains the enemy," Eduard Shevardnadze, then Soviet Foreign Minister, told a group of visitors in June 1990.¹ One could only wish that his audience had included more students of the Soviet domestic arena. Even as Soviet historiography begins to expand its chronological and thematic horizons, the Second World War seems destined to be the loser again, this time in the rush to the postwar era and Cold War studies. If dissertations-in-progress and conferences are any indicators, the trickle of publications on the postwar era is about to turn into a flood, with the prospects of making this era as dominant a theme in Soviet studies as the 1920s and then the 1930s were in previous scholarly generations. The expansion of historical interest and imagination into a period that until recently was still regarded as the domain of political scientists should be a reason to celebrate. There is only one snag: in the rush to the postwar era, the very event that gave it a name and a meaning – the war – is either marginalized or ignored altogether. By no means a comprehensive review of literature on the Soviet 1940s, this essay engages several recent studies that situate the war as a central theme in their deliberations and offer new venues for the study of the Soviet polity at this critical period and its immediate aftermath. (It should be noted that the essay does not cover one important arena, evacuation and life in the Soviet rear.) Private Ivan serves as a metaphor for the millions of ordinary citizens who endured and ultimately survived the cataclysm of war, an experience that became a watershed not only for the individual but also for the polity as a whole.

Private Ivan: the MIA of Soviet Historiography

The Second World War affected every Soviet individual, family, and community. The sheer magnitude of this unprecedented cataclysm touched all, whether at the front or in evacuation, anti-German resistance or collaboration. It is no surprise that participants from all walks of life set out to record their experience, and Soviet historians responded in kind by producing many memoirs and histories. One community, however, seemed determined to avoid the subject of the war: American students of Soviet history. Among the voluminous writings on the October Revolution, Civil War, the Great Transformation, Terror and the Cold War, the few social and political histories of the Soviet-German conflict reflected a reading of this event as an inexplicable intrusion on more important processes that shaped the Revolution and the Soviet polity.

This was not always the case. During the first postwar decade, students of the Soviet Union seemed well aware of the centrality of the war in Soviet politics and in the lives of Soviet citizens. Already in the first major study of the Soviet postwar polity, Julian Towster highlighted the impact of the recent war on the makeup of political and social institutions.² The study of the war and its consequences appeared to be off to a promising start, with Towster's work followed by several seminal monographs that have stood the test of time, and all written, not incidentally, by a now practically extinct school of political scientist-historians.³ The impact of the war and its emerging cult were too powerful to be ignored by scholars. Remarkably enough, however, they soon were. When the 50th anniversary of the war's end was commemorated in 1995, the dearth of publications by Western scholars about the Soviet theater stood in glaring contrast to the avalanche of monographs and memoirs on practically all other theaters of the war. This disparity was only magnified by the fact that some of the best of these few works were written by outsiders to the Soviet field, British specialists in German and European wartime history who do not even command any Slavic languages.

An effort to recover the war as a central theme in Soviet history requires an inquiry into the...