Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945

Very Good

Well written with new historical information, not many first hand accounts but, a good read none the less ......RjP

A reviewer

Ivan's War digs deep into the personal accounts of the eastern front during WWII. Merridale highlights many of the facts she discovered once the Russian archives were opened during the 1990s. A must read for any history buff interested in WWII or the USSR

Ivan's War- A review

This is not the usual military history reference or textbook. This is a very well written book on the soldiers of the Red Army, how they lived and unfortunately how they suffered and died en masse.Now that the archives in Russia are open for study, this author delved into the lives, such as they were, of the simple trooper and the junior grade officers of the Red Army. The book can not help but show the brutal, inhuman killer regime headed by Stalin. This figure does not come through as a pathological killer obsessed by racial fantasies like Hitler. Stalin comes through as eminently sane dictator who uses mass killing simply as a tool, somewhat like a carpenter uses the hammer and with about as much emotion. Whether the Politruks eliminate the dissenters and deserters or whether the Stavka orders headlong suicidal charges into German machine guns and artillery barrages we can see how the Soviet government holds life cheap. Eight million military deaths most of them preventable by good leadership and training would be unthinkable in any society except Soviet Communism.This book provides those insights and it presents the thoughtful reader with but one question: What took this system so long to fall? I gave it four stars instead of five simply because there were minor factual errors and omissions.For example one of the most admired men in the defense of Stalingrad was General Rodimstev whose name is immortalized in the ruins of the tractor factory where the men about to die scratched the words 'Rodimstev's Guardsmen fought and died here for their motherland (rodina)'.He gets virtually no mention. Also the planning for the Stalingrad encirclement was done by Zhukov and Vassilevsky assisted by the best brain in the Stavka-General Antonov. Again no mention made. Rokossovsky is deservedly mentioned, but Romanenko and Chistyakov, the actual leaders of the pincers, are not. Minor ommissions but I knocked off a star, since this book competes with such five star masterpieces as Tuchmans 'Proud Tower' and Massie's 'Castles of Steel'

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