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

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Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (eBook - First Edition) Pub. Date: 4/1/2007 Publisher: Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.

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Ivan's War: The Red Army at War 1939-45 (eBook) Pub. Date: 3/17/2011 Publisher: Faber and Faber
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Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (First Edition) Pub. Date: 1/23/2007 Publisher: Picador
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Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 Pub. Date: 1/24/2006 Publisher: Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.

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Overview

They died in vast numbers, eight million men and women driven forward in suicidal charges, shattered by German shells and tanks. They were the soldiers of the Red Army, an exhausted mass of recruits who confronted Europe's most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. For sixty years, their experiences were suppressed, replaced by patriotic propaganda. We know how the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, how they saw the world, or why they fought. In this ambitious, revelatory history, Catherine Merridale uncovers the harrowing story of who these soldiers were, and how they lived and died during the war.

Editorial Reviews

William Grimes

Ivan's War combines, quite effectively, painstaking historical reconstruction and sympathetic projection. Ms. Merridale, proceeding from campaign to campaign, describes from the top down and from the bottom up. She provides a coherent picture of the tactical decisions and industrial adjustments that altered the course of the war, and at the same time focuses on how such changes were reflected in the day-to-day experiences and feelings of the troops on the ground.
— The New York Times

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From The Critics

Thirty million men and women served in the Red Army during WWII. Over eight million of them died. Living or dead, they have remained anonymous. This is partly due to the Soviet Union's policy of stressing the collective nature of its sacrifice and victory. It also reflects the continuing reluctance of most Soviet veterans to discuss their experiences-in sharp contrast to German survivors of the Eastern Front. Merridale, professor of history at the University of London, combines interviews, letters and diaries with research in previously closed official archives to present the first comprehensive portrait of the Red Army's fighters. She carefully details the soldiers' age and ethnic diversity, and she puts a human face on a fact demonstrated repeatedly by retired U.S. officer and Soviet military expert David Glantz: the Red Army learned from the experience of its near-collapse in 1941, and by 1945 its soldiers were more than a match for their Wehrmacht opponents. Most poignantly, Merridale reveals that frontline soldiers increasingly hoped their sacrifices would bring about postwar reform-"Communism with a human face." What they got instead was a Stalinist crackdown-and a long silence, broken now by this outstanding book. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780312426521
Publisher: Picador
Publication date: 1/23/2007
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 480
Sales rank: 323,338
Product dimensions: 5.44 (w) x 8.41 (h) x 0.85 (d)

Meet the Author

Catherine Merridale is the author of the critically acclaimed Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia. The professor of contemporary history at the University of London, she also writes for the London Review of Books, New Statesman, and the Independent.

Read an Excerpt

Ivan's War

Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945

By Merridale, Catherine

Metropolitan Books

Copyright © 2006 Merridale, Catherine
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0805074554

It was Kamenshchikov's wife who woke him.
Perhaps it was her inexperience, she said, but she had never heard so many planes flying above the town at night. Her husband assured her that what she was hearing were maneuvers. There had been lots of exercises lately. All the same he threw a coat over his shoulders and stepped outside to take a closer look. He knew at once that this was real war. The very air was different; humming, shattered, thick with sour black smoke. The town's main railway line was picked out by a rope of flame. Even the horizon had begun to redden, but its glow, to the west, was not the approaching dawn. Acting without orders, Kamenshchikov went to the airfield and took a plane up to meet the invaders at once, which is why, exceptionally among the hundreds of machines that were parked in neat formations as usual that night, his was brought down over the Bialystok marshes, and not destroyed on the ground. By mid-day on June 22, the Soviets had lost 1,200 planes. In Kamenshchikov's own western district alone, 528 had been blown up like fairground targets by the German guns.

Continues...

Excerpted from Ivan'sWar by Merridale, Catherine Copyright © 2006 by Merridale, Catherine. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

	Introduction : true war stories	1
1	Marching with revolutionary step	23
2	A fire through all the world	49
3	Disaster beats its wings	82
4	Black ways of war	116
5	Stone by stone	153
6	A land laid waste	187
7	May brotherhood be blessed	226
8	Exulting, grieving, and sweating blood	263
9	Despoil the corpse	299
10	Sheathe the old sword	336
11	And we remember all	372

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Anonymous

Posted April 23, 2008

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
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Anonymous

Posted May 24, 2006

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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