I'd love to know who's reading, so if you have anything you'd like to add, or memories of your own, or if you just want to say "hello" back, then please feel free to leave a comment using the "anonymous" option - just make sure you remember to sign it! The deplorable behaviour of the Soviet soldier on German territory included widespread rape and looting. Somehow, they fought on. 462 pages. "The motherland was never conquered," Ms. Merridale mournfully concludes, "but it had enslaved itself. Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. Something like despair defined the period up to Stalingrad, as the Soviet Union gave up great swaths of territory and 45 percent of its population to the Germans. What is valuable here is Merridale's analysis of how war crimes of this order may result, when the State fails to manage the inevitable negative psychological and sociological stress of soldiers in wartime.
Unlike the Americans or the British, Russians fought on knowing that their wives and their parents and their children were in the hands of the enemy.
The euphoria of the victory over the Fascist regime was, indeed, for many soldiers very short. In the early months of the war, as the Germans advanced at will, mass desertions were commonplace. Rape and looting were thus tolerated and even encouraged by the Soviet authorities. There was, for instance, propaganda encouraging the men to give free rein to revenge and cruelty (the Political Officer and writer Ehrenburg played an important role in this campaign). The Soviet soldiers' conduct was thus arguably induced by the inhumane measures taken by the State. Yet Merridale's achievement is the way in which she brings the necessary empathy to the subject, whilst at the same time managing to keep the objective distance needed for an reliable historical analysis. The Soviet forces that met the Germans in June 1941 were poorly trained, poorly fed and poorly equipped. Not to mention what might happen when such stresses are politically abused, as in the propaganda campaign mentioned above.
Ivan’s Childhood is remembered alongside those notable films of the short-lived thaw that broke out of the propaganda mold and gave war the face of true human anguish. Many thousands of female victims ended up severely internally wounded by broken bottles when the Red wave swept over their doomed homeland. Like the United States, the Soviet Union has its greatest generation. Mutual trust was impossible. Nonetheless, she succeeds admirably in fashioning a compelling portrait, helped immensely by her talent as a writer. Cultural aspects such as the influence of songs, literature, poems and rhymes on the life of the soldiers also receive the attention of Merridale. The Soviet people, we would say, suffered beyond the point of death.
Metropolitan Books. There was, needless to say, also the influence of alcohol, that was abundantly available in East Germany. Ivan's War Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 By Catherine Merridale Illustrated. Ivan's Childhood (Russian: Ива́ново де́тство, romanized: Ivanovo detstvo), sometimes released as My Name Is Ivan in the US, is a 1962 Soviet war drama film and the first feature film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.Co-written by Mikhail Papava, Andrei Konchalovsky and an uncredited Tarkovsky, it is based on Vladimir Bogomolov's 1957 short story Ivan (Russian: Иван). Soviet & Post-Soviet Wars: An Oral History Project, The Evolution of Prisons and Penality in the Former Soviet Union, Defining and Defending Borders in the Post-Soviet Space, Women in Arms: from the Russian Empire to Post-Soviet States, Military Journalism in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, War Trauma in Post-Soviet Russia & Military Reform in Russia and the CIS, Police Brutality & Police Reform in Russia and the CIS, Contemporary Uses of the Second World War in Russia and the Former Soviet Republics, “Security and Defense Reform in Central Asia”, The Integration of Non-Russian Servicemen in the Imperial, Soviet and Russian Army, The Social and Political Role of War Veterans, The Military and Society in Post-Soviet Russia, Reflections on Policing in Post-Communist Europe, Issue 19 - Autumn 2018 (The evolution of prisons and penality in the former Soviet Union), A digital resources portal for the humanities and social sciences, The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies, Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic, Catalogue of 546 journals. Hello readers!
There was also fear of the capitalist state, a fear that turned very quickly into anger and fury after they saw the richness of the capitalist farmers and city dwellers. Bill, no postwar prosperity, no sunny homecoming. 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. Others attribute it the battle stress of the soldiers.
7Another fine aspect of the book is that Merridale is never satisfied with a one-dimensional and therefore simplified explanation of the Soviet soldiers’ behaviour. This anti-Soviet conduct exhibited by the soldiers (and the rural Ukrainian and Belarusian population at large) could only be countered by even more cruel and harsh counter measures by the State. Such idealizations were powerful concepts which retain some of their force even today. Families of deserters could be arrested by this order as well.
This site uses cookies to improve your user experience. $30. Others, rather than being demobilised were assigned to various tasks aimed at rebuilding the Soviet State into a super power, if they indeed escaped being sent to the Gulag. Troops, seized by "tank fright," often panicked and fled. Five years later, the British historian brings her expertise to this topic in Ivan's War. Time and again, ‘disloyal’ behaviour of the soldier was exhibited as soon as State control degenerated into chaos. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/pipss/471 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/pipss.471, This text is under a Creative Commons license : Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic, Site map – Contact us – Partners – Syndication, OpenEdition Journals member – Published with Lodel – Administration only, You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search, Military and Security Structures in/and the Regions & Women in/and the Military. (An intimate, and chilling, view of the German side can be glimpsed in "A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War, Russia, 1941-1944,", the diaries of Willy Peter Reese, a German soldier who died on the Eastern front, recently published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. HomeThe Journal of Power Institutions...Issue 4/5Book Reviews - General (7 titles)Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War, ... 1Catherine Merridale's first well reviewed and much appraised book “Night of Stone, Death and Memory in Russia” (Granta, 2000) examined the culture of suffering in Russia during the Soviet period. Not surprisingly, she finds it difficult to penetrate the psychological shields war veterans erected.
What the President of the Russian Federation does not mention, however, is the responsibility of the Soviet authorities (the NKVD especially) for killing many of their own people, as well as the responsibility of the military authorities for heedlessly wasting human life during military campaigns. Stalin's Speech of 1 May, 1944 encouraged the Soviet Soldiers to conquer Germany with the outcry: ‘To berlog’ (To the Beast). ", None of this comes out in her interviews with veterans. Of the 403,000 tank crew men who participated in the battle of Kursk, 310,000 would die, to name but a few. Hence, Merrdiale shows the impact of a totalitarian regime on the conduct of the soldier and how a vicious circle (a constant build up) of violence and counter-violence was created.
It is as if he wants to continue the state of victim hood and to promote suffering as an ideology, as was done during the Soviet period. ©2020 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Once again, the soldier-citizen of the Soviet State, notwithstanding his enormous contribution to the survival of the Soviet State, could not count on any compassion from the Soviet authorities: 27 million people lost their life during the Great Patriotic War; 25 million people became homeless; 8,6 million soldiers died; and 90% of the men that were born in the year 1921 were erased. a Russian soldier wrote to his wife after Stalingrad. Russia was at war for the greater part of Ivan’s … ".
I just thought I'd greet those of you who don't use LJ but have been given the link by someone in the family. Ivan the Terrible - Ivan the Terrible - The Oprichnina: Ivan’s first executions apparently arose out of his disappointment over the course of the Livonian War and the suspected treason of several Russian boyars.
Some of this data is already well known fact which is still used by the Russian authorities today. Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 Catherine Merridale, Author.
She often shows how extremes of human behaviour are usually caused by a complex cluster of factors. Minefields, for instance, were ‘attacked’ by waves of infantry soldiers in order to clear them. "Ivan's War" combines, quite effectively, painstaking historical reconstruction and sympathetic projection. Further, the government assigned political officers to every fighting unit to reinforce party discipline and to report on conversations. By Catherine Merridale. The American experience of tight-knit platoons bound by loyalty and friendship did not exist in the Soviet armed forces.
The resulting frustration of the soldiers produced a fury against any woman they might meet. Ms. Merridale is understanding about why that might be.
Nearly three-quarters of the infantry started life as peasants, and many had suffered the traumas of forced collectivization. Merridale's chronicle is not so much of the sights and sounds of war or of the agony and gore -- although all this is there -- as it is an attempt to fathom war's meaning, effect, and legacy for the peasant boy or girl sucked from his or her village or factory dorm and sent into the maw, often ill equipped and ill trained, to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with comrades who sometimes came from ethnic worlds apart, to master war's forms and tools, to do war's awful deeds, and then to somehow resume a normal life at war's close. The Red Army, Ms. Merridale writes, embarked "on an orgy of war crimes. Andrei Tarkovsky’s objective in Ivan’s Childhood (1962) was, in his own words, “to … Their feelings toward the regime ranged from sullen acquiescence to outright hostility, especially in Ukraine. His goal is taking it to the U.S. to prevent the Russians from using it to start nuclear war against the U.S.
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a prisoner in Camp HQ, is usually up on time, but this morning he suffers a fever and aches, and yearns for a little more time in bed. Summary Plot Overview A wake-up call sounds in a Stalinist labor camp in 1951, on a bitterly cold winter morning. Merridale gives a combination of factors to account for this explosion of brutality. "Imagine it -- the Fritzes are running away from us!"
The rape warfare, in which even children and elderly people were not safe, was especially atrocious. 3The main accomplishment of Ivan's War is to compare the soldiers as they really acted on the battlefield during WWII with the idealised version of the Russian soldier propagated by the Soviet state. What was life like in the armed services for a typical Soviet soldier? No matter how bad American soldiers had it in World War II, Russians had it worse, from start to finish.
Unlike the Americans or the British, Russians fought on knowing that their wives and their parents and their children were in the hands of the enemy.
The euphoria of the victory over the Fascist regime was, indeed, for many soldiers very short. In the early months of the war, as the Germans advanced at will, mass desertions were commonplace. Rape and looting were thus tolerated and even encouraged by the Soviet authorities. There was, for instance, propaganda encouraging the men to give free rein to revenge and cruelty (the Political Officer and writer Ehrenburg played an important role in this campaign). The Soviet soldiers' conduct was thus arguably induced by the inhumane measures taken by the State. Yet Merridale's achievement is the way in which she brings the necessary empathy to the subject, whilst at the same time managing to keep the objective distance needed for an reliable historical analysis. The Soviet forces that met the Germans in June 1941 were poorly trained, poorly fed and poorly equipped. Not to mention what might happen when such stresses are politically abused, as in the propaganda campaign mentioned above.
Ivan’s Childhood is remembered alongside those notable films of the short-lived thaw that broke out of the propaganda mold and gave war the face of true human anguish. Many thousands of female victims ended up severely internally wounded by broken bottles when the Red wave swept over their doomed homeland. Like the United States, the Soviet Union has its greatest generation. Mutual trust was impossible. Nonetheless, she succeeds admirably in fashioning a compelling portrait, helped immensely by her talent as a writer. Cultural aspects such as the influence of songs, literature, poems and rhymes on the life of the soldiers also receive the attention of Merridale. The Soviet people, we would say, suffered beyond the point of death.
Metropolitan Books. There was, needless to say, also the influence of alcohol, that was abundantly available in East Germany. Ivan's War Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 By Catherine Merridale Illustrated. Ivan's Childhood (Russian: Ива́ново де́тство, romanized: Ivanovo detstvo), sometimes released as My Name Is Ivan in the US, is a 1962 Soviet war drama film and the first feature film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.Co-written by Mikhail Papava, Andrei Konchalovsky and an uncredited Tarkovsky, it is based on Vladimir Bogomolov's 1957 short story Ivan (Russian: Иван). Soviet & Post-Soviet Wars: An Oral History Project, The Evolution of Prisons and Penality in the Former Soviet Union, Defining and Defending Borders in the Post-Soviet Space, Women in Arms: from the Russian Empire to Post-Soviet States, Military Journalism in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, War Trauma in Post-Soviet Russia & Military Reform in Russia and the CIS, Police Brutality & Police Reform in Russia and the CIS, Contemporary Uses of the Second World War in Russia and the Former Soviet Republics, “Security and Defense Reform in Central Asia”, The Integration of Non-Russian Servicemen in the Imperial, Soviet and Russian Army, The Social and Political Role of War Veterans, The Military and Society in Post-Soviet Russia, Reflections on Policing in Post-Communist Europe, Issue 19 - Autumn 2018 (The evolution of prisons and penality in the former Soviet Union), A digital resources portal for the humanities and social sciences, The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies, Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic, Catalogue of 546 journals. Hello readers!
There was also fear of the capitalist state, a fear that turned very quickly into anger and fury after they saw the richness of the capitalist farmers and city dwellers. Bill, no postwar prosperity, no sunny homecoming. 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. Others attribute it the battle stress of the soldiers.
7Another fine aspect of the book is that Merridale is never satisfied with a one-dimensional and therefore simplified explanation of the Soviet soldiers’ behaviour. This anti-Soviet conduct exhibited by the soldiers (and the rural Ukrainian and Belarusian population at large) could only be countered by even more cruel and harsh counter measures by the State. Such idealizations were powerful concepts which retain some of their force even today. Families of deserters could be arrested by this order as well.
This site uses cookies to improve your user experience. $30. Others, rather than being demobilised were assigned to various tasks aimed at rebuilding the Soviet State into a super power, if they indeed escaped being sent to the Gulag. Troops, seized by "tank fright," often panicked and fled. Five years later, the British historian brings her expertise to this topic in Ivan's War. Time and again, ‘disloyal’ behaviour of the soldier was exhibited as soon as State control degenerated into chaos. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/pipss/471 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/pipss.471, This text is under a Creative Commons license : Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic, Site map – Contact us – Partners – Syndication, OpenEdition Journals member – Published with Lodel – Administration only, You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search, Military and Security Structures in/and the Regions & Women in/and the Military. (An intimate, and chilling, view of the German side can be glimpsed in "A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War, Russia, 1941-1944,", the diaries of Willy Peter Reese, a German soldier who died on the Eastern front, recently published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. HomeThe Journal of Power Institutions...Issue 4/5Book Reviews - General (7 titles)Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War, ... 1Catherine Merridale's first well reviewed and much appraised book “Night of Stone, Death and Memory in Russia” (Granta, 2000) examined the culture of suffering in Russia during the Soviet period. Not surprisingly, she finds it difficult to penetrate the psychological shields war veterans erected.
What the President of the Russian Federation does not mention, however, is the responsibility of the Soviet authorities (the NKVD especially) for killing many of their own people, as well as the responsibility of the military authorities for heedlessly wasting human life during military campaigns. Stalin's Speech of 1 May, 1944 encouraged the Soviet Soldiers to conquer Germany with the outcry: ‘To berlog’ (To the Beast). ", None of this comes out in her interviews with veterans. Of the 403,000 tank crew men who participated in the battle of Kursk, 310,000 would die, to name but a few. Hence, Merrdiale shows the impact of a totalitarian regime on the conduct of the soldier and how a vicious circle (a constant build up) of violence and counter-violence was created.
It is as if he wants to continue the state of victim hood and to promote suffering as an ideology, as was done during the Soviet period. ©2020 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Once again, the soldier-citizen of the Soviet State, notwithstanding his enormous contribution to the survival of the Soviet State, could not count on any compassion from the Soviet authorities: 27 million people lost their life during the Great Patriotic War; 25 million people became homeless; 8,6 million soldiers died; and 90% of the men that were born in the year 1921 were erased. a Russian soldier wrote to his wife after Stalingrad. Russia was at war for the greater part of Ivan’s … ".
I just thought I'd greet those of you who don't use LJ but have been given the link by someone in the family. Ivan the Terrible - Ivan the Terrible - The Oprichnina: Ivan’s first executions apparently arose out of his disappointment over the course of the Livonian War and the suspected treason of several Russian boyars.
Some of this data is already well known fact which is still used by the Russian authorities today. Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 Catherine Merridale, Author.
She often shows how extremes of human behaviour are usually caused by a complex cluster of factors. Minefields, for instance, were ‘attacked’ by waves of infantry soldiers in order to clear them. "Ivan's War" combines, quite effectively, painstaking historical reconstruction and sympathetic projection. Further, the government assigned political officers to every fighting unit to reinforce party discipline and to report on conversations. By Catherine Merridale. The American experience of tight-knit platoons bound by loyalty and friendship did not exist in the Soviet armed forces.
The resulting frustration of the soldiers produced a fury against any woman they might meet. Ms. Merridale is understanding about why that might be.
Nearly three-quarters of the infantry started life as peasants, and many had suffered the traumas of forced collectivization. Merridale's chronicle is not so much of the sights and sounds of war or of the agony and gore -- although all this is there -- as it is an attempt to fathom war's meaning, effect, and legacy for the peasant boy or girl sucked from his or her village or factory dorm and sent into the maw, often ill equipped and ill trained, to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with comrades who sometimes came from ethnic worlds apart, to master war's forms and tools, to do war's awful deeds, and then to somehow resume a normal life at war's close. The Red Army, Ms. Merridale writes, embarked "on an orgy of war crimes. Andrei Tarkovsky’s objective in Ivan’s Childhood (1962) was, in his own words, “to … Their feelings toward the regime ranged from sullen acquiescence to outright hostility, especially in Ukraine. His goal is taking it to the U.S. to prevent the Russians from using it to start nuclear war against the U.S.
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a prisoner in Camp HQ, is usually up on time, but this morning he suffers a fever and aches, and yearns for a little more time in bed. Summary Plot Overview A wake-up call sounds in a Stalinist labor camp in 1951, on a bitterly cold winter morning. Merridale gives a combination of factors to account for this explosion of brutality. "Imagine it -- the Fritzes are running away from us!"
The rape warfare, in which even children and elderly people were not safe, was especially atrocious. 3The main accomplishment of Ivan's War is to compare the soldiers as they really acted on the battlefield during WWII with the idealised version of the Russian soldier propagated by the Soviet state. What was life like in the armed services for a typical Soviet soldier? No matter how bad American soldiers had it in World War II, Russians had it worse, from start to finish.