Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939--1945
by Catherine Merridale
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 73)
Great social history of the Red Army: This is a very well-written book about the people who fought in the Red Army and not a military history of that Army and its campaigns. As anyone who has ever spoken to fathers and uncles about WW2 knows, it is very difficult to get these men to open up. The author makes clear that the problem is even greater for members of the Red Army. Nevertheless, she did get real stories from the frontoviki and she weaves their stories beautifully into this terrific his...more
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Read in February, 2008
A look at the life of everyday soldiers in the Red Army from the disastrous Nazi invasion in 1941 to the carnage-filled march into Berlin in 1945. Ivan's War avoids detailed descriptions of battles, instead focusing on the experiences and sentiments of Soviet soldiers during a time of great upheaval that resulted in a complete overhaul of the Red Army while it was fighting. The later chapters (about the march west and demobilization after the war) are the best and most interesting.
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Read in January, 2007
Great book for anyone interested in history - especially WWII history. We always hear about the campaigns that the Americans and British fought. This is completely understandable, but to get a full picture of WWII (the greatest man-made disaster in human history) you have to consider the Eastern Front. The U.S. lost roughly 300,000 people in WWII. Russia lost between 20 and 30 million. Between 8 and 9 German soldiers that died in the war died fighting the Russians, not the Americans or Briti...more
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Read in March, 2008
I'm a WWII buff, but was more motivated to read this book from the standpoint of having had a very close, dear friend who was drafted (along with the rest of his first year university class) into the Red Army for the Finnish campaign, wounded twice in WWII, and had mentioned some / but never much detail about his own experiences during the war. I'd also spent quite some time as a student in Kharkov, which was occupied twice. This personal connection to the Russian front is what attracted me to t...more
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Read in November, 2007
This was an extremely good book, that will give the reader a greater understanding of the privation and utter misery under which the regular Red Army soldier fought during World War 2. What is particularly gripping are the accounts of soldiers being forced into unwinnable battles by inept leaders, and then being shot or imprisoned when they retreated. The book also touches on the lives of ordinary Soviet citizens, and what life was like for them as war raged around them. This group in particu...more
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Read in March, 2007
The mind reels at the fathomless suffering of the foot soldier in the Soviet army during WWII as well as their capacity to survive any hardship - short of murder - and privation - short of death by starvation - that man can devise. It added immensely to the understanding that I am developing of the nearly boundless suffering that the Soviet people endured from the Bolshevik Rev through the death of Stalin. Unimaginable.
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Read in January, 2007
A Russian grunts view of the Second World War. With all the hoopla
around Ken Burns series and "The Greatest Generation", reading this book will be a salutary corrective to the notion that the US military defeated Hitler.
At the cost of staggering losses of life, the Red Army pushed the Nazis out of Russia under condtitions that are just unimaginable today.
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Read in November, 2006
For a sociologist, she definitely wrote a groundbreaking military history on the Soviet Army of the Second World War. She has humanized them in the way Ambrose humanized the American soldier of the period. In short, the book is excellent, and any student of the Second World War would do well to read this book.
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I'm glad I was not a Russian during WWII. The author looks at the Red Army from a soldier's perspective. Unlike other historical non-fiction books about the Eastern Front, this puts a human face on a viewpoint often lost under the massive shadow of Stalin.
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Read in November, 2006
An excellent portrayal of the Soviet experience in World War II. Exposes the contradictions and secret shames of the "Great Patriotic War."
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Read in January, 2008
This book was a unique insight of the Russian soldier side of WW2. Most books on the Eastern Front focus mainly on the German point of view. This book is very well written..
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Read in January, 2007
An historical ethnography, it gives the reader an insider's view of what it was like to be a foot soldier in the Red Army.
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