Picador paperback, 2007
Combat
Ivan’s War
Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945
Drawing on archives, interviews, letters, and diaries, Catherine Merridale examines the lives of Red Army soldiers. She follows their experience of combat, their arrival in Berlin, and the hopes and disappointments of coming home.
On This Shelf
The war from the ranks: soldiers’ beliefs, fears, endurance, and the distance between official memory and lived experience.
World War II: The Eastern FrontISBN 9780312426521
Selected Passages
From Ivan’s War
Soldiers had various ways of dealing with the real face of capitalism. Some were envious, some intrigued. Later, when they entered Germany, their main reaction would be rage. No one could understand why wealthy Germans had wanted to invade their neighbors to the east, why anyone who had this much would ever fight for more.
For all the rhetoric of unity, however, close friendships still aroused suspicion in police circles. The NKVD monitored soldiers’ conversations at the front, while the Special Section and its successor, SMERSh, whose name was an acronym for the Russian expression “death to spies,” pursued each rumor of dissension.
It was rage that gave the troops their energy. Everything, from the deaths of beloved friends to the burning of cities, from the hunger of the children back at home to the fear of facing yet another hail of shells, everything—even the wealth of bourgeois homes—was blamed on the Germans.