Ivan's War: the Red Army 1939-1945, by Catherine Merridale

A book of slaughter and forgetting

Catherine Merridale specialises in the unearthing of buried memories. In her Night of Stone, the focus was on the relatives of so-called "enemies of the people" in the Soviet Union, forbidden to mourn their loved ones. In Ivan's War, she collects the stories of men and women who fought in the Red Army during the "Great Patriotic War". "Ivan" is the ordinary Russian rifleman, the equivalent of the British Tommy or German Fritz. Their stories are gleaned from letters and journals preserved in newly accessible archives, and from many hours of interviews with veterans. The result is impressive: a significant contribution to understanding what the war meant to Soviet soldiers.

The problem for the ordinary Ivan is that his memory was never entirely his own. At the time, his vision of what was happening was refracted through the distorting lens of Soviet propaganda, while until very recently official Russian recollection was a construct of the Brezhnev era. "Brezhnev," writes Merridale, "saw the war myth as a way of rebuilding the nation's faltering sense of purpose." This was the myth, celebrated in grandiose monuments, of the fearless heroes who saved Europe from the fascist menace. It is not as though there is no truth in this myth; but it is not the whole truth.

For the Red Army, the Great Patriotic War fell into two distinct parts. The first 20 months after June 1941 were catastrophic, the Russians entirely unprepared. Stalin had refused to contemplate the possibility of German aggression, and had been steadily eliminating his top military personnel. In a hurried mobilisation, troops were sent into battle with little training and sometimes no weapons. Even attempting to join one's unit could be fraught with Soviet difficulties: there might be no transport, yet failure to get there on time would count as desertion. By February 1942, for every German killed, 20 Soviet soldiers had died.

After the victory at Stalingrad, morale and conditions improved. The troops, though better equipped, still faced great hardship and, like soldiers everywhere, relied on the solaces of alcohol and women. For troops far from home, women represented a commodity: "They regard women like gramophone records," a young man wrote. "You play it and play it and then throw it away."

As they began to pursue the enemy over the border, contact with capitalism was an eye-opener to Russian soldiers. They were indignant to discover living standards vastly superior to their own. Those in charge of their minds turned this indignation and anger, much of which should have been directed at the failures of Stalin's system, on to the defeated Germans, with terrible consequences. Rape was widespread and systematic. As usual, a kind of double-think was in operation. While official orders said one thing - that the penalty for rape and looting was death on the spot - they implied another. "Red Army soldier!" a poster declared. "You are now on German soil. The hour of revenge has struck!" Afterwards, the shameful episode was wiped from official Soviet memory. None of Merridale's interviewees could remember these atrocities, let alone admit to participating.

After the hardship, danger and heartbreak of war, many of those who returned were betrayed by the country they had served. Maybe the cruellest thing was not the lack of help and the labour camps that awaited so many, but what was done to their minds, so that not even real memories are left. As Merridale puts it, under Stalin's regime, "it was as if people could build walls in their mind". As Ivan's War proves, such walls can be harder to dismantle than the one that divided Berlin.

Virginia Rounding's 'Catherine the Great: love, sex & power' is due from Hutchinson in March