The Red Army and the Second World War

The Red Army and the Second World War
Author: Alexander Hill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 757
Release: 2019-02-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316720519

In a definitive new account of the Soviet Union at war, Alexander Hill charts the development, successes and failures of the Red Army from the industrialisation of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s through to the end of the Great Patriotic War in May 1945. Setting military strategy and operations within a broader context that includes national mobilisation on a staggering scale, the book presents a comprehensive account of the origins and course of the war from the perspective of this key Allied power. Drawing on the latest archival research and a wealth of eyewitness testimony, Hill portrays the Red Army at war from the perspective of senior leaders and men and women at the front line to reveal how the Red Army triumphed over the forces of Nazi Germany and her allies on the Eastern Front, and why it did so at such great cost.

The Stuff of Soldiers

The Stuff of Soldiers
Author: Brandon M. Schechter
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 503
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501739816

The Stuff of Soldiers uses everyday objects to tell the story of the Great Patriotic War as never before. Brandon M. Schechter attends to a diverse array of things—from spoons to tanks—to show how a wide array of citizens became soldiers, and how the provisioning of material goods separated soldiers from civilians. Through a fascinating examination of leaflets, proclamations, newspapers, manuals, letters to and from the front, diaries, and interviews, The Stuff of Soldiers reveals how the use of everyday items made it possible to wage war. The dazzling range of documents showcases ethnic diversity, women's particular problems at the front, and vivid descriptions of violence and looting. Each chapter features a series of related objects: weapons, uniforms, rations, and even the knick-knacks in a soldier's rucksack. These objects narrate the experience of people at war, illuminating the changes taking place in Soviet society over the course of the most destructive conflict in recorded history. Schechter argues that spoons, shovels, belts, and watches held as much meaning to the waging of war as guns and tanks. In The Stuff of Soldiers, he describes the transformative potential of material things to create a modern culture, citizen, and soldier during World War II.

Soviet Jews in World War II

Soviet Jews in World War II
Author: Harriet Murav
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2019-08-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1618119265

This volume discusses the participation of Jews as soldiers, journalists, and propagandists in combating the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War, as the period between June 22, 1941, and May 9, 1945 was known in the Soviet Union. The essays included here examine both newly-discovered and previously-neglected oral testimony, poetry, cinema, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and archives. This is one of the first books to combine the study of Russian and Yiddish materials, reflecting the nature of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which, for the first time during the Soviet period, included both Yiddish-language and Russian-language writers. This volume will be of use to scholars, teachers, students, and researchers working in Russian and Jewish history.

Little Soldiers

Little Soldiers
Author: Olga Kucherenko
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2011-01-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191610992

Germany's war against the Soviet Union raised a small army of child soldiers. Thousands of those below the enlistment age served with regular and paramilitary formations, even though they were not formally mobilised or allowed at the front. For several decades after the war, these youngsters played an important part in Soviet remembrance culture, though their true experiences were obscured by the myth of the Great Patriotic War. Situated at the crossroads of social, cultural, and military history, Little Soldiers is the first to tell the story of the Soviet Union's child soldiers in a critical and systematic fashion. Focusing on the mechanisms and psychological consequences of propaganda on Soviet children, as well as their combat deployment, Kucherenko adopts a three-tier approach to writing the history of childhood: 'from above', 'from below', and 'from within'. A wide variety of new sources provide insight into young soldiers' combat motivations and the roles they played in the field, as well as their routine experiences and relationship with older comrades. Far from being victims, Soviet child soldiers emerge as independent social actors capable of making choices about their behaviour . Little Soldiers interconnects with matters of increasing importance: the role of propaganda in military conflicts, the totalization of warfare, child-soldiering, and social reflexivity.

The Soviet Military Experience

The Soviet Military Experience
Author: Roger R. Reese
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2002-01-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134604289

The Soviet Military Experience is the first general work to place the Soviet army into its true social, political and international contexts. It focuses on the Bolshevik Party's intention to create an army of a new type, whose aim was both to defend the people and propagate Marxist ideals to the rest of the world. It includes discussion of the: * origins of the Workers and Peasant's Red Army * effects of the Civil War * Bolshevik regime's use of the military as a school of socialism * effects of collectivization and rapid industrialisation of the 1920s and 1930s * Second World War and its profound repercussions * ethnic tensions within the army * effect of Gorbachev's policies of Glasnost and Perestroika

Soldiers of Memory

Soldiers of Memory
Author: Ene Kõresaar
Publisher: Brill Rodopi
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789042032439

Soldiers of Memory explores the complexities and ambiguities of World War II experience from the Estonian veterans' point of view. Since the end of World War II, contesting veteran cultures have developed on the basis of different war experiences and search for recognition in the public arena of history. The book reflects on this process by combining witness accounts with their critical analysis from the aspect of post-Soviet remembrance culture and politics. The first part of the book examines the persistent remembrance of World War II. Eight life stories of Estonian men are presented, revealing different war trajectories: mobilised between 1941 and 1944, the narrators served in the Red Army and its work battalions, fought against the Soviet Union in the Finnish Army, Waffen-SS, Luftwaffe, the German political police force and Wehrmacht, deserted from the Red Army, were held in German and Soviet prison and repatriation camps. The second part of the book offers a critical analysis of the stories from a multidisciplinary point of view: what were the possible life trajectories for an Estonian soldier under Soviet and German occupations in the 1940s? How did the soldiers cope with the extreme conditions of the Soviet rear? How are the veterans' memories situated in terms of different memory regimes and what is their position in the post-Soviet Estonian society? What role does ethnic and generational identity play in the formation of veterans' war remembrance? How do individuals cope with war trauma and guilt in life stories? Offering a wide range of empirical material and its critical analysis, Soldiers of Memory will be important for military, oral and cultural historians, sociologists, cultural psychologists, and anybody with an interest in the history of World War II, post/communism, and cultural construction of memory in contemporary Eastern European societies.

The Unwomanly Face of War

The Unwomanly Face of War
Author: Светлана Алексиевич
Publisher:
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 0399588728

"Originally published in Russian as U voiny--ne zhenskoe lietiso by Mastatskaya Litaratura, Minsk, in 1985. Originally published in English as War's unwomanly face by Progress Publishers, Moscow, in 1988"--Title page verso.

My Just War

My Just War
Author: Gabriel Temkin
Publisher: Presidio Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1998
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

"Gabriel Temkin, an eighteen-year-old Jew, was living in Lodz, Poland, in September 1939 when the Germans invaded. Following their swift conquest of Poland, the Nazis unleashed a campaign of terror against the Polish Jews." "Facing Nazi persecution, Temkin and his young fiancee Hanna fled to the Soviet-controlled eastern part of Poland. (Temkin's entire family, who could not get out of Lodz, was killed during the Holocaust.) On June 22, 1941 German panzers rolled across Soviet borders. Three weeks later Temkin was drafted into the Red Army. Distrusted by the Soviets because he was a refugee, Temkin was assigned, along with other refugees, to a military labor battalion to dig antitank ditches. In July 1942, during the Wehrmacht's Stalingrad offensive, Temkin was captured by the Nazis and sent to a POW camp. The Nazis were rewarding prisoners with bread to betray the Jews among them, but Temkin was not turned in. He eventually escaped, now remembering fondly the courageous, ordinary Russian and Ukrainian villagers who risked their lives helping him - a fugitive POW - with food and shelter. When he was able to reenlist, as the result of a bureaucratic fluke Temkin signed up not as a laborer but as a soldier in the regular Red Army. In May 1943, joining the scout/reconnaissance platoon of a rifle regiment, he fought the Nazis across Ukraine, Romania, and Hungary, reaching Austria by the war's end in April 1945." "Temkin is one of the only known Polish Jews to have fought as a combat soldier in the Red Army. He was awarded the Medal of Valor and distinguished himself in battle on several other occasions."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved