Book reviews of a historical nature.

Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine is only the most recent example of that nation’s belligerence and savagery. (It mirrors the United States and its rape of Iraq.) But no act of war or foreign policy exists in a vacuum, despite its blatantly false rhetoric of wanting to protect the native population and dream logic of pre-emptive attack being nothing more than a thin burlesque for the actual goal of resource plunder. Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent who worked in East Germany, calls himself a president, but acts like an autocratic tsar or Stalin manque. The Stalinist machinations and brutality is no mere coincidence. Stalin was a bit of a thug and a monster capable of slaughtering millions of his own people. The son of a seminarian took all the tricks and contrivances of the Orthodox Church and used those same tools to fashion a cult of personality. Like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, he used war as a pretense to become God.

The origins of Russian belligerence in the Ukraine and elsewhere (the Crimea, Chechnya, etc.) have its origins in the Second World War. The occasion was of such monumental fury and terror, an event that obliterated 20 million lives, that the Russian people call it The Great Patriotic War. The after-effects of this global conflict birthed the Cold War, a decades-long struggle of superpowers and ideologies. During that conflict the Soviet Union existed as a shadowy realm of evil and paranoia, hidden behind an Iron Curtain, vaguely understood by CIA Sovietologists and anti-communist cranks seeing commie conspiracy in every crevice. Hence the sparseness of histories written about the Eastern Front. Russia at War, 1941 – 1945: A History, by Alexander Werth, sought to remedy that drought of information. It stands as a parallel to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer. Like Shirer, Werth was a journalist-historian and like Rise and Fall, Russia at War is an epic tome.

Due to the machinations of the Cold War, the genesis of Russia at War is every bit as interesting as the contents therein. Composed during the War, Russia at War pieces together journalistic witness along with retrospective analysis. Werth, a British journalist, fluent in both Russian and German, was a Soviet sympathizer and committed leftist. Even though his ideological loyalties lay with socialist causes, he wasn’t some brainless dupe and loyalist parrot. Objective journalism was more important than fealty to whatever political strongman ruled the Soviet Union. Because of that, he delayed publication of Russia at War until after the death of Stalin. Granted, there is plenty of death and brutality to go around, but the initial 1964 publication predates the cataclysmic expose of The Gulag Archipelego, by Alexander Solzenitsyn. History, an investigative practice marshaling evidence towards an inevitable assertion, is also a playground of shadow and influence. The Great Patriotic War looms large on the Russian public’s consciousness. It influences Russian foreign policy every bit as much as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan shadow American foreign policy.

While Shirer plumbed the German archives in order to construct his epic history, Werth used the six-volume History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union (Istoriya velikoi otechestvennoi voiny Sovietskogo Soyuza, 1961 – 1965). The IVOVSS had, according to Werth, “clear weaknesses, the omission of troubling events such as the “panic” of October 16, 1941 in Moscow, and the exaggeration of Khrushchev’s role during the war, this summation, which was carried out by historians working under the control of a commission comprised of great Party ideologues and several generals represents for me an immense source of information.” Even blatantly biased, ideologically manufactured information is still useful information, provided one examines it through the proper lenses of skepticism and critique. This is the same way Russia at War should be viewed. Werth has his sympathies, but it should be seen as the first of its kind. Numerous books have been written about the Soviet side of World War 2, but it doesn’t diminish the importance of Russia at War. This is especially true if one sees Russia at War not as some definitive history, as The History of the conflict, but as a kind of epic piece of journalism. The eyewitness accounts are incredibly powerful.

Russia at War combines eyewitness accounts, Werth’s personal reflections, and an eagle-eyed assessment of the global conflict. He switches from ground-level engagements to diplomatic negotiations at the upper echelons of government. Familiar battles (Stalingrad, Kursk) and unfamiliar events (the Leningrad blockade, the siege of Moscow, the Russian invasion of Mongolia) combine to create a continent-spanning tableau. Riveting depictions of military prowess mingle alongside passages of bureaucratic tedium. Werth spends a lot of time recounting the formation, break-up, and re-formation of the numerous “fronts” in the War. It is informative, yet ultimately boring to anyone except the most die-hard military historian. The aftermath of the Battle of Stalingrad has Werth describing the carnage in what feels like a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel:

In and around the Red October Plant fighting had gone on for weeks. Trenches ran through the factory yards and through the workshops themselves; and now at the bottom of the trenches there still lay frozen green Germans and frozen grey Russians and frozen fragments of human shapes; and there were helmets, Russian and German, lying among the brick debris, and now half-filled with snow. There was barbed wire here, and half-uncovered mines, and shell cases, and torturous tangles of twisted steel girders. How anyone could have survived here was hard to imagine; and somebody pointed to a wall, with some names written on it, where one of the units had died to the last man. But now everything was silent and dead in this fossilised hell, as though a raving lunatic had suddenly died of heart failure.

Shifting mode from ground-level battle scenes, Werth chronicles the challenges Stalin faced with the German invasion. It should be prefaced that the two fronts of the European Theater had the Nazis engaging in two types of warfare. On the Western Front, the Nazis carried out blitzkrieg attacks and ruled Western Europe with a thuggish brutality. Yet for all the carnage and destruction, the Nazis saw Western Europeans as their own fellow man.

Not so on the Eastern Front. The Western Front was one of conquest, the Eastern Front was one of ethnic subjugation (the Slavs) and racial extermination (the Jews). The viciousness of the Nazi conquests on the Eastern Front were fueled by instructing the German soldier with the idea that they were crusading to rid the world of Judaeo-Bolshevism. This ultra-conservative Christianity married to a revolutionary political ideology was part of the formula that created the Holocaust. Hitler thought the Soviet Union too corrupt to withstand the might of the Wehrmacht. But the little Austrian corporal learned hard lessons about the limitations of his alleged military genius when he invaded Russia in October. Even with the numerous vulnerabilities of the Soviet war machine – most self-inflicted by a purge-crazed Stalin – the Russian winter and the Pripet Marshes in the Spring slowed the German blitzkrieg to an ineffectual crawl.

Werth discusses some controversial points, like how Stalin signing the Non-Aggression Pact was a defensive measure. He also mentions how Stalin ushered in a professionalization of the armed forces. Gone were the cod-egalitarian ethos, replaced with a more conventional hierarchy. Was this a betrayal of Bolshevik ideals? Or are such questions fatuous in the face of imminent ethnic enslavement and annihilation? The suffering of the Russians during the Great Patriotic War led to a reaction just as brutal as the German advance once the Soviets had the upper hand. But the road to that situation was not an easy one. The herculean task involved relocating the Soviet Union’s industrial might beyond the Urals. It also involved accepting aid from the Allies. Finally, it involved the “great” Stalin, the heroic Man of Steel, to constantly beg the Allies to open a Second Front in the West. It is a revelation seeing Stalin, the gruff bear of a man, reduced to begging and pleading via diplomatic cables and in person. One isn’t used to seeing the dictator on his knees.

Russia at War by Alexander Werth is a heart-rending epic about the Great Patriotic War, a chronicle of a tragic cataclysm. In the ensuing years, many of Werth’s assertions and assumptions have been debunked, but it remains an important historical text. It can be bookended with William L. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The book represents the journalist-historian at the apex of his art. Shining a light on the everyday struggles of the soldier and worker, it also tells the story of the Soviet Union’s diplomatic endeavors to persuade the Allies for aid. Russia at War humanizes Stalin, insofar as representing his faults and vulnerabilities in the face of almost certain military annihilation. Churchill helped Britain face down the Nazi threat, fighting alone and turning back the tide of blitzkrieg. The Soviet Union did the same, grinding the German war machine to a halt, using winter as a weapon and harnessing the desire for the Bolshevik cause to save the Motherland. But war isn’t without consequences, with everything from the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan as the after-effects of German aggression. With 20 million dead and an urban landscape practically obliterated, the notion of “buffer states” seems less like warmed-over Tsarist imperialist rhetoric and more like geopolitical commonsense. A means to curtail German aggression. Unfortunately, such rhetoric has been re-purposed for the invasion of Ukraine.