Kazakh Muslims in the Red Army is the first study of the wartime experience of Soviet Kazakhs. Based on indigenous-language sources, it focuses on the wartime experiences of Kazakh conscripts and the home front as expressed in correspondence.

In July 1941, the Soviet Union was in mortal danger. Imperiled by the Nazi invasion and facing catastrophic losses, Stalin called on the Soviet people to “subordinate everything to the needs of the front.” Kazakhstan answered that call. Stalin had long sought to restructure Kazakh life to modernize the local population—but total mobilization during the war required new tactics and produced unique results. Kazakhstan in World War II analyzes these processes and their impact on the Kazakhs and the Soviet Union as a whole. The first English-language study of a non-Russian Soviet republic during World War II, the book explores how the war altered official policies toward the region’s ethnic groups—and accelerated Central Asia’s integration into Soviet institutions. World War II is widely recognized as a watershed for Russia and the Soviet Union—not only did the conflict legitimize prewar institutions and ideologies, it also provided a medium for integrating some groups and excluding others. Kazakhstan in World War II explains how these processes played out in the ethnically diverse and socially “backward” Kazakh republic. Roberto J. Carmack marshals a wealth of archival materials, official media sources, and personal memoirs to produce an in-depth examination of wartime ethnic policies in the Red Army, Soviet propaganda for non-Russian groups, economic strategies in the Central Asian periphery, and administrative practices toward deported groups. Bringing Kazakhstan’s previously neglected role in World War II to the fore, Carmack’s work fills an important gap in the region’s history and sheds new light on our understanding of Soviet identities.

After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviet leadership fully mobilized Kazakhstan's populations for war. Communist Party and government officials in Moscow and Almaty responded to this crisis by conscripting ethnic Kazakhs into the Red Army, mobilizing the republic's industrial workers and collective farmers for intensified production, and waging a grandiose propaganda campaign designed to instill Soviet patriotism in these soldiers and laborers. During the war, Soviet authorities also deported large Soviet German and North Caucasian populations to Kazakhstan, where local Party and government officials forced them to eke out a desperate existence on the Gulag's "special-settlements." This dissertation is the first English-language study that analyzes these wartime mobilizational campaigns inside Kazakhstan. Drawing on a wide range of previously unexamined archival holdings in Kazakhstan and Moscow, published documentary collections, Soviet newspapers, and memoirs, the dissertation argues that mobilization catalyzed the integration of the republic's population into Soviet military, economic, and ideological institutions. As a direct result of this integration, the republic's Kazakh population acquired a much stronger Soviet identity, but the boundaries of Kazakhstan's ethnic hierarchy became more pronounced and the republic's status as a raw materials base for Russia became more firmly entrenched. By analyzing conscription and military service among ethnic Kazakhs, economic mobilization in Kazakhstan's factories and collective farms, propaganda, labor mobilization among Soviet German and North Caucasian deportees, and the repressive activities of the state security services, this work contributes to the existing historiography on Central Asia, the Soviet Union, and World War II in several ways. First, this dissertation demonstrates that wartime mobilization was a crucial factor in the consolidation of Sovietized local identities in Kazakhstan. Second, the dissertation sheds a great deal of light on the institutional culture of the Stalinist Soviet Union by demonstrating that the practice of bureaucratic scapegoating became integral to the functioning of the Soviet administrative system thanks to the stresses engendered by total war. Finally, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of how the war influenced policies towards ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union and how the conflict catalyzed political, economic, and ideological changes in the multiethnic Soviet empire.

Provides a bold new interpretation of the origins and development of World War II's remembrance in the USSR.

In her Four Essays on World War II, Olena Stiazhkina inscribes the Ukrainian history of World War II into a wider European and world context. Among other aspects, she analyzes the mobilization measures on the eve of the war, and reconsiders Soviet narratives on them. Scrutinizing social and political processes initiated by the Bolshevik leadership in the 1920s and 1930s, she outlines how mobilization and militarization became integral parts of Soviet politics. Today, the Kremlin uses Soviet and post-Soviet Russian narratives of World War II to justify its aggressive policies towards a number of democratic countries. Russia is engaged in falsification of the past to underpin claims of a so-called “Russian World” and its ongoing war against Ukraine. Against this background, Stiazhkina offers a new understanding of what happened in Ukraine before, during, and after World War II.