Under Joseph Stalin's iron-fisted rule, the Soviet state tried to forge an army that would be both a shining example of proletarian power and an indomitable deterrent against fascist aggression. In reality, the author reveals, Stalin's grand military experiment failed miserably on both counts before it was finally rescued within the crucible of war. Instead, the author portrays an army at war with itself, focusing on the daily lives of soldiers, officers, and civilians.

Inept leadership, inefficient campaigning, and enormous losses would seem to spell military disaster. Yet despite these factors, the Soviet Union won its war against Nazi Germany thanks to what Roger Reese calls its "military effectiveness": its ability to put troops in the field even after previous forces had been decimated. Reese probes the human dimension of the Red Army in World War II through a close analysis of soldiers' experiences and attitudes concerning mobilization, motivation, and morale. In doing so, he illuminates the Soviets' remarkable ability to recruit and retain soldiers, revealing why so many were willing to fight in the service of a repressive regime-and how that service was crucial to the army's military effectiveness. He examines the various forms of voluntarism and motivations to serve-including the influences of patriotism and Soviet ideology-and shows that many fought simply out of loyalty to the idea of historic Russia and hatred for the invading Germans. He also considers the role of political officers within the ranks, the importance of commanders who could inspire their troops, the bonds of allegiance forged within small units, and persistent fears of Stalin's secret police. Brimming with fresh insights, Reese's study shows how the Red Army's effectiveness in the Great Patriotic War was foreshadowed by its performance in the Winter War against Finland and offers the first direct comparison between the two, delving into specific issues such as casualties, tactics, leadership, morale, and surrender. Reese also presents a new analysis of Soviet troops captured during the early war years and how those captures tapped into Stalin's paranoia over his troops' loyalties. He provides a distinctive look at the motivations and experiences of Soviet women soldiers and their impact on the Red Army's ability to wage war. Ultimately, Reese puts a human face on the often anonymous Soviet soldiers to show that their patriotism was real, even if not a direct endorsement of the Stalinist system, and had much to do with the Red Army's ability to defeat the most powerful army the world had ever seen.

An ordinary German soldier’s letters home from Poland and Russia during World War II Reluctant Accomplice is a volume of the wartime letters of Dr. Konrad Jarausch, a German high-school teacher of religion and history who served in a reserve battalion of Hitler's army in Poland and Russia, where he died of typhoid in 1942. He wrote most of these letters to his wife, Elisabeth. His son, acclaimed German historian Konrad H. Jarausch, brings them together here to tell the gripping story of a patriotic soldier of the Third Reich who, through witnessing its atrocities in the East, begins to doubt the war's moral legitimacy. These letters grow increasingly critical, and their vivid descriptions of the mass deaths of Russian POWs are chilling. They reveal the inner conflicts of ordinary Germans who became reluctant accomplices in Hitler's merciless war of annihilation, yet sometimes managed to discover a shared humanity with its suffering victims, a bond that could transcend race, nationalism, and the enmity of war. Reluctant Accomplice is also the powerful story of the son, who for decades refused to come to grips with these letters because he abhorred his father's nationalist politics. Only now, late in his life, is he able to cope with their contents—and he is by no means alone. This book provides rare insight into the so-called children of the war, an entire generation of postwar Germans who grew up resenting their past, but who today must finally face the painful legacy of their parents' complicity in National Socialism.

In the interwar period, Red Army commanders headed by Tukhachevskii developed a new doctrine of mobile warfare and 'deep operations'. The military requirements of armaments and industrial production in the event of war was a central parameter in Stalinist industrialization. Based on recently opened Russian archives, the book analyzes military dimensions of Soviet long-term economic and military reconstruction plans from the mid-1920s until 1941. It presents a new framework for estimating the Soviet war-economic preparations, drastically underestimated by contemporaries.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes, the consequences of which still resonate today, as Russia has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more—from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain. "With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate 'backwardness' when undertaken by a regime in a state of war with its own people." —The Economist In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.

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.

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