Oddball
01-25-2006, 01:36 PM
Life and death in the Red Army
Omer Bartov
Anthony Beevor and Lucy Vinogradova, translators and editors
A WRITER AT WAR
Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–1945
378pp. Harvill. £20.
1 843 43055 X
Catherine Merridale
IVAN’S WAR
The Red Army, 1939–1945
396pp. Faber. £20.
0 571 21808 3
Since the fall of the Soviet Union fifteen years ago, the historiography of Russia and its vast empire has flourished. Young historians stormed into the archives, liberating thousands upon thousands of documents from their folders and trying to make some sense of that other side of the Iron Curtain. The curtain had crashed under its own weight, corroded by the rust and pollution of ageing industries and faded hopes. But while opinions about what had been going on behind it were vehement, knowledge was scarce. Now that it lay in ruins, knowledge rapidly expanded and opinions became far less certain.
Entire mountains of books could or should now be thrown into the dustbin of history. New research on the Gulag has shown not merely the murderous brutality of that system, its economic inefficiency and its utter and complete uselessness; it has also demonstrated how different the Gulag was from the Nazi system. The “concentrationary universe” was not cut from the same cloth, even if saying so served the ideological purposes of those who rightly condemned Stalinist criminality. Similarly, new studies of Soviet “population policies” have largely dispensed with the simplistic models of earlier scholarship. Whether the Soviet Union was an “affirmative action empire”, as one scholar has argued, or “a state of nations”, as another has suggested, clearly Lenin and Stalin’s moulding and destruction of ethnic groups was part of a complex, and often brutal, process of trying to create a Soviet nation from a conglomerate of peoples under their control.
Continue (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25340-2009407,00.html)
Omer Bartov
Anthony Beevor and Lucy Vinogradova, translators and editors
A WRITER AT WAR
Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–1945
378pp. Harvill. £20.
1 843 43055 X
Catherine Merridale
IVAN’S WAR
The Red Army, 1939–1945
396pp. Faber. £20.
0 571 21808 3
Since the fall of the Soviet Union fifteen years ago, the historiography of Russia and its vast empire has flourished. Young historians stormed into the archives, liberating thousands upon thousands of documents from their folders and trying to make some sense of that other side of the Iron Curtain. The curtain had crashed under its own weight, corroded by the rust and pollution of ageing industries and faded hopes. But while opinions about what had been going on behind it were vehement, knowledge was scarce. Now that it lay in ruins, knowledge rapidly expanded and opinions became far less certain.
Entire mountains of books could or should now be thrown into the dustbin of history. New research on the Gulag has shown not merely the murderous brutality of that system, its economic inefficiency and its utter and complete uselessness; it has also demonstrated how different the Gulag was from the Nazi system. The “concentrationary universe” was not cut from the same cloth, even if saying so served the ideological purposes of those who rightly condemned Stalinist criminality. Similarly, new studies of Soviet “population policies” have largely dispensed with the simplistic models of earlier scholarship. Whether the Soviet Union was an “affirmative action empire”, as one scholar has argued, or “a state of nations”, as another has suggested, clearly Lenin and Stalin’s moulding and destruction of ethnic groups was part of a complex, and often brutal, process of trying to create a Soviet nation from a conglomerate of peoples under their control.
Continue (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25340-2009407,00.html)