Ivan's War by Catherine Merridale

Ivan's War - Life & Death in the Red Army (1939-1945)

Author : Catherine Merridale

Rating : C

I like reading historical non-fiction. If I can't read actual history, I'll gladly settle for "Alternate History", but that's a subject for another time.

I especially like reading about relatively unknown historical topics. After all, can there really be a "new angle" to, say, the Battle of Gettyburg, or D-Day? So a book about day-to-day life in the Red Army during WW2 is something that will naturally appeal to me.

Catherine Merridale spared no effort in researching this book. She spent many weeks in Russia, interviewing old WW2 veterans and poring over recently-declassified documents.

Unfortunately, one gets the feeling the Red Army vets never really opened up to her. So she was stuck with a mountain of documents to go through instead, knowing all the time that Stalin and his minions had probably sanitized the entire lot many decades ago.

In the end, you get 400 pages of interesting, but highly selective and highly repetitive accounts. Worse, the book lacks any direction. Yes, it's laid out in roughly chronological order. But this is a book about the lives of the soldiers, not the campaigns. It would've been better to arrange the book by theme ("humor", "day-to-day living", "supplies", "the growth of patriotism" (or lack thereof), politics, etc.

Instead, the book plods along retracing ad nauseum the same trite themes : it was cold, life was brutal, lots of soldiers perished, the Germans were brutes, etc. In 1941. In 1942. In 1943. In 1944. In 1945. You get the idea.

This could've been a great book, but perhaps the fault lies with the Russian veterans for not providing anything of substance in Merridale's interviews. In any event, if you love to read history, it's won't disappoint you. But if you aren't a avid history-phile, perhaps it's better to read The Longest Day.