By Catherine Merridale, 2006

Around half a million Allied military personnel died in World War Two. These Allied personnel had the advantage—or disadvantage in some senses—of dying far from home. The corresponding number of Soviet deaths was about eight and a half million, and much of the war was fought on home ground. Many of the Soviet deaths were the result of lack of preparedness and of Stalin’s harebrained or malicious policies and of the climate and geography that defeated Napoleon and other invaders.

The numbers are staggering. It is difficult to contemplate death on this scale, but Merridale takes the reader on that journey.

The invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941 found its citizens ill prepared for war, as it was a violation of the non-aggression pact signed by Stalin and Hitler in 1939. The country had been weakened militarily by civil war, famine (mostly intentional– as a means to the collectivization of agriculture), and rapid industrialization, and by the Great Terror of the last half of the 30s.

Red Army soldiers went into battle without proper clothing or footwear, without weapons, having not eaten for days. They went into battle starving and ill equipped but knowing that winning or being killed were the only options. They went into battle knowing that being taken prisoner was seen as treason. Survivors were mostly either murdered—directly by shooting or indirectly through neglect—by the Germans, or if they did manage to get home, shipped to the Gulag. Stalin refused offers to exchange his son or pay a ransom for him. Like President Donald Trump, he could not abide losers.

There was only supposed to be one individual in the Soviet Union and that was Stalin. Individual friendship and personal intimacy were seen as bourgeois and anti-Soviet. One’s energy and attention were to be devoted to the collective, and there were spies everywhere to report on deviations from the ideal. People were kept so busy with work and political indoctrination and living conditions were so crowded that there was little time or space for intimacy.

On the battlefield soldiers had to depend on one another as individuals, and close friendships developed. These friendships helped to keep soldiers going in a world where political ideology was usually irrelevant. Although there were NKVD on the front lines, they were basically useless in combat, and it was difficult to lip read or eavesdrop in the heat and noise of battle.

There was a great deal of luck to survival. There was also little place for sensitivity or self-analysis on the battlefield, instead there was a desperate need for a blinkered single-minded pushing forward. The sensitive, self-aware soldiers mostly did not survive.

Arriving in East Prussia after many savage battles, the Red Army began a raping rampage that continued on to Berlin. They raped children and crones and every sort of woman in between; the only thing that might save a woman from rape was having an infant in her arms.

The rapes were partly a reaction to the puritanism of Soviet society, a puritanism which had been awkwardly grafted onto peasant culture. The rapes were partly revenge for all all the deprivation and suffering the soldiers had been through, an attempt to humiliate the enemy and make them suffer.

The rapes also reflected the sheer incredulity and rage Soviets felt when confronted with how rich a country Germany was even as it teetered on the edge of defeat. They had grown up on propaganda that the countries of the west were materially far behind the workers’ paradise. Of course many of the riches in Germany had been stolen from Jews and other conquered peoples.

The raping got little mention in Soviet news reports or official documents of the day and was never allowed into the official historical record. As Merridale interviewed veterans in the early 2000s, no one she talked to admitted to participation in rape. A few said they heard it had happened, but had never actually seen it. In fact, rape was so common it would have been impossible not to see it, but admitting to it would conflict with the official Soviet—and now Russian—version of the heroic exploits of the heroic Red Army. It would also conflict with the myth that gave meaning to the old veterans’ lives. The experiences they were willing to reminisce about were as sanitized as most of their letters home during the war.

After the war most of the men of the age to marry or have children were dead, and many of those who survived were too wounded, physically and psychologically, to be good family men. Women had got used to managing on their own and saw men as shackles or invalids. Many of the few men left turned to drink, creating a vicious circle whereby men became less powerful because they were perceived as losers and thus became what they were thought to be.

Merridale is most interested not in politics and strategy but in the horrors of war and how they affect individuals. The human costs of war are her focus. She makes us feel the pain of exploding, bleeding, broken, rotting flesh. From her picture she looks like a prim church lady from a Barbara Pym novel who should be organizing the jumble sale. In fact, she needed extraordinary gumption to spend years interviewing old soldiers and in archives going through diaries and letters.

Ivan’s War is a natural progression from Merridale’s earlier work. The first book I read by her, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia, is a masterpiece that haunts me still. The people she interviewed had no concept of PTSD, but neither, in Merridale’s view, did they have any other overarching framework to explain their tragic history. Any comfort they found was in human company or in vodka, and in a sense that life is fundamentally tragic. The book is a very feminine treatment of the savage 20th century in Russia, feminine in the sense that it questions the human costs of all the deaths.

Merridale has also written a history of the Kremlin, Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin. I thought I would skim this book but in fact read every word of it. The author is equally scornful of the Bolsheviks who looted or destroyed the religious treasures and of Putin’s “pious candle.”

In all her work Merridale calls a spade a spade. One of the most apt examples occurs in Ivan’s War when she describes what happened in the western Ukrainian city of Lvov as the Soviets were leaving and the Germans were invading. “The members of the local NKVD, in preparation for their own retreat, spent their night murdering the inmates of its crowded jails.”

Lesser writers would have distanced themselves—and the reader—from the horror by using a softer term, like “eliminated” or “liquidated.” Merridale calls murder murder.

Throughout her work, this writer confronts the hard questions, and has no easy answers.