Review Article: The Second World War in Russia

Abstract

Wars are not often subjects of deep historical inquiry. The second world war in Russia, however, was of such powerful political and emotional significance that it became in effect the founding myth of the late Soviet system. Amir Weiner has quite recently argued that it indirectly gave a new lease of life for the Soviet project that sustained its dynamism well into Khrushchev's ascendancy. At the least, the war years saw institutional and attitudinal changes that assisted the USSR's transition from an unstable mobilization system to a more sustainable, technocratic, totalitarianism following, if not before, Stalin's death. And the image of this war has been appropriated seemingly like no other: within two years of peace, the 'people's victory' had already become Stalin's; later it was the party's; and today the 'Great Patriotic War' is a lesson in statehood and support of Putin's political course.As a total struggle between the two great totalitarian systems, understanding the conflict is implicitly not only a matter of military strategy, command structure, or even socio-economic mobilization, but also the more nebulous yet nonetheless decisive factors of individual motivation and belief. The questions that have driven studies of 1930s Stalinism also apply to Russia's wartime experience, for the fortunes of the Red Army were dependent on the capacity of the Soviet planned economy, the robustness of its governing apparatus, as well as the degree of Stalinist social and individual transformation accomplished in the years of 'socialist construction'. How significant was wartime terror in keeping the system from falling apart or in engineering conformity? How extensive were official loyalties and identities across Soviet society following the Stalinist push to cultural, national and political homogeneity through the ideological education, territorial re-centralization and purging that make up the history of the 1930s? Essentially, how strong was the state that Stalin built?If wartime Soviet endurance can be boiled down, it could be to an expedient