Mark Edele

Soviet Veterans as an Entitlement Group, 1945-1955

The article explores processes of group integration and disintegration among Soviet veterans of World War II during the first postwar decade. Approaches that focus on generation, legal privilege, formal organization, social mobility, or ideological outlook miss the considerable sociocultural complexity of this group. Between the end of mass demobilization in 1948 and the foundation of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans in 1956, former soldiers were integrated neither as a generation nor as a status group with formal privileges and their own organization (as would be the case in later years). What held them together was instead a shared sense of entitlement based on wartime sacrifice. During the first postwar decade, therefore, Soviet veterans are best understood as an “entitlement group.” Only in the 1960s and 1970s was this entitlement group transformed into a status group that became one of the major pillars of the late Soviet order.

The limits of demobilization: Global perspectives on the aftermath of the great war

One hundred years ago, the European powers plunged into a soon-to-be global conflict that has been aptly described as ‘the great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth-century. Given the scope of the horrors which Europe and the wider world experienced between August 1914 and November 1918, this verdict seems more than justified: estimates of the casualties among the roughly 65 million mobilized soldiers range between eight and 10 million dead combatants and between five and six million killed civilians – excluding the hundreds of thousands of men who were permanently disfigured or mentally traumatized. The body of scholarship devoted to this first ‘total war’ in history is appropriately large, but its coverage uneven: while the political events and diplomatic entanglements that led to the outbreak of war in 1914, the developments on the Western Front or the Paris Peace Treaties have received sustained attention ever since the end of that war, Eastern European and global historians have only more recently begun to explore the full economic, political and cultural consequences of the First World War. Even less attention – with the exception of Germany and

Veterans and the village: the impact of Red Army. Demobilization on Soviet urbanization, 1945-1955

This article re-evaluates a classical historical question: the impact on the process of urbanization of the demobilization of Red Army soldiers after 1945. One historical school focuses on the mass return to the village, while a rival interpretation claims that demobilization led to a further spurt in urbanization as soldiers refused to return to collective farms. Archival data now suggest a two-part process: first, soldiers returned to the village, expecting a loosening of the kolkhoz regime; once their expectations were frustrated, they left the village, leading to a resumption of the prewar trend of forsaking the village.

Violence from Below: Explaining Crimes against Civilians across Soviet Space, 1943–1947

Abstract The end of World War II brought little relief to the lands it ravaged most. Mass wartime violence continued in the Soviet space beyond the ‘false peace’ of 1945. Historians have sought to explain this violence in terms of the ‘wartime brutalisation’ of state and citizens alike, though this approach is limited in explaining how and why violence continued after 1945. This article shifts focus from psychology to social history to argue that the disintegration of Soviet state control is central to explaining the enduring violence after 1945 and understanding its emergence as much ‘from below’ as ‘from above’.

The Second World War as a history of displacement: The Soviet case

The typical Soviet subject in the Second World War was a displaced person. Taking a broad view of the Second World War as beginning with the Sino—Japanese war in 1937 and ending only with the pacification of the Soviet western border in 1949, this essay quantifies displacements within Soviet borders as well as beyond them. Deportation, flight, evacuation, military and labour mobilisation, as well as repatriation, together encompassed the majority of the Soviet population. Hence, the displaced persons who eventually made it to Australia—while distinctive in terms of ethnicity and maybe politics—had fairly typical Soviet wartime experiences.

Displaced persons: from the Soviet Union to Australia in the wake of the Second World War

Introduction to a special feature which focuses primarily on the history of one particular group of DPs: people who had been exposed to Soviet rule during the war – either as Soviet citizens, or deportees and refugees from Poland and elsewhere – and who subsequently found their way to Australia in the late 1940s and early 1950s, mainly under the DP mass resettlement scheme administered by the International Refugee Organization (IRO).

Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945, and: Plen: Sovetskie voennoplennye v Germanii, 1941-1945 (review)

The Great Patriotic War, or to put it in Western language—the Soviet experience of World War II in Europe—is having a renaissance among historians. After the long hiatus that followed such classics as Alexander Werth’s Russia at War, and after the wave of research on late Stalinism looked at the war years largely from the perspective of their impact on postwar society, more and more historians are now starting to explore the war itself. Recently, two new and important additions have been made to this emerging literature on the Soviet experience of World War II: Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War and Aron Shneer’s Plen: Sovetskie voennoplennye v Germanii, 1941–1945. These are two very different books. Merridale attempts the delicate balancing act of targeting an educated audience beyond academe without losing sight of the latter. Her book is beautifully written, illustrated with

Take (No) Prisoners! The Red Army and German POWs, 1941–1943*

From the outset of the German-Soviet war (1941–45), Soviet soldiers, commanders, political officers, and police agents killed captured Germans. Investigation into the reasons and extent, the perpetrators and dynamics of these war crimes was hampered from the start. One obstacle was that alleged Soviet atrocities were part of German propaganda well before the Wehrmacht’s attack on June 22, 1941. The “Commissar Order” of June 6, 1941, decreed the execution of Soviet political officers (politruki, or commissars) should they be captured in battle or while organizing resistance. The order attempted to legitimize this open breach of

Johannes-Dieter Steinert. Deportation und Zwangsarbeit. Polnische und sowjetische Kinder im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland und im besetzten Osteuropa 1939–1945.

Johannes-Dieter Steinert. Deportation und Zwangsarbeit. Polnische und sowjetische Kinder im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland und im besetzten Osteuropa 1939–1945 . [Deportation and Forced Labour. Polish and Soviet Children in Nazi Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe 1939-1945] Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2013. 306 pp. Bibliography. Paper.

Dark trophies: Hunting and the enemy body in modern war, by Simon Harrison

This book tries to make sense of the phenomenon of trophy taking in modern war. What is at stake is a consistent minority practice among American and to a lesser extent European soldiers: the takin...