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    Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
    Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
    Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
    Audiobook16 hours

    Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945

    Written by Catherine Merridale

    Narrated by Derek Perkins

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A powerful, groundbreaking narrative of the ordinary Russian soldier's experience of the worst war in history, based on newly revealed sources.

    Of the thirty million who fought in the eastern front of World War II, eight million died, driven forward in suicidal charges, shattered by German shells and tanks. They were the men and women of the Red Army, a ragtag mass of soldiers who confronted Europe's most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. Sixty years have passed since their epic triumph, but the heart and mind of Ivan-as the ordinary Russian soldier was called-remain a mystery. We know something about how the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, how they saw the world, or why they fought.

    A tour de force of original research and a gripping history, Ivan's War reveals the singular mixture of courage, patriotism, anger, and fear that made it possible for these underfed, badly led troops to defeat the Nazi army. In the process Merridale restores to history the invisible millions who sacrificed the most to win the war.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 6, 2019
    ISBN9781541400245
    Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
    Author

    Catherine Merridale

    Catherine Merridale is the author of the critically acclaimed Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945, and Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia. A professor of contemporary history at Queen Mary University of London, she has also written for The Guardian, the Literary Review, and the London Review of Books, and contributes regularly to broadcasts on BBC radio. She lives in Oxfordshire, England.

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    Reviews for Ivan's War

    4/5

    114 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Great book.
      Very insightful of the lives and perspectives of red army soldiers and vets
    • 5/5
      I was not expecting much, to tell the truth, when I selected this book. The same vacuous, tired recitation of the inscrutable Soviet automatons being hurled into all the old familiar battles.

      Was I surprised! This is easily one of the best books I've read about WWII, let alone the Red Army! An incisive, ground-level examination of every aspect of the Red Army—and Stalin's Russia—that had me spellbound during the entire book.

      In fact, now that I come to the end, I'm just wishing it could go on and on! I've read easily hundreds of books about the war—my dad flew bombers in the 8th Air Force—and let's just say I'm jaded. But this book woke me up again! A triumph!

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      One of the best books on the Red Army during World War II. What the soldiers went through is horrifying. To be an ordinary soldier is to be of no value. The saddest part is the is communism at its most horrific. And this book brutally reflects the reality.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Thank you Catherine Merridale, absolutely enthralling. The author is a British social historian and her outsider status both as British and as a woman is also interesting. And has also renewed my desires to read equivalently well researched books on places/times where the author is an outsider and I am at least partly insider to add that extra dimension! Must be some out there - perhaps a book on British massacres in Africa by a Peruvian historian.

      It has been a strangely comforting read alongside the current Brexit and Covid pandemic. I hope the comfort lies less in the contrast of world chaos in the comfort of a warm home, and more in the work and effort the author has made to listen to people who lived through it and dig through the archives to recover something of the souls of individuals without praise or blame. Loved the photos sprinkled through the book.

      For a brilliant review just see Mariel who has put the time in to write the kind of review the book deserves.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Superb, absorbing account of something that hasn't been addressed too often; that is, what World War II was like for the average "frontoviki," the "Ivan," the soldier of the Red Army. Well-organized, with good illustrations, but most of all, some excellent writing. The angle of what the soldiers went home to in 1945-1946 is also explored; the disappointment at promises dashed is something you don't see anywhere else, except for hints of it in Solzhenitsyn. If I had one criticism of the book, it's that it has only one map, a large-scale one in the front. More maps might have helped trace the narrative. But overall, this is a highly interesting book, and one I would not hesitate to recommend.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A terrifying view of the average Red Army soldier in the largest and most brutal land conflict in human history.

      1 person found this helpful