Whose War Was It, Anyway? Writing Histories of the Soviet Union in World War II

Whose War Was It, Anyway? Writing Histories of the Soviet Union in World War II Robert Dale (bio) Jonathan Brunstedt, The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR. 306 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. ISBN-13 978-1108498753. £29. 99. Oleg Budnitskii, Liudi na voine (People at War). 400 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2021. ISBN-13 978-5444815342. Mark Edele, Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II. 257 pp. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. ISBN-13 978-1350153516. 35. 00. One of the ironies of the voluminous historiography examining World War II is that writing about a global conflict vast in its size, scale, and intensity, with far-reaching implications for the world, is so parochial. The enormity of the conflict, and the documentary record it generated, has frequently limited scholars to national histories, which explore how particular armies, societies, and polities waged war at the expense of wider entanglements. Although industrialized total warfare created similar challenges across the globe, national responses to the conflict continue to dominate the scholarship. 1 Notable exceptions to a national approach—for example, Gerhard Weinberg's pioneering global history of World War II—restrict themselves End Page 434 to a traditional focus on military and diplomatic developments. 2 Large parts of the reading public could still be forgiven for thinking that World War II was largely a European war, fought by European or North Atlantic powers and their attendant empires. Far less has been written, at least in English, about the war in China, Japan, Southeast Asia, or Africa. 3 Popular histories of the war have often reinforced national and Eurocentric approaches, obscuring excellent research beyond the European theater. There are, however, encouraging signs that the historiography of World War II is becoming increasingly global in its approach and the stories that it tells. Imperial entanglements, the experience of ethnic minorities within militaries, and an expansion of the field to integrate parts of the world neglected from grand narratives are among these positive developments. 4 These wider trends should give historians of the USSR's experience of World War II pause for thought. Widespread fascination with the war on the Eastern Front between June 1941 and May 1945—especially its landmark battles, the drama of the Soviet military and economic recovery, and the enormous suffering on the Soviet home front—has long served to push the center of World War II eastward. 5 The archival revolution that followed the Soviet collapse in 1991 facilitated a surge in scholarship about End Page 435 the Soviet war effort, in the West as well as in the Soviet Union's successor states, even if military archives remained largely classified. 6 If scholarship about World War II is gradually becoming more global, the Soviet war experience remains curiously national in approach. Much of the writing about the Soviet war effort continues to come from a Russian perspective, continuing to conflate Russia and the Soviet Union. 7 Thinking of the war on the Eastern Front as Russia's War, as a popular work of synthesis published in 1997 framed it, is no longer tenable, if it ever was. 8 In the case of the Soviet Union, a multinational and multiethnic Eurasian land empire simultaneously facing westward to European threats and eastward toward China and Japan, national approaches to World War II are problematic. Russian experiences, memories, and interpretations of World War II frequently obscure a more complicated and nuanced Soviet picture. Several accomplished recent histories, which move beyond the central Russian republic and explore the war's history on Soviet peripheries, have already begun to complicate this picture. 9 Nevertheless, the ways in which the Soviet experience of World War II has often been written sit uncomfortably with a turn toward more global perspectives on World War II. This observation combined with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and indeed the war in the Donbas since 2014, necessitates a reassessment and reexamination of how the Soviet Union's World War II is written. Political regimes and leaders across the globe have appropriated the history and memory of World War II for contemporary political. . .