Already in the middle of WW2, thinking Soviet soldiers were capable of unbiased judgments about Soviet socialism under Stalin -- its great achievements at great costs -- or so suggests Ivan's War by Catherine Merridale.* I hope young working-class Iranians who serve in their armed forces will feel similarly about their country, religion, and revolution if the time comes for them to defend their nation from the invader.
* <http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/ferguson130307.html> Comrades in Arms by Dean Ferguson
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In Ivan's War, the accomplished English historian Catherine Merridale sets forth the sacrifices made by the Soviet rank and file -- by "the Ivans," the Soviet G.I.s who stood fast at Stalingrad, smashed the Panzer armies at Kursk, and stormed the Fuehrer's stronghold at Berlin. Delving into newly-opened military archives, perusing the letters and diaries of the frontoviks -- front-line combatants -- she inquires deeply into the motivations of the Red Army's soldiers. What made them fight on as they did? she asks.
There were two factors in the main: first desperation, then revenge. In the catastrophic summer of 1941, when Wehrmacht columns marched on Moscow and Soviet collapse seemed imminent, the soldiers fought out of desperation: the fear of annihilation that drove a women's battalion at Brest Fortress to fight to the death, despite a furious bombardment and the onslaught of vastly superior forces. After the Soviets' decisive victory at Stalingrad, desperation gave way to hatred and the desire for revenge. The troops that discovered the burial pits of Babi Yar and the death camps of Maidanek and Treblinka fell upon "accursed Germany" with an Old Testament fury. They wanted blood for blood.
There were other factors that steeled the Soviet will to resist and conquer. Patriotism, yes: a primeval love for rodina, the Motherland.
But more than that: for millions of soldiers, a lingering faith in the utopian ideals of Soviet Communism. Despite the purges that liquidated the last of Lenin's cadres, despite Stalin's betrayal of the Revolution's promise, millions believed in what might have been, and what could still be: something that can only be called socialism. Merridale is tempted to dismiss this faith as superficial, even absurd; but she concedes that it stiffened the resolve of many front-line fighters. She cites the example of one Mikhail Ivanovich, an infantry officer in an elite brigade whose faith sustained him on a forced march -- through 150 miles of icy swamps -- behind the Nazi lines. For those who called themselves comrades, Merridale writes,
Communism was a far cry from the theoretical manuscripts.
The soldiers put their faith in progress, in the collective, in
[the acquisition of military] skills. What they called Communist
belief was [faith in] the victory of a just cause over the darkness
. . . [a] victory that seemed to attest that this people could
never be enslaved.
In a letter to Alan Clark -- the author of Barbarossa, a magisterial history of the Russo-German war -- one Soviet veteran wrote of the inspiration that socialism offered:
Even those of us who knew that our government was wicked,
that there was little to choose between the SS and the NKVD
except their language, and who despised the hypocrisy of
Communist politics -- we felt that we must fight. Because
every Russian who had lived through the Revolution and
the thirties had felt a breeze of hope, for the first time in
the history of our people. We were like the bud at the tip
of a root which has wound its way for centuries under rocky
soil. We felt ourselves to be within inches of the open sky.
We knew that we would die, of course. But our children would
inherit two things: A land free of the invader; and Time, in which
the progressive ideals of Communism might emerge.
The Soviets fought superbly. Denied liberty themselves, they nevertheless helped to save the West from slavery and fascism. Denied any voice of their own, they yet preserved democracy -- and the prospect of a democratic socialism -- from a genocidal regime's devastation. -- Yoshie