Recent Books
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The Stu of Soldiers: A History of the Red
Army in World War II Through Objects
BY BRANDON M. SCHECHTER.
Cornell University Press, 2019, 344 pp.Schechter looks at the Great Patriotic War
(as World War II is referred to in Russia)
through Soviet soldiers’ everyday objects
(spoons, spades, knapsacks, uniforms,
weapons, war trophies), with the aid o
their letters and diaries, wartime manu-
als, and postwar ¥ction and memoirs.
With this original approach—in itsel an
amazing achievement given the immense
literature in this historical ¥eld—Schech-
ter uses the material culture o the Red
Army to trace the makeover o Soviet life
and politics brought about by the war. The
story o pogony (shoulder boards) is a good
example o Schechter’s nimble analysis.
This feature o the military uniform was
discarded initially as a trapping o the
ancien régime, only to be reintroduced
during World War II. In Schechter’s view,
this shift illustrates the transformation o
the Soviet Union from a project o global
proletarian revolution into a nation
drawing on its history in defending the
motherland from a foreign enemy. For
the many millions o¤ Red Army soldiers
o dierent cultures and nationalities,
the everyday reliance on the same
government-issued gear was a unifying
experience, one that came to de¥ne the
Soviet Union until its eventual implosion.The Siberian Dilemma
BY MARTIN CRUZ SMITH. Simon &
Schuster, 2019, 288 pp.Back in 1981, Smith’s mystery novel
Gorky Park, set in the contemporary
Soviet Union, won him great success: it
became a bestseller and was later madecollaboration with Russian colleagues
became possible. Apart from Russian
historians, informants, and landlords,
however, Siegelbaum mentions almost no
encounters with the people o contempo-
rary Russia. A Russia that had “shed its
Sovietness and other-worldness” appar-
ently lost its attraction for him.
McAuley’s memoir, by contrast, is
strongly focused on the Russian people
and mentions her academic career only
in passing. When she came to Lenin-
grad as an Oxford student in the early
1960s to write a thesis on the settlement
o labor disputes in industrial enter-
prises, she immersed hersel deeply in
Soviet life and personal friendships.
She spent a lot o time in conversation
with her Russian friends, shared the
hardships o daily Soviet life, went
camping, and attended drunken parties.
In the early 1990s, she ventured into
buying an apartment—just as the Soviet
housing system was opening up to
private real estate. She tells the story o
the Soviet Union and modern Russia
through the experiences o her close
friends: the hopes and dreams o the
thaw that took place under Nikita
Khrushchev, the dullness and demoral-
ization o stagnation under Leonid
Brezhnev, the enthusiasm o¤ Mikhail
Gorbachev’s perestroika, and the
sweeping and often shocking transfor-
mations o post-Soviet Russia. Her
deep embeddedness in Russian life has
never interfered with her position as a
shrewd outside observer: in the early
1990s, when so many ¥rmly believed
that Russia was on the way to democ-
racy, she noted the low interest in
politics, the lack o political language,
the naive belie in the market, and the
persistence o Soviet practices.