1History 407/507 (seminar): USSR at War, 1939-1945 Time: Thursday, 2:00-4:50 p.m. Place: 475 McKenzie Hall Instructor: Alex Kashirin Office: 340X, McKenzie Hall Office Hours: to be announced Email: [email protected] The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the German onslaught and broke the back of German power. For years the western version of the war played down this uncomfortable fact, while exaggerating the success of democratic war-making. Richard Overy Seminar description: This is a seminar aiming at giving students a comprehensive understanding of an impact of total war on various strata of human society. Although the course’s readings focus on the USSR and its wartime experiences, significant attention is given to a broader international political context of the Second World War, the role of totalitarian ideologies as driving forces behind this colossal conflict, and the ongoing controversies surrounding diverse interpretations of various aspects of the war’s prosecution and legacy. One of the most revered objects of national pride for as many as ¾ of Russia’s population, WW II, has a bifurcated or two-dimensional character of being simultaneously a war of liberation and a war that helped perpetuate Stalin’s dictatorship and his suppression of liberty. Some historians argue that unlike the war commemoration in the West, emphasizing democratic values of anti-fascism and human freedom, defense of Western civilization and the legacy of Enlightenment and French Revolution, the Soviet version of commemoration focused primarily on the reborn national might of Russia, the regained grandeur of the Soviet state and the crucial role that Stalin and Communist Party played in leading Russia to victory. The memory of war, in other words, was hijacked by the Soviet establishment and used as the new source of regime’s legitimacy in place of the fading memory of Revolution and Civil War. The war memory in Russia has not been invoked to ensure ideals of democracy, freedom and active civic position. By uniting the values of socialism and nationalism on one hand and interpreting Nazism as the highest stage of capitalism on the other, the Soviet commemoration of the war downplayed the role of radical racism as the driving force of Nazism, diminished the tragedy of the Holocaust, and treated a wide variety of Soviet nationalities, with their unique wartime experiences, as one monolithic undifferentiated “unity of the Soviet People.” The spirit of freedom, citizen activism and shared responsibility that inspired the frontoviks (front soldiers) and partisans during the war was almost entirely eradicated from society’s memory because it contradicted the type of memory that the state sanctioned and generated. Patriotism—often a euphemism for nationalism—became the only context in which heroism of the Soviet people could be praised. For decades, the2wartime memory in the Soviet Union transmitted authoritarian values and a cult of the great power. The Soviet model of writing the Great Patriotic War’s history was indeed statist. It often intentionally overlooked the less palatable events and tended to reduce the remarkable diversity of war experiences in the East to one heroic struggle of the Soviet people under the competent leadership of the Communist Party. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered a new era of historical research by allowing specialist to tap into formerly inaccessible archival collections of war-related documents. Many surviving war veterans were also compelled to tell their “real” stories. New evidence predictably led to new challenging interpretations of the Great Patriotic War, which resulted in some of the ongoing controversies. Did the Second World War begin for the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, with Hitler’s perfidious assault across the Soviet western border, or in September of 1939, when the Red Army invaded and occupied Eastern Poland? How could the confident Red Army, with its 25,000 tanks, be so soundly beaten by Hitler’s Wehrmacht that invaded Russia with only 3,500 tanks? Was the Red Army really so unprepared for war and its weapons systems so obsolete compared to those of the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1941 as the Soviet historiography claimed for decades? How could it happen that some of the best Nazi Luftwaffe aces and Panzer corps commanders were trained in Soviet Russia? For what kind of war was Stalin preparing since 1929? How could Russia, reduced geographically and producing 3 to 4 times less coal and steel than Germany, build 3 to 4 times more armaments and war materiel and ultimately outgun its opponent? Why did the outgunned Germans continued to kill 4 Soviet soldiers to one of their own even as late as 1944-45? What prompted Western democracies to ally themselves with a mass murderer Stalin against a mass murderer Hitler? In 1941, Germany wielded the most advanced army in the world. What accounted for the rapid de-modernization of Hitler’s army in the East? What did people eat in the besieged Leningrad? Why do some Red Army veterans remember Stalin’s best general, Georgii Zhukov, as a “butcher” who spilt more soldiers’ blood than any other military leader in world history? Why were the Russian villagers often more afraid of their own partisans than they were of the German soldiers? Contemporary Western and Russian scholarship provides a fresh look at the war effort in the East. The main objective of this seminar is to familiarize students with the various aspects of life in the wartime Soviet Union, ranging from strategic planning and operational realities of war on the Eastern Front to soldiers’ eye-witness accounts of combat, and from experiences of home front workers turning out tanks under the open sky to Shostakovich composing his Seventh Symphony to the accompaniment of the German bombing of Leningrad. The students will also gain insight into the plight of national minorities—Poles, Jews, Western Ukrainians, Russian Germans—squeezed between the rock and the hard place in the occupation zones or forcibly relocated to Siberia or Kazakhstan. Since contemporary historiography of World War II poses more questions as it seeks to provide answers, there will be plenty of opportunity for individual research and in-class discussions. Readings will be selected to adequately highlight the listed aspects of the Soviet war effort, and the students will be