From the cockpit of a MIG to the foot soldiers and tankers on the scarred, bloody battlefields to the four-star general commanding the attack, Red Army is a riveting portrayal of modern war--and of human strengths and weaknesses. Seen entirely through Russian eyes, this extraordinary novel is destined to become a classic.

In a definitive new account of the Soviet Union at war, Alexander Hill charts the development, successes and failures of the Red Army from the industrialisation of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s through to the end of the Great Patriotic War in May 1945. Setting military strategy and operations within a broader context that includes national mobilisation on a staggering scale, the book presents a comprehensive account of the origins and course of the war from the perspective of this key Allied power. Drawing on the latest archival research and a wealth of eyewitness testimony, Hill portrays the Red Army at war from the perspective of senior leaders and men and women at the front line to reveal how the Red Army triumphed over the forces of Nazi Germany and her allies on the Eastern Front, and why it did so at such great cost.

The Stuff of Soldiers uses everyday objects to tell the story of the Great Patriotic War as never before. Brandon M. Schechter attends to a diverse array of things—from spoons to tanks—to show how a wide array of citizens became soldiers, and how the provisioning of material goods separated soldiers from civilians. Through a fascinating examination of leaflets, proclamations, newspapers, manuals, letters to and from the front, diaries, and interviews, The Stuff of Soldiers reveals how the use of everyday items made it possible to wage war. The dazzling range of documents showcases ethnic diversity, women's particular problems at the front, and vivid descriptions of violence and looting. Each chapter features a series of related objects: weapons, uniforms, rations, and even the knick-knacks in a soldier's rucksack. These objects narrate the experience of people at war, illuminating the changes taking place in Soviet society over the course of the most destructive conflict in recorded history. Schechter argues that spoons, shovels, belts, and watches held as much meaning to the waging of war as guns and tanks. In The Stuff of Soldiers, he describes the transformative potential of material things to create a modern culture, citizen, and soldier during World War II.

On June 11, 1937, a closed military court ordered the execution of a group of the Soviet Union's most talented and experienced army officers, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii; all were charged with participating in a Nazi plot to overthrow the regime of Joseph Stalin. There followed a massive military purge, from the officer corps through the rank-and-file, that many consider a major factor in the Red Army's dismal performance in confronting the German invasion of June 1941. Why take such action on the eve of a major war? The most common theory has Stalin fabricating a "military conspiracy" to tighten his control over the Soviet state. In The Red Army and the Great Terror, Peter Whitewood advances an entirely new explanation for Stalin's actions—an explanation with the potential to unlock the mysteries that still surround the Great Terror, the surge of political repression in the late 1930s in which over one million Soviet people were imprisoned in labor camps and over 750,000 executed. Framing his study within the context of Soviet civil-military relations dating back to the 1917 revolution, Whitewood shows that Stalin sanctioned this attack on the Red Army not from a position of confidence and strength, but from one of weakness and misperception. Here we see how Stalin's views had been poisoned by the paranoid accusations of his secret police, who saw spies and supporters of the dead Tsar everywhere and who had long believed that the Red Army was vulnerable to infiltration by foreign intelligence agencies engaged in a conspiracy against the Soviet state. Recently opened Russian archives allow Whitewood to counter the accounts of Soviet defectors and conspiracy theories that have long underpinned conventional wisdom on the military purge. By broadening our view, The Red Army and the Great Terror demonstrates not only why Tukhachevskii and his associates were purged in 1937, but also why tens of thousands of other officers and soldiers were discharged and arrested at the same time. With its thorough reassessment of these events, the book sheds new light on the nature of power, state violence, and civil-military relations under the Stalinist regime.

My Life in the Red Army chronicles Polish 19-year old Fred Virski's experiences as a drafted soldier in the Russian army during World War 2. With a wry tone rarely seen in a combat memoir, Virski describes the hardships, the near-starvation rations, the inadequate clothing, and his tense interactions with officers and agents of the NKVD (secret police). He is wounded twice; earns a Medal of Valor (which he later loses for insubordination); witnesses (and survives) atrocities committed by both the Germans and the Soviets; is branded a deserter; and somehow finds time to fall in love. A testimony to the will of the human spirit in face of impossible odds, My Life in the Red Army is a must read for fans of World War 2 biographies.

The opening of the former Soviet Union to the West over the past three years has made accessible, for the first time, much new material on the Red Army of the Great Patriotic War - the huge and varied forces which won some of the greatest battles of World War II against the German invasion. This book contains a range of rare, authentic uniforms modelled and photographed in Moscow: tank commanders and generals, assault infantry and women medics, pilots and NKVD security officers, artillerymen, camouflaged scouts, and many more. The photographs are backed-up by close-ups of insignia and personal equipment.

The emergence of the military agency of the Soviet state is a crucial but neglected aspect of inter-war Soviet history, and in this pioneering study Francesco Benvenuti provides a detailed analysis of the politics (as opposed to the operational activities) of the Red Army during the Civil War. Several historians have suggested that the roots of Stalinism may be found in the Bolshevik experience during the Civil War, and Benvenuti shows that the military opposition inside the party was much stronger than conventionally supposed: Trotsky's subsequent political weakness owed much to his ruthless pursuit of military goals not always in direct harmony with party interests, as did his technocratic attempts to extend the role of specialist advisers at the expense of party officials.

Stalin’s Red Army entered World War II as a relatively untried fighting force. In 1941, with the launch of Operation Barbarossa, it joined battle with Hitler’s army, the most powerful in history. After a desperate war of attrition over four years, the Red Army beat the Nazis into defeat on the Eastern Front and won lasting fame and glory in 1945 by eclipsing the military might of the Third Reich. This book begins with a review of the historical background of the Red Army in the years leading up to the outbreak of war in 1939, and follows with a discussion of the major themes in the development of Soviet forces during the "Great Patriotic War" that ensued in 1941. The Red Army’s organizational structures are examined, from high command down to divisional level and below; Soviet combat arms and weaponry are also described in detail.

On first publication, this uncommonly concise and readable account of Soviet Russia's clash with Nazi Germany utterly changed our understanding of World War II on Germany’s Eastern Front, immediately earning its place among top-shelf histories of the world war. Revised and updated to reflect recent Russian and Western scholarship on the subject, much of it the authors' own work, this new edition maintains the 1995 original's distinction as a crucial volume in the history of World War II and of the Soviet Union and the most informed and compelling perspective on one of the greatest military confrontations of all time. In 1941, when Pearl Harbor shattered America's peacetime pretensions, the German blitzkrieg had already blasted the Red Army back to Moscow. Yet, less than four years later, the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flew above the ruins of Berlin, stark symbol of a miraculous comeback that destroyed the Germany Army and put an end to Hitler's imperial designs. In swift and stirring prose, When Titans Clash provides the clearest, most complete account of this epic struggle, especially from the Soviet perspective. Drawing on the massive and unprecedented release of Soviet archival documents in recent decades, David Glantz, one of the world's foremost authorities on the Soviet military, and noted military historian Jonathan House expand and elaborate our picture of the Soviet war effort—a picture sharply different from accounts that emphasize Hitler's failed leadership over Soviet strategy and might. Rafts of newly available official directives, orders, and reports reveal the true nature and extraordinary scale of Soviet military operations as they swept across the one thousand miles from Moscow to Berlin, featuring stubborn defenses and monumental offensives and counteroffensives and ultimately costing the two sides combined a staggering twenty million casualties. Placing the war within its wider context, the authors also make use of recent revelations to clarify further the political, economic, and social issues that influenced and reflected what happened on the battlefield. Their work gives us new insight into Stalin's political motivation and Adolf Hitler’s role as warlord, as well as a better understanding of the human and economic costs of the war—for both the Soviet Union and Germany. While incorporating a wealth of new information, When Titans Clashed remains remarkably compact, a tribute to the authors' determination to make this critical chapter in world history as accessible as it is essential.

Displaying a sure sense of craft and a sharp facility for linking personal experience to the public realms of history and politics, Jehanne Dubrow’s Red Army Red chronicles the coming of age of a child of American diplomats in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. In the last moments of the Cold War, Poland—the setting for many of the poems—lurches fitfully from a society characterized by hardship and deprivation toward a free-market economy. The contradictions and turmoil generated by this transition are the context in which an adolescent girl awakens to her sexuality. With wit and subtlety, Dubrow makes apparent the parallels between the body and the body politic, between the fulfillment of individual and collective desires.