Russia's War By Richard Overy

Amazon.com Review
As German armies stampeded through the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Nazi politicians and Western statesmen alike predicted the USSR's collapse. In Russia's War, a balanced and acute portrayal of a combat theater that claimed more than 40 million Soviet lives, Richard Overy tells the story of how Stalin and his commanders held off defeat and engineered the most significant military achievement of the Second World War: the destruction of the Wehrmacht.
Russia's War is far from a tale of triumph, as the Russian capacity for resourceful creativity, desperate courage, and raw endurance was matched, if not exceeded, by the brutal oppression of the Soviet system. Overy argues, however, that victory was the result of precisely this uneasy combination. Drawing from extensive archival sources made available in the wake of glasnost, he revises both our conception of the Red Army as a horde that overwhelmed the Germans and the accepted wisdom that Hitler's defeat was the result of strategic bungling and a logistical overreach of the Nazi forces. Perhaps his most poignant contribution is the discussion of the crisis that recent disclosures have provoked in the Russian understanding of the conflict. What was once viewed by the Soviets as the "Great Patriotic War" has become "a crucible of miserable and incomprehensible revelations." In spite of these confusions, Russia's War commences to find significance in a contest that repeatedly disquiets and humbles the historical imagination. –James Highfill

Review
This turns the long-received Stalinist myths about how the war between Stalin and Hitler was fought on its head. It establishes that Stalin, after a catastrophic start, handed the conduct of operations over to the generals, Zhukov above all. It also explains how very much harsher the war in the east was than anything the British, or still less the Americans, had to go through. A most admirable book that makes an excellent foil to Beevor's bestselling Stalingrad for it puts the titanic struggle in its full strategic context. (Kirkus UK)

49 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
Interesting Overview of Russia's Defeat of Nazi War Machine!, May 18, 2000
By Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews


I am a confirmed fan of Overy's work, especially after reading his tome on "Why the Allies Won", in which he carefully examines the real reasons the Allies succeeded in a war that was much more closely contested than many observers appreciate. Here he concentrates on what has to be considered the most unlikely reversal of fortune in 20th century war history, the catastrophic yet also heroically successful defense, repulsion, and vanquishing of the Wehrmacht along a war front that was literally thousands of miles long. Against all odds, losing army after army in the prosecution of the war, with millions of combatants and non-combatants killed, woundeded, or captured from the moment of the opening salvos in the summer and fall of 1941, the Russians' capacity for absorbing unrelenting and murderous punishment at the hands of the brutal assaults of a supremely confident and well-equipped Nazi army stunned the world.
By every account Hitler made exactly the right move at the right time; he had just whipped the French and British armies in western Europe without raising a sweat. Just months before the invasion the Russians had been stopped successfully and quite unexpectedly by a much smaller and more poorly equipped Finn army. Thus, no one expected the Russian army to be able to stop or stem the smashing successes of the Germans some 200 divisions strong as they literally flooded through Poland into Russia in Operation Barbarossa, destroying everything in sight. Yet, with unbelievable determination and equally incomprehensible losses, the Russians eventually began to halt the Wehrmacht advance. Finally, with newly established and quickly trained armies raised even as the Nazis drew near Moscow, Stalin and his armies began the long, tortuous, and painstaking turnaround that eventually helped to save the world. That they did so is without question an accurate summation of the situation. Throughout 1941, 1942, and 1943 the rest of the Allies were simply in no position to seriously challenge Hitler's stranglehold in Europe.

It is clear that without the Soviet prosecution of the war along the Eastern front, an Allied invasion of Europe would have been much more difficult, if not impossible. The war would have been extended by years. Yet the story Overy tells here is not a simple story of unexpected Soviet courage and success in the face of unbelievable odds; it is also a tale that details decades of wanton brutality within Russia itself, a nation hampered by its own trail of wave upon wave of murderous progroms and purges. The antiquated Soviet army was so devastated by the systematic extermination of the upper echelons of the Officer core that almost no one with any combat experience remained in leadership positions by the time the German blitzkreig began. Under such circumstances, the ability of the Russians to stem the tide of battle and turn it to their advantage becomes a much more interesting and complicated phenomenon to watch and understand. This is a carefully crafted and well-documented narrative that deserves your studious attention. For any serious student of the second world war, this book is a must-read. Enjoy!

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36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
Balanced and readable account of the Soviet WWII experience, September 19, 1998
By michael.gruenenfelder@email.com (St. Gallen, Switzerland) - See all my reviews

Richard Overy is a professor of modern history at King's College, London. His "Russia's War" is to my (limited) knowledge the first account of the second world war from a Soviet perspecive after the opening of Russian archives. The book is notable for three reasons:
1. Overy's history finely balances detail and overview. He neither clutters the story with endless tales of carnage and missery nor is the brutal horror, unleashed by the Nazi aggressors as well as the Soviets' own regime, missing from the book. On the strategic level, Richard Overy manages to make the reader grasp the few really decisive campaigns in this long and complicated conflict.

2. The key Soviet players come to live. It's not just Stalin (on whom he offers insights, which were new to me) or Georgi Zhukov but also the second tier of national and military leaders. The human side of the Soviet key players and the psychological climate in the Soviet Union comes back to life. He shows what Stalin, Zhukov and the others did to reverse the odds within 18 months.

3. The book doesn't start on 22 June, 1941 and ends on 9 May, 1945. Richard Overy devotes a substantial part of the book to the civil war and the period leading up to the war in Europe. He dicusses to early problems of the regime in the Soviet Union, the foreign aggression against them (e.g. Poland's invasion of Soviet territory in 1920) and the terror of the Stalinist regime before the war which consumed the lives of many millions of Russians, Ukrainians and other nationalities. Also, he describes the immediate period after the war, when Ukrainian rebels continued a bloody campaign into the Fifties.

Last but not least I would like to mention the moderate price. It's imperative reading for the professional historian as well as anybody interested in the subject. Very recommendable indeed!

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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
All There, but Something's Missing, August 14, 2000
By A Customer

In his introduction to Russia's War the author notes: "In twenty years' time it may be possible at last to write something approaching a definitive history. Current writing has a provisional air to it, and this book is no exception." Therein lies the problem for the reader wishing to devote one books worth of reading time to arguably one of the most important historical events of the last hundred years. Where should one start?
Overy himself recognizes the contributions of John Erickson and David Glantz, "who have done more than any other Western scholars to communicate to the non-Russian world the fruits of Soviet and post-Soviet research". Knowing this I assembled the following list of candidates: Russia's War (1997) by Overy, When Titans Clashed (1995) by Glantz and House, The Road to Stalingrad (1975) and The Road to Berlin (1983) by Erickson, and the classic Russia at War 1941-1945 (1964) by Alexander Werth (who was a correspondent in the Soviet Union from 1941-1948). While I was considering my decision I encountered an exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books between Anthony Beevor, author of Stalingrad, and a reviewer over the accuracy of his book in light of recent work by Glantz. In the end I chose Russia's War. If there was no definitive work at least I wanted the book that had access to the latest sources.

First the positive. Overy is very good at bringing recent evidence to controversial and muddied (often by Stalinist and Soviet propaganda) issues. An example is the effect of Lend Lease. For years its importance was denied. Overy notes a bugged conversation of Marshall Zhukov recorded in 1963 but released in 1993. Here, according to Overy, Zhukov "endorsed" the view that without Lend Lease the Soviet Union 'could not have continued the war'. He is also good at identifying where there are holes in the evidence, making possible only tentative conclusions or future mysteries to be solved.

Another strength is the scope of the book. The coverage is vast. He literally seems to deal with everything. Particularly valuable are the last chapter, The Cult of Personality: Stalin and the Legacy of the War, and the epilogue, Russia's War: Myth and Reality. By continuing the story past 1945, after having started the story during Civil War, Overy situates Russia's War in the middle of our historical consciousness and it is here that I begin to have a problem.

One of the reason I would recommend that everyone study this war is its shear horror and the magnitude of that horror. There are certainly heroic actions and temporary heroes but in the end everyone is doomed: the fascists and the communists, the losers and the winners, the guilty and the innocent. Most of all it is the ordinary people: the Poles, the Jews, the Ukrainians, the other Nationalities, the Germans. the Russians. There was no place to hide. After the war, Stalin actually purged the generals who won the war.

All this is included. But I can't help feeling that something is missing. The wealth of information often seems like it is being presented by an accountant. The human element seems lost. Perhaps it's unfair to ask this of the author when he's done so much. Perhaps I've just become numb. Secondly, there was one survivor: Stalin. Though detailing many of individual events of his reign of terror, Overy refuses to connect the dots. Stalin's presence looms so large that the book could have been called Stalin's War or Stalin's Russia, yet we are left to draw our own conclusions, search for our own meaning.

Overall this is a good book. I don't know if there is a better one available. I will certainly use its fine notes and bibliography as a reference. But I will continue to look at the other candidates on my list for greater understanding and to see if it's possible for a non-fiction work on this subject to do what I have asked it to do. I will also turn to Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Written by 1960 and finally published in the Soviet Union in 1988, Overy calls it "one of the greatest novels on war in any language". Maybe here I will find what seems to be missing.

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