Submitted by jeepgypsy, Sep 10, 2007 15:05

I wish a less subjective reviewer had written this piece. Mr. Kirsch frets throughout that Davies' alleged lack of objectivity and minor digressions stain the empiricism of his book, while at the end of his review, his own self-righteous counterfactualism smacks us sour with charges of America's "racism" against the Japanese. I might remind Mr. Kirsch that WWII didn't start with the invasion of Poland as he infers, rather it began with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, where 11 million Chinese untermensch would eventually meet a fate every bit as horrible and "racist" as that suffered by death camp inmates in Poland. Further (and hypocritically) Kirsch suffers a mighty digression of his own in preachifying over the atomic bombings, incidents having zero relevance to Davies' book or to the war in Eastern Europe.

At any rate, having just read Catherine Merridale's "Ivan's War" and "Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia", I'm woefully aware of the amnesia we suffer regarding the scope of human suffering in Eastern Europe during WWII. The problem though, as Merridale points out time and again in "Ivan's War", is that if this state of amnesia is problematic in the West, it's downright epidemic in Russia. If WWII is remembered as "the good war" in the West, it's remembered as "the great (patriotic) war" in the Slavic consciousness. Nazi crimes are holy tenets; Soviet crimes are clouded myths.

Even so, as sympathetic as Davies might be to the horrors of the Eastern Front, his book will no doubt find a cool reception in Russia. He doesn't help himself by telling his readers that Stalin authorized the execution of 800,000 soldiers in the first year of the war. Though I don't doubt the number, I've never before seen so high a tally mentioned in the Eastern Front corpus of literature, so I'm looking forward to ordering the book and checking his sources. Perhaps he includes the "punishment battalions" in this figure, military units of 800 - 1000 men used for frontal attacks, that in many cases never had a single survivor.

Somewhere on the web is a very telling English-language article by a Moscow journalist regarding the movie "Enemy at the Gates". Shot in what used to be East Germany, it was the most expensive non-American movie ever made. The film is loosely based on William Craig's book of the same name, a chronicle of the Battle of Stalingrad, a book I regard at the top of the heap of Eastern Front war histories. Craig relates that huge mounds of Red Army corpses -tens of thousands of dead soldiers- were stacked on the eastern bank of the Volga River, one of the mounds being four stories high. All of these soldiers were shot by Soviet commissars for crimes of cowardice, desertion, back talking, theft of rations, looting, etc. The movie illustrates this aspect of the battle, though it plays down the numbers considerably. That didn't matter to residents of Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad) when the movie opened there. Showing communist ideologues gunning down Red Army troops is still an unbreachable taboo in Russia. Even in "Stalingrad", the movie ended up grossing less than a single week's rental fee in a good sized American mall theater. People, even victims of the most heinous regimes, believe what they want to believe, and they refuse to acknowledge everything else.

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