Vatunin isn’t as well known in the West as he ought to be. His record at the 1943 Battle of Kursk and the subsequent liberation of southern Russia and eastern Ukraine from the Germans is an impressive one. Vatunin’s problem is that he died during the war, and as a result left no memoirs and played no role in the shaping of the war’s history in the way that comparable figures like Aleksandr Vasilevskii or Sergei Shtemenko could.

What the article focuses on, though, is Vatutin’s role as an “inconvenient [neudobnyi] general,” one who stood up to the country’s misguided political leadership on the eve of war. While this is an interpretation with obvious resonance in current circumstances of Russian military reforms that are opposed by the bulk of the high command, it’s not clear to me what grounds there are for this judgment in the historical record.

Vatutin’s rise to prominence postdated the 1937 purges, and so he didn’t have much opportunity to say anything especially controversial until 1938. While he did participate in the Main Military Council (the Soviet military’s collective deliberative body) in the pre-war years, it’s not clear that he said or did anything especially noteworthy. The Voice of Russia article cites Mikhail Miagkov to claim that Vatutin, not Georgii Zhukov, was the major force behind the May 1941 idea of a spoiling attack to disrupt Hitler’s obvious preparations for an invasion of the Soviet Union. This likewise seems to me to lack much foundation. Vatutin here seems to be useful as a man who spoke truth to power, and then conveniently died. To credit Zhukov as the real force urging more active measures against the Germans would bring in all sorts of complications with Zhukov’s subsequent political career.

What struck me, though, was how little the article made of the circumstances of Vatutin’s death. He was ambushed by Ukrainian nationalist partisans in early 1944, and died of his wounds in hospital. While the article certainly mentions this fact, it does little with it. Given the Kremlin’s current preoccupation with East European nationalist movements, and its tendency to label as “falsification” any history that sympathizes with them against the Soviets, this was a missed opportunity to lambast the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

This is not to say I have “editor’s remorse.” As I’ve said previously (and actually meant), I’m delighted with the quality of the chapters in the book. But when you hear about new research, it’s hard not to wish for a chance to find some way to get exciting results in. I’ll cross my fingers and hope for a paperback edition.

One panel in particular had a lot of new material. While Peter Waldron focused on World War I (discussed elsewhere), other papers brought in new and exciting research on World War II.

Donald Filtzer looked at the phenomenon of deprivation and death among the Soviet population, but as a social historian with access to reams of statistical information. We tend to throw around numbers on excess deaths, but given the enormous demographic shifts in the wartime Soviet Union, it’s hard to get a good handle on what was really happening to the population. Teasing out the difference between death from disease and death from malnutrition is quite difficult. Filtzer’s approach is to look at reams of mortality data from Soviet cities during the war. This mortality data is as problematic as you might expect. Lots of deaths took place without much inquiry from medical professionals, so the proportion of causes of death attributed to “other” skyrocketed during the war. Can we make sense of this?

Filtzer argued that though malnutrition can mimic the wasting of tuberculosis (endemic in the Soviet Union), malnutrition can also unleash a previously dormant case of tuberculosis. By combining figures for tuberculosis mortality with “other” mortality, and comparing that to those mortality levels before the war, we can get a reasonable sense of malnutrition-related deaths.

OK–but besides satisfying morbid curiosity, what do we learn? Well, Filtzer finds some intriguing patterns in the data. In the first year or so of the war, malnutrition killed vulnerable populations: children, the elderly, inmates of the Gulag. By 1943, though, starvation was killing males of working age in large numbers, far more than females. This leads to a couple of follow-up questions. One was asked at the panel: could it be that healthy adult males were in the Red Army, leaving the weak and sickly males on the home front to die disproportionately from malnutrition? Of course, it’s sobering to think just how sick someone would have to be to NOT make the Red Army’s standards, given enormous manpower losses. My question is slightly different: evidence from other cases of hunger (like, for example, the Donner party) suggests that women are more resistant to starvation than men; is that what we’re seeing here? We’ll have a better sense with Filtzer’s full results.

Brandon Schechter, a graduate student at Berkeley, looked at the material culture of daily life in the Red Army during World War II. This is something that really hasn’t been done before–we have a good sense, much like the Soviet leadership did, of the big, glamorous items of supply like tanks and aircraft. We have much less sense of mundane issues like uniforms and canteens. Some of what Schechter finds isn’t surprising, either in the specific Soviet experience or cross-culturally: food was vital to morale, for example, and scrounging, improvisation, and theft were quite common.

Other findings are newer and more startling. I didn’t know, for example, that Soviet soldiers carried glass canteens (with concomitant problems of weight and breakage) until very late in the war. The Soviet military initially focused on providing soldiers with high-calorie, low-bulk food that kept them fighting but made them unhappy. Soviet soldiers perceived a clear improvement in the provision of supplies over the course of the war.

My question to Schechter was, given the scale of Soviet pre-war maneuvers, and the Soviet experience of campaigns in Eastern Poland, Manchuria, and Finland, why were there such difficulties of supply in 1941? Was it the purges, the defeats and retreats or 1941, or something else? Schechter suggested that it was a combination of circumstances (distance and destruction), together with the Red Army’s decision to tie itself to field kitchens to keep its soldiers fighting, contrary to the American model of extensive preserved rations to enable soldiers to fight for at least some time without being bound to food supplies from the rear.

Finally, over lunch with Scott Palmer, GlavKom of this blog, I heard a great deal about his upcoming project on technology in Russian history. Of all the chapters that ought to be in the book but aren’t, I’d put science and technology at the top of the list. In part, that omission was a result of the lack of a lot of literature out there on those questions for the wartime years. Palmer’s book promises to be an excellent step in that direction. Perhaps he can be persuaded to share some ideas in this forum.

Here’s the question: where in the piece is there a single specific example of a myth about the war that Russian historians have shattered? I say this not to demean the work of Russian historians, many of whom are doing fine research. I say it to point out a recurring aspect of Russian official and semi-official discourse on World War II, which is that it is plagued by evil-doing historians who mythologize and falsify the war. There’s never any specific indication of who exactly it is that is doing these terrible things, or of what exactly it is they say that is so awful and wrong.

Putin condemns “any falsifications, any distortions of the history of World War II” as “a personal insult, a sacrilege.” As has become increasingly clear, though, these ritual denunciations of falsification don’t ever actually name individual falsifiers or specify what exactly it is that they have falsified. What had me excited about this message from Putin was the chance to get his sense of who’s doing good history. Sad to say, that opportunity was missed. Putin didn’t name any actual historians, Russian or Western, who are working on the war.

Instead, he suggests novels, all written under the Soviets. This isn’t necessarily bad advice, and he’s not suggesting bad books: Russians certainly know how to write novels, and even the Soviet Union couldn’t quash that. Nonetheless, the authors and books he recommends are quite instructive.

The names Putin gives us are standard figures in the Soviet pantheon of literature, who wrote books on the war that were perfectly politically correct: Konstantin Simonov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Boris Vasiliev, Konstantin Vorobiev, and in particular Vladimir Bogomolov. Bogomolov was a veteran of Soviet military counterintelligence (though there’s some controversy over his military service), and the book that Putin recommends (Moment of Truth, also known as In August 1944) glorifies the work of Smersh (Death to Spies) in restoring Soviet rule in liberated territory.

Two names leap out by their absence: Viktor Nekrasov and Vasilii Grossman. I’ve done no survey, but my sense is that if you asked people who really know literature about the best work to come out of the Great Fatherland War, Nekrasov and Grossman would be the first mentioned. So why doesn’t Putin mention them? I can’t speak for him, but Nekrasov ended up expelled from the Soviet Union and stripped of his citizenship, while Grossman couldn’t get his masterwork Life and Fate published because of the uncomfortable parallels he drew between Nazism and Stalinism. It certainly seems as though Vladimir Putin isn’t comfortable with writers who aren’t comfortable with the Soviet system.

Editing a book can be a real chore, but in this case I’ve been delighted by the quality of contributors and by how easy they’ve been to work with. I truly could not ask for a better team.

We have Richard Bidlack of Washington & Lee on public opinion and propaganda, and Nicholas Ganson of Holy Cross on food supply and living standards. Nick’s the junior member of our team, but has a new book out on the 1947 famine.

Mark Harrison, University of Warwick, takes on industry and the economy, Jean Levesque of the University of Quebec-Montreal looks at agriculture and the countryside, and Reina Pennington of Norwich University covers women. Jeremy Smith, late of the University of Birmingham and now of the Karelian Institute of the University of Eastern Finland, discusses non-Russian nationalities, and Kenneth Slepyan of Transylvania University takes the partisan movement. Finally, I have a chapter on the Red Army as an institution.

You’ll have to take my word for it, and I’m certainly a biased observer, but the quality of the chapters in uniformly high, and Pen & Sword has come through with a spectacular cover and a number of nice photographs. I’m sure you’re all looking for good holiday gifts . . .

UPDATE: US distributor for the book is Casemate Publishers, which at present has a distribution date in February 2011. It shouldn’t in fact take that long.

The MinMassComm isn’t the only Russian state agency sponsoring a site devoted to the War. The Ministry of Defense also has one of its own. Titled “Feat of the People,” this new(ish) site aims: “to perpetuate the memory of all the Wars’  heroes – irrespective of rank, scale of exploit, or award status; to educate youth concerning the military valor of their forefathers; and to provide a documentary base for counteracting attempts the falsification of World War II history” by creating a digital database of the 30 million military awards given out during the conflict together with archival documents relating to wartime military operations.

As with the “Chronicle of Victory,” non-Russian speakers are a bit out of luck. Although an “English” button is available on the site, it only translates the site’s anchor page and navigational bar.

To the outside observer, this would sound like two opposed organizations. This being Russia, of course, appearances can be deceiving. Only a few of the speeches and statements have been released, but what’s available so far suggests that there was much more about openness and access than there was about secrecy. Being generally bitter and cynical by nature, I was expecting only boilerplate (and there was, to be sure, plenty of that), but there was a remarkable amount of substantive information on offer. In particular, historians of Russia owe it to themselves to read the speech of Rosarkhiv head A. N. Artizov in full.

Chair of the meeting was S. E. Naryshkin, head of Medvedev’s Presidential Administration. His remarks were quite brief, and opened with a very vague set of goals for the meeting: “perspectives on the development of archival affairs, working out and realization of a series of measures directed at supporting a just and objective representation of Russian history.” This is, of course, not especially enlightening.

It did get better though. Naryshkin conceded that the falsification and anti-Russian history that Russian political leaders have been getting so worked up about are largely the result of bad access to documents. In Naryshkin’s words, “lack or inaccessibility of information becomes the condition and reason for falsification.” This makes the most important step “further declassification of archival documents.”

Naryshkin also set priorities for the Russian archival system. His first was electronic access–both the preservation of newly-generated electronic documents (not a big deal for most historians, at least not now) and improving electronic access to existing collections.

Next came access to documents, in which Naryshkin actually referred to the “society’s right of free access to information.” This was immediately followed by a qualification to “strictly provide for the security of the state and respect the rights of citizens,” but the very idea of treating access to archival information as a right, even if phrased in social rather than individual terms, is a major step.

A. N. Artizov’s speech was much heavier on concrete information. He noted the particular problems Russian archives face: finding qualified staff, and coping with the mass of records created by the totalizing nature of the Soviet state. Nonetheless, he touted the achievements of Russian archives in the last few years, including declassification and scholarly publication. Scans of key documents on the Katyn massacre achieved two million hits per day when made available to the public.

Veterans of reading rooms know that many of the people there are seeking to document the work or military service records of themselves or their relatives. Rosarkhiv has a new website where such inquiries can be submitted electronically. Historians of limited time and unlimited funding should note the ability to submit thematic requests for information as a paid service.

Thanks to Artizov, fans of the political use of history can look forward to a document collection that Artizov has promised will be coming soon: “the collaboration of Ukrainian nationalists with the Nazis”

Artizov had quite a bit to say about declassification. He cited 10 million files declassified since 1991, but noted how slow and labor-intensive the process is. He claimed that 1.7 million files remain classified, 1.1 million of those Communist Party or USSR government files. I should note that those numbers sound low to me. They could be true, I suppose, if they exclude some very important archives that are outside the Rosarkhiv system: the military, the foreign ministry, and the security services.

New files come in to the Rosarkhiv system at the rate of 1.5 million per year. Most notably, Artizov says the Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev fonds have all been transferred from the Kremlin’s Presidential Archive to Rosarkhiv. The bulk of the remaining Politburo archive will make the same transfer in 2010-12. Transfer doesn’t mean declassification, of course, but certainly the move from presidential to archivist hands is a good thing for researchers.

Artizov also gave some updated information on the major World War II archive that he discussed back in March. I was skeptical of this on practical and scholarly grounds, and remain so. Artizov is remarkably specific, though, which suggests that efforts proceed apace to make this archive happen. The plan for the new archive is to build it on the grounds of the existing Ministry of Defense Archive in Podol’sk. While this will certainly make the physical transfer of MoD records much simpler, it makes life much tougher for foreign researchers, who will be faced with the unenviable choices of either taking a daily elektrichka trek out from Moscow, or living all the way out in Podol’sk.

Fortunately, this situation is about to change. Late next month, Routledge publishers will make its 2009 release The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941-1945: A Documentary Reader by Alexander Hill (Associate Professor of Military History, University of Calgary) available in a handy paperback edition.

Hill’s edited volume contains documents covering wide-ranging aspects of the Soviet military experience: from pre-War diplomacy and preparations, through the debacle of 1941, to the Fall of Berlin and invasion of Manchuria. Separate chapters covering the Siege of Leningrad, Lend-Lease and the Economy, and the Partisan movement round out the volume. The collection is accompanied by Hill’s expert commentary and suggestions for further readings.

The book is an ideal supplement for individuals interested in the documentary history the Soviet war effort. And it makes a terrific companion text for courses devoted to the Second World War.

To pre-order your copy directly from Routledge, just click on the link above.

Our GlavKom Scott Palmer will be delighted to know that the Rodina-mat’ monument in Volgograd is an easy winner for the most significant symbol of victory.

VTsIOM also surveyed turning points in the war. Russians were asked what they considered to be a decisive moment in the Great Fatherland War, and the moment in the Great Fatherland War. Stalingrad wins both: 68% of Russians saw it as a decisive moment, and 31% as the turning point of the war. Kursk and Moscow essentially tied for second place in both circumstances, as Kursk scored 49% as a decisive moment and 17% as the turning point; Moscow got 46% and 15%.

That surprises me to some degree. I’m not surprised at all to see Stalingrad winning, though my own inclination would be to see Moscow as the most significant moment, an issue that we can perhaps argue about in the comments. Finding Kursk in 2nd is odd, though I’ve been aware that it looms far larger in the Russian consciousness than in the Western. I’m not sure what to make of that. Back during perestroika, Duma member and former Deputy Minister of Defense Andrei Kokoshin argued for the importance of the battle of Kursk as showing the viability of a fundamentally defensive strategy, though it’s hard to imagine that view affecting the general public. I also note that Operation Bagration–the destruction of Army Group Center in Belorussia in summer 1944–only rates 4% as a significant moment, well below the breaking of the Leningrad blockade (34%), the taking of Berlin (13%), and tied with the Rzhev operation [?!?!?!?].

There’s also a pattern in the data: young people are significantly less likely than older people to see any of the big events of the war as decisive–74% of those over 60 see Stalingrad as a decisive moment; only 58% of those 18-24. The sole exception is Moscow, where there is no drop-off by age. I think can be attributed to ignorance–Moscow is important now, one might think, and so it must have been important then. The youngest cohort is by far the most likely (14%) to fail to name a single decisive moment in the war.

What about the question of ignorance? One of the ways VTsIOM measures this is by asking people to name hero-cities.

This is a task I would fail miserably. I’d have no trouble with the obvious ones–Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad–but then I’d start thinking too much. Kursk? Big battle, but it wasn’t actually fought that close to the city itself . . . . Brest-Litovsk? More a fortress than a city, but I’m pretty sure I remember it from the Aleksandrovskii Garden outside the Kremlin . . . No way I’d get Kerch or Novorossiisk. The oddity here is that despite Stalingrad’s centrality to Russian memories of the war, it’s only mentioned by 45% of the respondents as a hero-city; Moscow (59%) and Leningrad (57%) both beat it.

In terms of more substantive knowledge of the basic facts of the war, I was not able to find detailed breakdowns on VTsIOM’s website, so I’m going by the summaries available here.

First, it’s reassuring to know that Russians are clear (88%) that Germany started the war, and only 1% blame the US.

The good folks at VTsIOM are bothered that only 22% percent of Russians can name the correct start date of World War II (1939), and the bulk of the rest, 58%, name 1941. That one doesn’t bother me so much, and I would imagine you’d get very similar answers from an American audience. For Americans and Soviets, World War II really did start in 1941, though as a good broad-minded historian I certainly know the war begin in 1939. While seeing 1941 as the start of the war betrays a certain Russocentrism or Americacentrism, insisting that the start date is 1939 suggests a similar Eurocentrism. If we look at the Far East, one could make a decent case for 1937, or even 1931.

Similarly, in response to the question of who commanded the Red Army, only 49% say Stalin, with the bulk of the rest (31%) naming Zhukov. As above, that large number of errors is understandable, and the supposed wrong answer isn’t entirely wrong. Stalin certainly wasn’t commanding armies in the field.

What about unambiguous questions? The record on dates isn’t impressive. Only 34% can name 1942 as the start of the battle of Stalingrad, and 35% can name 1944 as the lifting of the siege of Leningrad. Things look somewhat better when we get to who fought on what side. 62% can identify the US as an ally, and 53% Britain. 82% got Germany as an enemy, but only 30% Japan. Since Japan was only at war with the USSR for about two weeks, that’s hardly surprising.

Those figures are not entirely out of line with American ones. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a right-of-center American organization, did a survey in which 69% of Americans could identify Germany and Japan as America’s enemies in a multiple choice test. Of course, it’s appalling that 31% couldn’t manage even that, but I’m not sure it’s any more or less appalling than 18% of Russians not managing to hear that Germany was the enemy in World War II.