It will come as no surprise that two such prominent historians of the Stalin era have produced the most comprehensive history of the Soviet home front to date. Drawing on research from five archives and richly contextualized with interviews and literary and popular culture material, this work brings together the existing literature in Russian and English to explore the ways in which the state apparatus attempted to direct the massive undertaking of managing the home front as well as how ordinary people in a variety of situations dealt with the trauma and overwhelming demands of the era. The book is organized both thematically and chronologically, beginning with retreat and evacuation and ending with the reincorporation of liberated territories and organized around “the defining policies of the wartime state . . . and the popular responses that supported, limited and reshaped these policies” (10).
One of the dominant threads throughout the book is the snowballing burden of the mounting demands of war on the increasingly limited resources of the home front economy and the inverse relationship between success at the front and the rear: as the army fell back in the first years of the war, the home front experienced its greatest organizational and mobilizational successes in evacuation, labor recruitment, resource distribution, and production. As the army began to recover after Stalingrad, the home front effort became increasingly less efficient. Each success of the war effort created new problems for the system that required more non-existent resources, inspired more corruption at all levels to meet impossible demands, and received less energy from the sick and hungry workforce. By the end of the war, the increasing demands on diminishing resources meant that “the main wartime policies . . . were beginning to collapse from the weight of their own contradictions” (376).
The authors make a strong case that the system was only able to operate through a combination of coercion and persuasion. While coercive policies and practices were certainly in place, the persistent lack of resources of all kinds meant that enforcement of draconian policies was rarely possible. The wartime propaganda machine evolved to leverage not only the tie between home front workers and soldiers, but also the contrast between “the ideal of a socialist, united, multi-national collective,” and the “virulent race hatred of Nazism” (375). Soviet citizens on the home front indicated that they willingly endured the extreme hardship of the war years even while they resented managers, bureaucrats, and leaders who did not share in their suffering.
The authors present an impressive variety of perspectives to encompass the vast array of experiences of the home front. Through bureaucratic records and official data, they develop a clear picture of the vision that governed policy decisions and the systems created to realize them. These are balanced by dozens of personal stories of evacuation, rationing, labor, and health care from various groups of the population including peasants, workers, managers, evacuees, orphans, prisoners, and deportees, with attention to gender and age differences in each group. As a result, we get a clearer picture of how and why various efforts succeeded or failed at different times and how these successes and failures affected the people who created policies, those who implemented policy at various levels, and the ordinary people who were affected by and responded to those policies.
Richly resourced with narrative and statistical data, this book provides important insight not only into the home front experience, but into Stalinist systems and society. As the authors note, “The Stalinist state reached the height of its vast powers during the war” (372), but also conclude that the war years pushed that state and its people to the limits of their capabilities. We see in this period not only the massive power that the state wielded over its population, but also the systemic and institutional limitations of that power to force its goals into reality.
