Literary Review - August 2007

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HISTORY

EVANMAWDSLEY EASTERN FRONT

ABSOLUTEWAR: SOVIETRUSSIAINTHE SECONDWORLDWAR– A MODERNHISTORY

★By Chris Bellamy (Macmillan 813pp £30)

CHRISBELLAMYISuniquely qualified to write a readable and authoritative account of the ‘Russian war’. A professor of military science at Cranfield University, he has produced important works on security affairs, a number of them on the Russian military, past and present. He has a professional grasp of the theory and technology of warfare. Finally, unlike most historians of his generation, Bellamy has a personal experience of armed conflict; in the 1990s he worked as a journalist for The Independentin the Middle East, the Balkans and, most notably, Chechnya. After a long discussion (seven chapters) of the prelude to the June 1941 invasion, Bellamy proceeds to lay out in detail the campaigns of 1941 and 1942. He explains effectively both why the Red Army was caught by surprise and how it fought back. He discusses ‘conventional’ combat at the front as well as the often neglected security situation in the rear. The treatment avoids over-detailed battlefield narrative, and is broken up into manageable sections. The many maps for these campaigns are really outstanding. So far so good, but there are also significant missed opportunities. Although the book is thoroughly footnoted and makes extensive use of Russian-language material, the source base is limited. It is difficult to do archival research in the Russian Federation, and for such a vast topic such research is scarcely practical. But the use of published archival documents here is also more selective than it need have been. Much use is made of the six-volume collection of NKVD documents, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti SSSR v Velikoi otechestvennoi voine (1995–2002), and of some smaller collections, notably on the Battle of Moscow and the Blockade of Leningrad. But citation of the extremely important two-volume collection of documents on the start of the war, 1941 god (1996), apparently comes only second-hand through Constantine Pleshakov’s monograph, Stalin’s Folly(2005). There is no use (or mention) of what is now an indispensable source, the collection of command and other documents published in the series Russkii arkhivin the 1990s. This collection comprises some twenty volumes, each 500 pages long, including, for example, five volumes relating to Stalin’s Stavka. Also missing are important new collections of diplomatic discussions, notably those edited by Oleg Rzheshevskii on British–Soviet negotiations. The memoir material is only dipped into, although effective use is made throughout the

book of the insightful recollections of the Soviet diplomat V M Berezhkov (1994) and the unexpurgated version of Marshal Rokossovskii’s account (2002). The use of secondary sources is also quite selective. The Romanian official history (in Romanian) is included in the bibliography, but none of the Russian official histories. Also missing are a number of recent Western books, such as Stalin’s Wars (2006)by Geoffrey Roberts, now the definitive treatment of Soviet wartime diplomacy, or Zetterling and Frankson’s important analytical study, Kursk 1943(2000). The other general problem with Absolute War, and one that will be more evident to the non-specialist, is the chronological coverage. This book has twenty chapters and 687 pages of text excluding notes and bibliography. The narrative does not get to the German invasion until the start of Chapter 6. The next six chapters (7–12) cover six months of 1941. After one chapter each on the 1941–44 blockade of Leningrad and on inter-Allied relations, there are two long chapters on 1942, and one on the July 1943 Battle of Kursk. The period from the autumn of 1943 to May 1945 is squashed into two sketchy chapters taking up a mere 75 pages. This is the time when the Red Army defeated the Wehrmacht and drove it back across western Russia and central Europe, establishing Soviet hegemony for fifty years. A critical event like the collapse of the Axis Romanian front in 1944, which opened a whole new theatre in the Danube and Balkan regions, is dealt with in less than a paragraph. To take another example, there is virtually nothing about the huge campaign in East Prussia in the winter of 1944–45, which was much costlier for the Red Army than the ‘Berlin operation’; Köönigsberg does not even appear in the index. If the aim is really, as the author states, to know how the Soviet war was ‘run’ as well as how it was ‘won’, then surely we have to understand how the Red Army’s massive and longranging mobile campaigns of 1943–45 developed. The logarithmic approach of Absolute War may have come about because the author, like the Wehrmacht, was gradually worn down by the expanse of Russian front. Bellamy states, at the very end, that the book ‘has concentrated on the critical years of 1941 and 1942, when the very survival of Soviet Russia hung in the balance’. After Kursk in 1943, ‘it was only a matter of time’. This approach might have been good enough back in 1965 for Alan Clark’s now antique Barbarossa. It will not do for a book in 2007 that aspires (to quote the dust jacket) to be ‘the definitive history of this cruellest of conflicts’. Overall, despite the reservations outlined, Chris Bellamy’s book has much to recommend it, certainly for the first two years of the war (and for the lead-up to the invasion). For this period even specialists will read it with profit. Bellamy does not go in for broad judgements, but the early idea of anchoring the book around Clausewitz’s notion of ‘absolute war’ was an inspired one. To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 37

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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