Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet Home Front during World War II

by Wendy Z. Goldman, Donald Filtzer

Overview

The first history of the Soviet home front experience during World War II and of the civilians who bore the burden of total war and played a critical role in the global victory over fascism.

After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, German troops conquered the heartland of Soviet industry and agriculture and turned the occupied territories into mass killing fields. The country's survival hung in the balance.

In Fortress Dark and Stern, Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer tell the epic tale of the Soviet home front during World War II. Against the backdrop of the Red Army's early retreats and hard-fought advances after Stalingrad, they present the impact of total war behind the front lines in a chronicle of spirited defense efforts, draconian state directives, teeming black markets, official corruption, and selfless heroism. In one of the greatest wartime feats in history, Soviet workers rapidly evacuated factories, food, and people thousands of miles to the east. After long and dangerous journeys in unheated boxcars, they built a new industrial base beyond the reach of German bombers. As the Soviet state reached the height of its power, imposing military discipline and sending millions of people to work thousands of miles from home, ordinary people withstood starvation, epidemics, and horrific living conditions to supply the front and make the Allied victory possible This book examines the dark and painful war years from a new perspective, telling the stories of evacuees, refugees, teenaged and women workers, runaways from work, prisoners, and deportees.

Based on a vast trove of new archival materials, Fortress Dark and Stern reveals a history of suffering, sacrifice, and ultimate triumph largely unknown to Western readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190618414
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/03/2021
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	685,770
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Wendy Z. Goldman is the Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of numerous books, including Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin's Russia and Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936.

Donald Filtzer is Professor of Russian History Emeritus at the University of East London. His books include Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System After World War Two and The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943-1953.

Table of Contents

AcknowledgmentsOxford University Press Spring/Summer 2021 Trade CatalogIntroduction: Total WarCh. 1 Panic, Scorched Earth, and EvacuationCh. 2 Rolling East and ResettlementCh. 3 The Staff of Life: Feeding the PeopleCh. 4 Illicit Provisioning: Inequality, Leveling, and Black MarketsCh. 5 "All for the Front": Free Labor, Prisoners, and DeporteesCh. 6 Millions in Motion: The Labor System in CrisisCh. 7 Runaways: Labor Desertion and State CoercionCh. 8 The Public's HealthCh. 9 "Our Cause is Just": Loyalty, Propaganda, and Popular MoodsConclusion. 'Brick Dust and Ashes': Liberation and ReconstructionNotesIndex

Editorial Reviews

"Two well-established authors...have combined efforts to create a truly masterful narrative of the gigantic task of mobilizing the home front for a war of unprecedented scale. The story that they tell is as dynamic as the unstable fronts of the war and yields numerous surprises....The wealth of archival sources they have brought to bear, command of the secondary literature, and strongly mounted argument combine to create a book that not only provides a concise account of a major historical event but also gives us a new and convincing interpretation....Most impressively, throughout the book Goldman and Filtzer do an exemplary job of toggling between the grand scale of events and what they meant to individual people....Their narrative is gripping....We now have an authoritative, multifaceted account of the largest labor mobilization in human history." — Brandon Schechter, American Historical Review

"A brief review cannot do justice to the breadth and depth of Goldman and Filtzer's account of the Soviet homefront. The book makes an important contribution to understandings of Stalinism as a system, exploring both its power and its limits ... A monument to the contributions and suffering of Soviet civilians, the book reclaims the Soviet victory for "all the world's people, part of an ongoing international struggle against virulent nationalism, race hatred, anti-Semitism, and exploitation" (378)." — Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Fortress Dark and Stern is a welcome and long overdue addition to the literature that doesn't just fill a gap-it fills a gaping hole!... [It] sheds light on a relative Soviet success story of the early war period that tends to be lost among the battles being fought and hundreds of thousands of casualties suffered at the front. Although it may seem too obvious to state, without the efforts and sacrifices of those in the Soviet rear, the Red Army would have been unable to keep on fighting. How and why the Soviet home front held up, in the face of wartime trials that would have crippled many other nations, is undoubtedly a story worth telling." — Alexander Hill, Journal of Slavic Military Studies

"A sweeping, yet detailed account of the Soviet home frontDEL. The true innovation of this bookDELconsists in its presentation of the home front as a core constituent of the war effort as a whole, a dynamic constellation of factories, farms, railways, and offices that kept the Red Army (RA) armed, clothed, and fed and whose ability to do so ultimately depended on the RA's own ability to hold and liberate the country's territoryDEL.The authors also pay tribute to the resilience and resourcefulness of the Soviet people, arguing that they remained overwhelmingly committed to the war effort throughout its durationDEL.A piece of stellar scholarship" — Yiannia Kokosalakis, Journal of Slavic Military Studies

"Most readers lack an understanding of the Great Patriotic War that began with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941....Unfortunately, historians have overlooked a significant decision by Stalin that made a German victory highly unlikely—the order that all vital industries and agriculture, including workers, in the path of the Wehrmacht be evacuated. Goldman and Filtzer examine the role the Soviet home front played in their new study, Fortress Dark and Stern. The authors not only relate the political ramifications of the decisions made by Soviet leadership, both their successes and failures, but also, and more important, they recount the pain and suffering of the Russian people by drawing on personal accounts of that herculean task. The final defeat of the Third Reich was made possible by those sacrifices. Goldman and Filtzer's volume is a major contribution to the study of WW II and a worthy addition to any library." — Choice

"Fortress Dark and Stern...depicts in vivid and often horrifying detail what life was like for noncombatants, whose enormous sacrifices supported the army's efforts and contributed to the victory over the Nazis....The fullest story to date of the Soviet home front, of the civilians who lived in dire conditions, often working double and triple shifts and sometimes dropping dead on the factory floor, in order to keep the army and the country going." — Maria Bloshteyn, Los Angeles Review of Books

"This book describes the extraordinary experience of people on the Soviet home front during World War II; specifically the devastating anguish of the war, and Soviet citizens' grim determination to prevail... Much has been published about the wartime Soviet Union since 1991, but this book's forceful style and its use of Soviet sources ensure it will have lasting value in World War II scholarship. The use of personal anecdotes and statistical evidence is laudable." — Zachary Irwin, Library Journal

"Fortress Dark and Stern presents a definitive social history of the Soviet Union at war. Impeccably researched by two of the most distinguished historians in the field, this book conveys the triumphs and tragedies of what was a total war like no other. It is a major contribution to the study of the Soviet Union and the Second World War." — Lynne Viola, author of Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial

"How did Stalin's Soviet Union claim victory in the Second World War? In Fortress Dark and Stern, two consummate historians at the peak of their powers investigate the Soviet people's epic struggle on the home front to arm, feed, and clothe soldiers who marched against fascism from Stalingrad to Berlin. Based on prodigious archival evidence, memoirs, and new scholarship, this beautifully written book tells a story essential for a new generation of students and citizens." — Dan Healey, University of Oxford

"To be a Soviet civilian during the war with Germany was to strive and to suffer. Many faced bad or impossible choices. Fortress Dark and Stern describes the predicaments, fates, and accomplishments of the millions behind the lines in unforgettable detail." — Mark Harrison, University of Warwick

"Drawing on a vast array of new archival sources, Wendy Goldman and Donald Filtzer offer the most comprehensive account to date of the Soviet Home front during World War II. The authors' novel findings about the role of the Stalinist state during the war will give rise to debates and disagreements among historians. No future study of the Soviet Home front and the Eastern Front generally will be complete without reference to this book." — Oleg Budnitskii, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow

"For decades, historians have debated how the Soviet Union managed to withstand the immense blow dealt by the German invasion in 1941. As Fortress Dark and Stern persuasively argues, it was the home front that assured Soviet survival in 1941 and, ultimately, victory in 1945. Drawing on rich, newly discovered archival materials, this book shines a bright light on the lives and the labor of millions of ordinary citizens, predominantly women, who emerge as the unsung heroes of the Soviet war epic." — Jochen Hellbeck, author of Stalingrad: The City That Defeated the Third Reich

"Offers...an unparalleled overview of the Soviet home front. In clear and lucid prose, Goldman and Filtzer tell the story of the vast movement east in the wake of the invasion, the gargantuan efforts to provision the population, the desperate mobilization of labor, and the struggle to maintain the population's physical health and retain their loyalty in the face of formidable challenges to both... Wartime labor mobilization and labor discipline have received only limited attention from historians, and in Fortress Dark and Stern they finally get their due... It paints a compelling picture of the tremendous costs of waging war as they were experienced far from the frontlines." — Rebecca Manley, Russian Review

"This book could not be more timely. Wendy Goldman and Donald Filtzer have written an impressively comprehensive account of the support system that, they argue, was essential to the World War II victory of the Red Army in Europe. Using extensive archival materials, they paint a picture of a government based on an ideology of rationalism and science trying desperately to manage the chaos of an initially successful invasion, huge losses of land, people, and property, the decimation of its military, a massive evacuation, plagues, corruption, poor planning, and an exceptionally brutal occupying force... This book is... also a reminder of the resonance that the enormous suffering of the peoples of the Soviet Union still has today and the way that memories of the war shape so many of the actions of current leaders." — Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild, Aspasia

"That text made excellent use of the then-available Russian language sources." — Home Front Studies

From the Publisher

03/12/2021

Goldman (Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of History, Carnegie Mellon) and Filtzer (emeritus, Russian history, Univ. of East London) take their book's title from a wartime poem by Nikolai Tikhonov that describes a factory in a bombed Russian city as a "fortress dark and stern." This book describes the extraordinary experience of people on the Soviet home front during World War II; specifically the devastating anguish of the war, and Soviet citizens' grim determination to prevail. Some readers will recall a comparable account in Harrison Salisbury's epic The 900 Days, which describes the wartime siege of Leningrad and its horrific suffering. Goldman and Filtzer argue that moving the Soviet industrial base eastward was the "single most significant factor in the Soviet victory" in the Second World War. Although moving strategic factories away from the battlefront was relatively successful, the USSR's agricultural production was not; Soviet citizens lost 58 percent of processed food production within a year of the Axis invasion of the western Soviet Union Besides Nazi war atrocities, the Holocaust in particular, as well as malnutrition and epidemics help explain the extraordinary number of Second World War civilian deaths in the USSR. VERDICT Much has been published about the wartime Soviet Union since 1991, but this book's forceful style and its use of Soviet sources ensure it will have lasting value in World War II scholarship. The use of personal anecdotes and statistical evidence is laudable.—Zachary Irwin, formerly with Penn State Behrend

Library Journal