Free Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 by Timothy Johnston Page A

form the heart of the chapter. By focusing on the Arctic Convoys, rather than the interac- tion between Red Army troops and allied soldiers in Germany, it sheds light on another understudied aspect of the wartime experience. 141
Together, these two chapters offer a unique window into the beha- viour of Soviet citizens on the Home Front. There has been remarkably little work produced in recent years on the Soviet Home Front during the war. 142 The strategic and military history of the war has been thoroughly described, as have the battlefield motivations of Soviet soldiers and the experience of occupation. 143 However, no major
     
139 See for example: N. M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge Mass., 1995); K. K. C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge Mass., 2004).
140 Relationships on the ground with German troops and civilians did not always conform to these simplistic paradigms. See: Merridale, Ivan’s War , 301–2; A. Dallin,
Odessa, 1941–1944: A Case Study of Soviet Territory under Foreign Rule (Oxford, 1998), 91–3. Nonetheless, within official rhetoric at least, however, the Germans remained an almost unequivocably evil force.
141 M. Scott and S. Krasilshchik, eds., Yanks Meet Reds: Recollections of US and Soviet
Vets from the Linkup in World War II (Santa Barbara,1988). On Soviet fraternization with German civilians in post-war Germany see: Naimark, The Russians in Germany .
142 The paucity of literature has been noted in various places: A. Weiner, ‘Saving Private Ivan: From What, Why, and How?’ Kritika , 1.2 (2000), 305–36; R. D. Mark- wick, ‘Stalinism at War’, Kritika , 3.3 (2002), 509–10.
143 A. Beevor, Stalingrad (London, 1998); I. Kershaw and M. Lewin, eds., Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge, 1997); R. Overy, Russia’s War (London, 1997); D. R. Stone, A Military History of Russia: From Ivan the Terrible to the War in Chechnya (London, 2006), 191–217; Merridale, Ivan’s War ; B. Bonwetsch and
R. Thurston, eds., The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union
l Being Soviet
work in English has examined the Home Front as a whole since Barber and Harrison’s book in 1991, which offers a valuable but limited introduction. 144 In many ways, the most significant text remains the Sunday Times correspondent, Alexander Werth’s, 1964 memoir of his experiences in the wartime USSR. 145
What has been published in recent years about the Soviet Home Front has tended to argue that the war was a time of increased personal freedom. 146 The Soviet police ‘liberalized’ their approach to illegal food trading, the mass media became increasingly personalized, and anti- religious campaigns were tempered. 147 However, the literature on this ‘relaxation’ is still confined to fairly narrow fields. Furthermore, it is rarely connected with the literature that describes the struggle to carve out ‘private’ space after 1945. 148 This book offers one of the first attempts to examine the continuities between wartime ‘relaxation’ and post-war life. One of its core arguments is that the ‘tactics of the habitat’ were highly flexible and could be adapted to suit the conditions of the 1930s, wartime ‘relaxation’, or the more stringent post-war years.
     
     
1945–53: the post-war years
Chapters 4 and 5 address the post-war years. Historians of the post-war Stalin-era have traditionally focused their attention on foreign policy and high politics. 149 For some time, the field of domestic politics was
     
(Chicago, 2000); J. A. Armstrong, Soviet Partisans in World War II (Madison, 1964); Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair ; A. Dallin, German Rule in Russia 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies, 2nd edn (London, 1981).
144 J. Barber and M. Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London,