This is an unusual tone in recent scholarly histories of the Soviet Union in World War II. British historian Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War (2005) reported vivid memories of frontline camaraderie made possible by the conviction of fighting for a just cause recounted by the veterans she interviewed, but also presented a seemingly contradictory picture from the archives of the chaotic and harsh treatment of conscripts within the armed forces. The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 disclosed the ‘dirty secrets’ that Soviet propaganda had attempted to hide and that Soviet archives, once declassified, unwittingly revealed – among them, defeatism on the outbreak of war, deportations of small nationalities, anti-Semitism, the willingness of Soviet prisoners of war to enrol in the Vlasov Army and fight under German command, and the postwar resistance to repatriation of POWs and forced labourers in Europe. Not surprisingly, such topics have largely monopolised historians’ attention over the past thirty years. A notable contribution comes from German- and US-trained Mark Edele (now University of Melbourne’s Hansen Professor), whose book Stalin’s Defectors (2017) pointed to high rates of desertion and defection from the Soviet Army in 1941–42 and raised the question of whether this was compatible with the image of a monolithically loyal Soviet population rallying behind its government to fight the Germans.

American social historians Goldman and Filtzer, teaching respectively at Carnegie Mellon and the University of East London, are of an older scholarly generation than Edele. They were formed in the clashes between so-called ‘revisionists’ interested in investigating history ‘from below’ and their critics who asserted that anything that really mattered in Soviet history came ‘from above’. (Full disclosure: I was one of this group too, but, unlike Goldman and Filtzer, not in its Marxist wing.) Goldman’s specialty is the history of Soviet women, while Filtzer is a labour historian who has authored a series of important monographs on Soviet workers under Stalin. At least initially, his standpoint was close to the (non-Soviet Marxist) view popularised in Leon Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed (1936): that the Revolution had failed in its promise to give power to the working class.

The two authors are thus well qualified to undertake this study. With due respect to the pioneering volume of British historian John Barber and economist Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945 (1991), the thoroughness of Goldman and Filtzer’s archival research, focused mainly on economic agencies of government, has no equal in the scholarship in any language. For Goldman and Filtzer, the ‘home front’ means primarily production and labour in support of the war effort, and ‘the people’ (often synonymous with ‘the workers’) are viewed mainly in a labour context, leaving other aspects unexamined, such as the impact of war and enforced absences on marriage and the mass phenomenon of single motherhood. Thus, despite Goldman’s expertise on Soviet women, the gender aspect of their story is rather muted: still more women were drawn into the labour force than before the war, of course, but given that the breakthrough in women’s employment had occurred in the Soviet Union a decade earlier, World War II was less of a watershed moment in the Soviet society than was the case for its Western allies. Taking off from Harrison’s conclusion that the Soviet state accomplished ‘a wartime production miracle’ on the home front, the basic question for Goldman and Filtzer is, ‘How did the state and people accomplish this miracle?’

The early chapters of the book deal with the evacuation of industry and people (in that order of priority) from west to east after the German attack of June 1941. With the Germans swiftly occupying territory that was home to forty per cent of the Soviet population and generated a third of Soviet industrial production, the challenge to evacuation planners would have been monumental even without the added problem of Stalin’s unwillingness to recognise the likelihood of a German attack in the summer of 1941. Perhaps a little more than a third of the occupied regions’ industrial plant was salvaged and re-established in the Urals and Siberia. Meanwhile, twelve million people had somehow scrambled out of the area into the Soviet hinterland by the end of 1941, largely through their own efforts plus some involuntary help from the NKVD, with little thanks to the evacuation authorities (whose efforts to persuade their superiors to the contrary leave a somewhat misleading archival trail). This is an extraordinary story, quite vividly told with illustrations from individual experience, but for Soviet specialists not an unfamiliar one.

From the standpoint of specialists, the book’s three chapters on labour mobilisation are the most interesting, though they may be heavy going for many ordinary readers. The Soviet war experience was unique in that it involved not only conscription into the armed forces of all able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and fifty, but also drafting of the remaining civilian population – mainly women and teenagers – for labour. This applied not only to the rural population, which had already been intermittently subject to a labour draft in the 1930s, but also to the urban. It often involved being sent far away from home to live in wretched conditions (the accounts of sandal-wearing Central Asian villagers who didn’t speak Russian arriving at factories in the Urals to work in freezing conditions is particularly harrowing). The extent of the wartime upheaval is nicely captured in the authors’ comment that ‘very few Soviet citizens awoke on Victory Day, May 9, 1945, in the same beds they slept in the night the war began’.

Two other factors of the labour draft are particularly worthy of note. First, the Soviet Union drew on the labour of convicts in the Gulag as well as deportees mobilised into a ‘Labour Army’, so the Soviet labour force ran along a continuum from free workers through draftees to convicts. But because harsh labour laws of 1940 and 1941 had criminalised worker absenteeism and unauthorised changing of jobs, the distinction between free and unfree labour was blurred: ‘workers were not prisoners, but they were bound to their place of employment’. Second, the labour drafts provoked mass flight on the part of conscripts: ‘the state had to mobilize more than three people in order to add just one worker to the permanent workforce’. Many of those who fled ended up in more congenial jobs closer to home, where the efforts of the state’s conscription authorities to find and recapture them were thwarted by the desire of other state authorities, their new labour employers, to keep them. The authors conclude that desertion ‘was never synonymous with lack of support for the war’ and that ‘there is scant evidence that [those who fled] viewed desertion as an act of resistance’. Perhaps not (why should labour deserters volunteer such evidence and thus court prosecution?), but these are not the conclusions that most naturally spring from the data that has been presented.

In fact, Filtzer took a different line himself in his 1992 book on Soviet labour in the 1950s (Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization), where he suggested that the harsh circumstances in which teenagers were drafted into the industrial labour force in the 1940s produced the first cohort of workers since the Revolution that felt little or no identification with the Soviet system. But there are no such heterodox thoughts in this book. Dedicated to all those who fought ‘on the home front and the battlefield, in the forests, camps, and ghettos’, it ends with an evocation of the monument to Soviet Home Guard volunteers in the desperate defence of Moscow in October 1941, which ‘commands the living never to forget that they died so that future generations could live in a world without fascism’.