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Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. By Catherine Merridale. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006. 480 pages. $30.00. Reviewed by David M. Glantz, author of When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler and editor of The Journal of Slavic Military Studies.
No war in history has produced greater human suffering, material devastation, and political and social dislocation than the Barbarossa Campaign conducted by Adolph Hitler's Third Reich against Josef Stalin's Soviet Union duringWorldWar II. True to objectives he enunciated almost 20 years before in his autobiography, Mein Kampf, on 22 June 1941, Germany's Führer unleashed a genuine Kulturkampf (culture struggle) against the Soviet Union, aimed at destroying its Red Army and Bolshevik regime, enslaving its Slavic population, and attaining living space (Lebensraum) for the German nation. Hitler expected to achieve these goals by waging a lightning war (Blitzkrieg) to decimate the Red Army, undermine the morale of its soldiers, and produce a collapse similar...