Volume 53, Number 6 · April 6, 2006
The Real Patriotic War
By Anne Applebaum
Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945
by Catherine Merridale
Metropolitan, 462 pp., $30.00
A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–1945
edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova
Pantheon, 378 pp., $27.50
Once, during the 1980s, I visited the fortress of the city of Brest. Brest is now in Belarus, just east of the Polish border, but at that time Brest was a Soviet city, and its fortress was the city's most important shrine to Soviet power. The entrance led through a vast slab of stone, into which had been cut an enormous Soviet star. Inside, the visitor's eye was immediately directed to a vast, sorrowful human head, carved straight into an outcropping of rock. Ubiquitous loudspeakers piped funereal music throughout the fortress museum, which contained displays commemorating the Soviet heroes of the Nazi siege of Brest, as well as the subsequent Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War. In front of an outdoor eternal flame, newlyweds held hands and solemnly laid wreaths, as was then the custom.
Review, 3160 words
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