800 Days on the Eastern Front

800 Days on the Russian Front: A Russian Soldier Remembers World War II
Author: Nikolai Litvin (translation and notes by Stuart Britton) 2007 159pp
My rating 2*
Started December 29, Finished December 31 2007

Everything I’ve learned about the eastern front of WWII, the arena where the USSR fought Nazi Germany, indicates that that was the decisive theatre of the war to the degree that it makes the western theatre, where the Americans and British were engaged with the Germans and the Italians, seem like a minor sideshow. Combat in the east seems to have covered a greater area, involved more battles with more troops, incurred far more military and civilian casualties, lead to far more and greater atrocities by both sides and been waged with a take-no-prisoners ferocity that makes what happened in the west (think Saving Private Ryan) seem almost civilized by comparison. The ferocious nature of this combat combined with the indifference the Soviet leadership seemed to have had for the well being troops as individuals has long made me curious as to what life in the Soviet army was like but any attempts I made to investigate this issue came up empty – there didn’t seem to be any commonly available works on the subject. A couple of years ago, when Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army came out, I thought my curiosity would finally be satisfied; this was not the case though, as the book contained little of the detail I sought with the author herself commenting that the veterans she interviewed were reluctant to say anything negative that might besmirch their great achievement of crushing the fascist invaders and saving their nation during their service in The Great Patriotic War. Thus when I saw 800 Days described as “the best memoir to date of a Red Army soldier in World War II”, I immediately put it on my reading list. Alas, another disappointment: the book, written in 1962, 17 years after the last of the events it describes transpired, while it does contain some riveting detail (in early 1943, the author’s unit was completely without provisions and subsisted for two weeks on a found horse carcass) is fragmentary and incomplete (whose memory wouldn’t be after 17 years?), again generally lacking in the sort and quantity of specifics I sought and also hampered by the author’s reluctance to say anything negative about the great undertaking he was involved in. Also, I would also venture that at this remove, there is such a gulf between the frames of reference of this coddled 21st century first world reader and a mid 20th century Siberian proletariat, barely removed from peasantry, that things which would seem like extreme hardship to me, were routine parts of daily life for Litvin and thus not even worth mentioning. Other reasons why the book may have lacked the sort of harrowing detail I expected, are firstly, that it starts in 1943, when the tide had already turned – the Germans were in retreat – and by which time the Soviet materiel position had greatly improved and secondly, that for most of the narrative, the author was a driver for high ranking officers and thus usually not involved in front line combat operations.

Other flaws I found with the book included the editor’s use of endnotes instead of footnotes and the general lack of maps to accompany the notes. To fully comprehend the notes, the reader would either have to be extremely well versed in the campaigns Litvin was involved with or routinely consult a detailed atlas of western Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Prussia.

Overall, I don’t recommend this book to the general reader, but only to those with a deep interest in the eastern front of World War II.