1869, Ep. 80 with Brandon Schechter, author of The Stuff of Soldiers
1:07PM Nov 1, +0000
Speakers:
Jonathan Hall
Brandon Schechter
Keywords:
objects
russian
war
army
book
uniforms
people
culture
soviet
soldiers
brandon
lived
chapter
red
criminals
military
russian soldiers
peasant
talking
regime
Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. This episode we speak with Brandon Schechter, author of the new book The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects. Brandon Schechter is a historian of the Soviet Union, whose research focuses on the creation of meaning in times of crisis. In addition to his new book, he has published essays on the integration of national minorities and women into the Red Army, the moral economy of rationing property relations under Stalinism, and how objects can narrate lived experience. He served as Elihu Rose Scholar in Modern Military History at NYU, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Davis Center, Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown, and Fulbright IIE fellow. Schecter is currently an adjunct at Columbia University. This spring, he will c- teach a graduate level course on Russia at war with Anne Lounsbery at NYU. We spoke to Brandon about why he chose to study stuff, how he chose the specific objects featured in the book, and how World War Two created a new cultural hierarchy within the Soviet Union. Hello, Brandon, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you, Jonathan. It's an honor to be on.
Well, congratulations on your new book,The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects. Tell us how did this project begin for you?
Oh, when I first got to grad school, I knew I was going to do something with the Red Army because I was very interested in as this massive institution that is one of the few inroads that the Soviet government has into the countryside. And the initial idea was to write a history of ethnic minorities in the Red Army. And part of that was always going to be kind of an everyday life aspect of the people people's experience in the Red Army. And the more research I did into that particular subject, I began to realize that I was going to have to learn about 15 more languages. And I also kept running into as I was learning in Qatar that a lot of the Tatara memoirists were reading things that were remarkably similar to Russian language memoirs. So eventually, I shifted and decided that I should just do an entire project about everyday life. And getting into the nitty gritty of how people lived through this war, the everyday things that they would do, and how in a lot of ways, these everyday experiences reflect a lot of the major changes of the war. In this everyday life, and this lived experience of the war, ideology, and the messy details of reality kind of is where the rubber hits the road.
Interesting, interesting. The title of your book is The Stuff of Soliders - tell us why stuff?
So there's a variety of reasons that I that I chose stuff and things in particular, one is that in a socialist dictatorship, one of the promises of, of communism is greater abundance. And one of the things that happens in the realities of rolling out communism is of coming up with policies of what socialism is actually going to look like on a daily basis is that shortage almost immediately becomes a major problem. And the state becomes essentially a massive distribution system. So from the very beginning, from the Russian Civil War, the distribution of stuff to privilege groups of people, the taking away of, of things from D class A groups of people, is a major part of Soviet rule. So in a socialist dictatorship, objects take on a, arguably a different meaning than they do in a lot of other types of government. And in many ways, objects. And this is true of armies more generally, but particularly sharp in the Soviet experience. Objects are ideology made material. The state promises to feed people better when people are going hungry, they see they actually literally feel that the state is not delivering on its promises. The state promises to provide soldiers with adequate weapons to help them create adequate shelter. And the state increasingly actually delivers on these promises as the war goes on. But the decisions that they make, the type of things that they develop, and the distribution of things to different groups of people is, both in civilian life and military life incredibly important. Another reason why I chose objects is simply because the mass of the incredible diversity of the Red Army — an army in which both men and women are serving — an army in which basically, people from ages 17 to 55 are serving an army in which convicts and Communist Party members Young Komsomol all the Young Communist League members, workers, peasants, Uzbeks, Jews, people who've been incorporated into the Soviet Union only in 1939. People who have been in the Soviet Union from the very beginning of the project are all serving. And one of the few things that actually unites this myriad of people is the fact that they're all wearing the same uniforms, eating the same rations, digging the same trenches, sometimes earning the same metals, using the same weapons. So the war is this moment of coming together. And for a lot of people, this moment of learning what it means to be Soviet, through this military experience. Another reason that I'm particularly interested in objects is that they allow you to get up every day. And this is a massive event, an event of really unfathomable scale. Thirty-four and a half million people serve in the Red Army. It is the largest army in recorded human history. And one of the ways to make that a more human experience to get down to what this is like for individual humans, is to concentrate on things. And then finally, objects are what make this world possible. You need stuff to fight, you need food, you need weapons, you need shovels, you need uniforms. And one of the things that I think is particularly interesting when you look at objects is that they are in particularly in a military context. They are both tools that serve vital functions. But then many of them are also in a lot of ways, an embodiment of ideology, or at the very least the product of the system that created them. Whether whether we're talking about tanks, whether we're talking about rations, whether we're talking about uniforms, the Red Army goes through a massive makeover in early 1943 where it adopts the uniforms...it adopts and essentially updates the uniforms of the regime that it had overthrown, including some of the most hated symbols of the old regime. And you know, they do this in part to appeal to traditional nationalism, they do this in part so that they're not wearing the same uniform that they'd been retreating in the last two years. And it's kind of mark this, this sea change and what's going on. But we see very clearly that, on the one hand, you need to clothe these guys, and are these men and women so that they are not freezing to death, and so that they can survive in the primitive conditions that they're living under. But every uniform has aspects to it that is not simply about functionality.
So with the wide variety of objects and stuff that you could choose from, tell us how you you narrowed it down and chose the specific objects that you focus on in the book.
It happened really quite naturally. The only thing that was kind of strange, the only thing that presented a challenge is which certain objects could have been in one or another chapter. Helmets migrated between the chapter on uniforms and the chapter on trenches several times as I was reading the book, and eventually came to rest in the trap chapter on trenches because it's about safety. Um, chapter six, which is takes us into the soldier's knapsack is a variety of objects that are united primarily by the fact that they're the things that give soldiers lives, meaning that the things that allow these nomadic soldiers who have to carry everything with them on these long forced marches, choose the objects that are going to take up space and take up weight, and can continue to use them. So, you know, what I essentially did is I looked at what are the essential things that soldiers are constantly talking about in their letters, their diaries, their memoirs, and interviews, what objects keep coming up, what genres of objects keep coming up, and to also look at which objects are going to allow me to capture a lot of the major changes that are going on. And conversely, which objects have nothing to do with change, and actually were fairly stable from 1941 to 1945. So the choices came about, really quite, quite naturally. the only the only chapter that surprised me, in that I thought it was just when I was initially planning this project, I thought it was really just going to be an epilogue is chapter seven, which is the chapter on trophies. As I was beginning to do my archival research, I thought, Oh, this is going to be interesting. You have to talk about this. There's this moment when the Red Army is invited to basically send parcels home from the Third Reich. And, you know, I thought, Okay, this will be a great contrast to end things with just a little side note, it ended up being one of the most important chapters because as I was getting into the archives, as I was looking at more and more diaries, in particular, into lesser extent, letters and memoirs. Everybody's talking about it. Everybody's talking about this confrontation with the bourgeois world and talking about it in in a way that is basically pointing to - look how richly they live in the Third Reich. They've been looting all of Europe and especially us for the duration of this war. They're criminals. And we, as Soviet citizens deserve compensation from these criminals who have been exploiting us, who've been murdering our family members. And in Soviet law, usually a felony conviction leads to the confiscation of all personal property. So there's this very interesting way and that inviting soldiers to loot their enemies, they are very clearly stating this is a criminal regime that we're fighting against. And we're going to use the usual practices of how we deal with our criminals against this criminal regime. And this also maps on very well to traditional ideas of Germans as being the most bourgeois group of people in traditional Russian literature. And, of course, Marxist Leninist Stalinist ideas of who the bourgeoisie are in in this way, the not in this way, the Nazism becomes kind of like this is logical endpoint of capitalism, in a way that works very well for the regimes' concepts, and soldiers lived experiences kind of coming together.
That's fascinating. I love how you, you're tying the objects in with the broader brushstrokes of history. In, you know, the Great Patriotic War, the name of the Soviets gave World War Two, one of the transformations that you also focus on is this new hierarchy in which Russian culture and military officers rose to the top of what once was a worker and peasant society. Can you tell us a little bit more about this transformation?
Of course, you know, it continues to formally be a worker and peasant society with workers in the front, peasants are always kind of second-class citizens. And I'm not the first historian to discuss this transformation, this transformation has its roots in the 1930s. To a large extent, David Brandenberger, is an excellent book about this, but the war really brings it into sharp definition. And I would, I would argue, catalyzes, this change in that, once Russian is established as the language of the military, which happens before the war, and and only in 1938, do they actually shift to Russian as a, as a language that is a mandatory subject in all high schools. So they run into this problem where they're drafting people in 1941-42, from non Russian areas, and they don't speak Russian. So the idea that Russian culture, and to a lesser extent, Ukrainian and Belarusian culture, is the default culture of the army was baked in before the war, because that's where that's where the drafting most people from, that's where the state actually is embedded enough that it can effectively draft large numbers of people. The culture increasingly during the war, is harkening back to Imperial Russian military culture, they start reproducing manuals, they start reproducing, they start producing biographical literature about major Russian generals, they make decorations at a named decorations after major Russian generals from the from the past, like civil war, so forth. And they're very keen, particularly with the sea change with the uniforms to claim the past military glory of the Russian Empire, and to link the modern Red Army with all of the previous Russian military formations. And the way that the Revolution plays out in this is quite interesting and that theRevolution is, then this moment that unleashes the incredible potential of all the Soviet people, but particularly the Russians, and the Russians is the first among equals. And because Russian becomes the folk culture, you have to, you basically have to speak Russian to be a full, full member of the Red Army. One of the things that the Red Army is also into is cultivating soldiers as much as possible providing them with reading providing them with a kind of cultural program. So there's, it's kind of implied as well to be a really good Red Army soldier, you have to know Pushkin a little. You have to be invested in traditional Russian culture. And it's not racialized per se. And Uzbek can become can become a fully decorated soldier and fully integrated. But part of that full integration is mastering Russian culture to a certain extent. And this is I mean, this has, in many ways, I think this is similar to projects to make a German the kind of general language and culture of the Habsburg Empire in the last couple decades of the Habsburg project. But there is also this kind of sense that the Russians have sacrificed the most the Russians are the most reliable, that emerges from from the war in particular. And you will see propaganda where non non-Russian soldiers are talking about calling someone who's non-Russian a Russian as a compliment. Or where and one of my my colleague and friend Charles Shaw has written about this as well, that many non-Russian soldiers take on Russian nicknames. So Magomed might become Misha as part of this, this culturalization to to the Red Army in the EU. And some in a couple of the guys who I write about, they eventually stopped writing home in their native languages and start writing home in Russian, in part because their letters get to the sensor much more quickly if they do that.
That's great. That's great. Well, you go down many different avenues in this new book, and we've just scratched the surface in just a few minutes. Fascinating book - The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through O bjects. It was a pleasure talking with you, Brandon. Yes, so if anyone's interested in learning more, please go to our website and click on the link and potentially buy the book. We'd love it.
Thank you so much, Jonathan.
Thank you so much, Brandon. Take care.
Okay.
That was Brandon Schachter, author of the new book The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects. I you are a loyal listener to the podcast, we'd like to offer you a special 30% discount on his new book. To receive your discount, please go to Cornell, press cornell.edu and use the promo code 09POD. If you live in the UK use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combined academic.co.uk Thank you for listening to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast.