Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War: a Modern History [Unabridged] [Hardcover]

This book aims to present the Second World War from the Soviet perspective by using documents from formerly closed Soviet archives and memoirs only recently published in their full length (ie those written by Zhukov and Rokossovsky, respectively).

While the non-Russian reader can only welcome such an attempt, Prof. Bellamy's book suffers from some major shortcomings, one of which is the apparent inability of its author to read German language sources. Some errors (German ambassador von der Schulenburg is misspelled as "Schulenberg" throughout the book) could have been avoided.

But the major shortcomings are in the material presented for the Soviet side. Bellamy avoids discussing the Soviet pre-war military strategy and doctrine in a separate chapter, even though he rightly writes about the entirely offensive deployment and strategy vis-à-vis Germany. When military strategy is discussed, however, he erroneously attributes the Soviet's doctrine on the eve of the war to Svechin ("Strategy") instead of to Vladimir Triandafillov ("The nature of operations of modern armies") and Isserson.

Another major topic that is missing in this book is the Soviet Order of battle on June 22, 1941. Strangely enough, the well known German Order of Battle is given in the book, but no details about the Soviet deployment along the German, Hungarian and Romanian border. This is a very disappointing fact, especially because one would have wanted to compare the striking similarities in the deployment of the opposing forces. For very detailed information about the Soviet Order of Battle I can only refer the reader to the detailed works of Charles Sharp and Craig Crofoot for the ground forces and to Christer Bergström's about the Soviet Air Forces.

Overall, this book is not bad, but full of missed opportunities.

Having read many books on the eastern front conflict I found this book fresh and yet somehow very familiar. Nothing too new here but the style of the author means the 700 odd pages zip by as the various phases of the conflict are explained and expanded on with plenty of diagrams and maps. No phase is as given as much space as say Clarkes' Barbarssa or Beevors' Stalingrad but then when covering the whole campaign that would be asking something. All in all a great read, newcomers to the conflict will learn loads, those just interested in the period who have read other works will not learn too much new but will come back to this book as it really does a good job of covering a lot of ground.

By any measure, the clash between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was the most titanic conflict between two nations ever fought, as well as the decisive front of the Second World War. Yet the Eastern Front has been given comparatively short shrift in most English-language histories of the Second World War, largely due to a combination of politics (the Cold War and the inaccessibility of Soviet-era archives) and a Western-centric bias. These issues make Chris Bellamy's history of the Soviet war effort a welcome addition to the literature on the war. Taking advantage of the greater availability of Soviet sources, he provides a fresh account of the Eastern Front that prompts some revision of the traditional Western understanding of the war there.

To do so, Bellamy begins by broadening his scope. He begins not with the launch of Operation Barbarossa, but with the Soviet participation in the invasion of Poland in September 1939. The inclusion of this and the subsequent "Winter War" between the Soviet Union and Finland the following year are key to one of his arguments, that the Red Army were already making the tactical and operational transformations which would make them such a formidable fighting force later in the war. While acknowledging the brutalities of the Stalinist regime, he asserts that the Soviet regime was far more efficient and effective in mobilizing for the war effort than their Nazi counterparts, an argument echoed in other recent studies such as Richard Overy's The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. In doing so, he challenges many of the misconceptions surrounding the regime and Stalin himself (such as his depressive withdrawal at the start of the German invasion) while demonstrating the veracity of such horrific episodes as the cannibalism practiced by some Leningraders during the 880 day siege of their city.

All of this comes together to provide readers with a better appreciation of the war the Soviet Union fought. He supports his analysis with considerable use of Soviet documentation, including recently published work form the hitherto unavailable NKVD archives, which add a previously obscured dimension to our knowledge of the conflict. While some readers might be bothered by the niggling problems of the book (Bellamy has a casual style and a number of writing tics that can make his text seem amateurish compared to the works of other historians), the strengths of this book easily outweigh its virtues. Comprehensive, perceptive, and girded by a wealth of new information, Bellamy's book is easily the best single-volume history of the Soviet war effort, one that every student of the Second World War should read to better understand that nation's decisive role in the conflict.