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Everything You Need to Know About the Red Army
In order to understand where we are today, we have to look to the past.
Personally, I love learning about the Soviet Union. It really was an attempt (or excuse) at authoritarianism under the guise of providing an ideal utopia: a communist state.
That didn’t work out.
One of the Soviet Union’s most prized possessions was its military: also known as the Red Army.
So, I thought, as the official celebration of the end of the Second World War comes close (on September 2, 1945), I’d look back at the Red Army.
I hope you hop along.
Despite all the scholarly attention the Soviet Union has received since its fall in 1991 and the subsequent opening of archives to international historians in the 1990s, the Red Army’s material culture and everyday practices have received little focus.
In order to better understand the Red Army, historians have pointed out that it is good to look at the objects of its soldiers in order to learn more from them.
Brandon M. Shechter’s analysis in his book, Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects, does an excellent job at that. It serves as a good preliminary introduction to a field that can garner a lot more scholarly attention.
