The living & the dead

by Nina Tumarkin

World War II killed some thirty million Soviet citizens and transformed the lives of survivors and their descendants. It was the defining ordeal that shaped the history of the Soviet behemoth in the past half-century. The Living and the Dead weaves together the tangled threads of the war's memory in the Soviet Union and Russia. This moving account of a suffering people's struggle with brutal history shows how state and party authorities stage-managed a national trauma into a heroic exploit that glorified the Communist partywhile systematically concealing the disastrous mistakes and criminal cruelties committed by the Stalinist tyranny. Nina Tumarkin explores the nature and fate of the myth, beginning in 1941, when Germany launched its catastrophic "Operation Barbarossa." She shows how Stalin first memorialized the war as heroic, triumphal, even messianic, but then demoted the myth because it had produced too many popular heroes and stories of personal initiative. The cult reached its a