Granted, they are correct about the economic growth of the country. Intentionally or not Joseph Stalin took crib notes from the Imperial Russian Finance Minister who famously stated that given the choice between industrialization and allowing people to starve in the streets, people were just going to have to go hungry.


In that sense- and ironically doing what the Nazis could only imagine themselves doing under General Plan Ost- it's quite easy to grow your economy when you have no respect for human life or human rights and the rumbling of mouth breathing Germans on your border all collectively convinced there's a conspiracy of Jewish communists running your country to destroy western civilization then forced those people who generally loathed you into your 'loving' embrace. Seriously, to get a picture of what the early years of the Soviet Union was like, go read Ivan's War. Germany invading in some respects saved Stalin's experiment.


>Zero Unemployment


Because employment was a duty, even if your job was to sit in a stairway and read the newspaper.


>Zero homelessness


Man, who can say no to this? Construction companies are a brilliant way to build a fledgling economy but lets completely forgo that so everyone can live in concrete coffins.


>End Famine


You mean that thing you intentionally inflicted on the Ukrainians to cripple them? Or that thing where you forced everyone in bread lines? Jokes from the era were about how even heroes of the Soviet Union like cosmonauts had to wait in bread lines. Let that sink in: the Soviets could put man in space and achieved many important firsts in the wider space race but when tasked with making sure a country was fed they could not run an efficient bakery.


>Higher Calorie Consumption than the US


Someone's going to have to point me to this statistic but I don't see how they're not lying here. This certainly would not have started until the late 50's or early 60's because the Soviet Union was trashed in the wake of WW2 and the parts that were treated the worst was the bread basket.

> source

It's from a book called "Ivan's War"

https://www.amazon.com/Ivans-War-Life-Death-1939-1945/dp/0312426526

unfortunately I got rid of the book, so I can't check the actual material cited.

Glantz, David M and Jonathan M. House. When Titans Clashed: How The Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015. 384 pages, available as paperback, hardback, and ebook.

This is one of the best single-volume operational histories of the Nazi-Soviet War. It is not as in-depth as, say, Erickson's duology, but it's relatively quick and easy to read. Glantz is still the English-language historian par excellence of the operational aspect of the Nazi-Soviet War and of Soviet doctrine and theory, though he is unfortunately semi-retired now. Jonathan House's coauthorship saves When Titans Clashed from the worst of the usual criticisms of Glantz's writing, namely his dry "I have copy-pasted and translated this section of a Russian field manual" style.

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Smelser, Ronald M., and Edward J. Davies. The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 342 pages, hardback or paperback.

I recommend this book as a companion to Titans, as the two of them dismantle many Western assumptions & myths about the so-called "Eastern Front," albeit from different angles. Where Titans presents a less Wehrmacht-centric perspective on the purely military aspects of that conflict and sheds light on the actual military skill of the Red Army, The Myth of the Eastern Front explains the origins of many of those assumptions and is an important historiographic piece.

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Merridale, Catherine. Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. New York: Picador, 2006. 462 pages, paperback, hardback, or audiobook.

Ivan's War is a social history of the Red Army, told partly through interviews with veterans and civilians and partly through memoirs, and contextualized by improved access to archives during the post-Soviet, pre-current-unpleasantness era. It is less academically rigorous than, say, Reese's Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers: A Social History of the Red Army, 1925-1941, but more approachable and quite compelling. If you're wondering what it was like to be an anonymous frontovik in the wartime Red Army, this is a good place to start. By dispelling the implicitly dehumanizing and racist narratives of the largely Wehrmacht-influenced prevailing Western literature on the Nazi-Soviet War, Ivan's War also rounds out a sort of mythbusting trilogy with Titans and Myth of the Eastern Front.

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Continuing the World War II theme, Robert Citino's Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 (448 pages), The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943 (440 pages), and The Wehrmacht's Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944-1945 (632 pages) are, as a trilogy, a good look into the institutional culture of the German officer corps. Citino posits that, in addition to the distortive effects of Nazism on that culture, the officer corps embodied a long tradition of a particular way of war - short, sharp, lively wars of strategic preemption and the pursuit of the rapid defeat by encirclement of enemy armies - that proved unsuited for modern industrialized total war, and ultimately contributed to the Reich's defeat. Citino is quite readable; his prose is actually *enjoyable* which can be quite rare for military history.

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Glantz, David M. Soviet Military Operational Art: In Pursuit of Deep Battle. New York: Frank Cass, 1991. 320 pages, paperback.

Returning to Glantz and the Soviet focus, this is a good surface-level (but satisfactorily deep) introduction to the history, theory, and practice of the Soviet concept of operational art - the intermediate level of war between tactics and strategy, involving the use of large formations like armies to achieve coordinated tactical successes, the sum of which contribute to strategic victory. It is, as I mentioned before, rather dry, but compared to some of Glantz's other stuff it's still perfectly readable. In my opinion, this text is an indispensable primer for understanding how the Red Army expected to fight at various points in its history, but also the roots of modern Russian theories of war. It is unfortunately a little expensive, however. I think Glantz might have long-form essays floating around on dtic.mil that summarize some of the book's content but I'm not sure.

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Ferriter, Diarmaid. A Nation and Not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 1913-1923. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2017. 528 pages, paperback.

A departure from the rest of the list, I really like this book as a survey of the Irish Revolution and the beginnings of the IRA. It covers military matters, but mostly social and political matters, and for that reason alone I think it's a good introduction to the (arguably much more important) broader & less technical-tactical parts of military history. The first ten chapters cover the historiography of the Revolution, and a few chapters in the last third of the book discuss memory and how different communities have constructed different histories of the Revolution. These sections helped me, as a student of military history, to learn to look beyond the pure battlefield matters and examine the impact of war on society as a whole, because war is nothing if not a social phenomenon.

Here you go

It's based on WWII but the experiences cannot have been all that different for many in WWI. The difference in WWI is that divorce was much less widely available, certainly in Russia! Many men likely turned to drink and suffered dead marriages as a result.

https://www.amazon.com/Ivans-War-Life-Death-1939-1945/dp/0312426526

Ivan's war isn't quite diary level, but it is still a very intimate look at soviet soldiers and their feelings of war.

You are wrong about the Soviets.

1. Women did fight in not so mall numbers in sniper units but also als fighter pilots, tank driver, heavy machine gun units (dont know why), a lot of Anti-Aircraft Units, and also in infantry units or cavalry units mixed with men
   
2. Units were massively represented as medics in nearly all forms of units, working under heavy fire, armed, riding for example on the back of the tanks pulling the "tankists" out of burning tanks..
   
   
   Read this Book, one of the best books about second world war and incredibly intense!
   https://www.amazon.com/Unwomanly-Face-War-History-Women/dp/0399588728
   
   
   Also great: https://www.amazon.de/Ivans-War-Life-Death-1939-1945/dp/0312426526

Read Ivan's war https://www.amazon.com/Ivans-War-Life-Death-1939-1945/dp/0312426526

>Thanks! Just ordered Merridale, Catherine. Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. on the bay ($3.86freeshipping)
>
>Personal accounts are of interest. Have you read Tapping Hitler's Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations ...?
>
>Only just started but of interest especially the dissidents (?)
>
>for example pg 79 THOMA: I foresaw the whole thing....I regret every bomb, every scrap of material and every human life that is still being wasted in this senseless war. The only gain that the war will bring us is the end of the ten years of gangster rule...
>
>Every day the war continues constitute a crime. They must put Adolf Hitler in a padded cell. A gang of rogues can't rule forever. It would be a pity if any one of them was shot. They ought to be made to do heavy work until they drop down dead."

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One wonders if he suspected he was being recorded;playing for the audience. Of course, it's easier to be judicious when one is safe, and, also, correct in hindsight

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Thanks again!

Ivans War is a solid start from there I've read a number of books about individual battles some of which include personal anecdotes from soldiers but I've yet to come across a book, in English, written from a Russian soldiers perspective.

Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army 1939 - 1945 by Catherine Merridale
The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Anthony Beevor

This article has a detailed explanation. As I mentioned the "Hitler didn't use gas in the battlefield because of his own experiences" was a one theory and( I probably should have pointed out) not the most likely one. The article mentions also that chemical weapons were possibly used in battlefield at least one occasion.

> While Hitler may not have dropped chemical bombs, some believe the Germans did use poison gas against enemy soldiers in World War II. In her book “Ivan’s War,” Catherine Merridale writes that Nazis used poison gas to kill some 3,000 Soviet troops and civilians holed up in caves after the Battle of the Kerch Peninsula in 1942.

This also probably has some additional information.

You'll want to read Ivan's War, by Catherine Merridale. It's the best English-language treatment of the average soldier's experience.

Here's the book I read that went into detail on this:

http://www.amazon.com/Ivans-War-Life-Death-1939-1945/dp/0312426526

It's about 3/4 of the way through, talking about the average Soviet soldier's experience during and after the war.

I'm starting to get the sense that you didn't read my first comment. I literally said a very specific two year period before the end of stalingrad.

I then went on to talk about the people who joined the red army in the early war after the shock of operation barbarossa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa


Read the following Books for more information:

Ivan's war

Stalingrad

Leningrad

The Fall of Berlin

I don't know why you keep posting things from after the date range I specified. So many of the men who faugh in the early battles were dead by the time even operation Uranus took place, let alone during invasion of Germany.