From Stalingrad to Pillau - (Modern War Studies) by Isaak Kobylyanskiy (Hardcover)

About the Book

A vivid and candid memoir from a Ukrainian Jewish soldier in Stalin's Soviet Red Army during its war with Germany. The soldier, who commanded an artillery battery, chronicles an epic wartime journey in an army on the march.

Book Synopsis

Strange sounds resembling the remote rumble of distant thunder were audible. Everybody understood: it was the echo of the battle for Stalingrad. . . . A heavy rain began falling.

Stalingrad's outskirts provided Isaak Kobylyanskiy, a 19-year-old ethnic Jew from Ukraine, with his first exposure to combat and initiated his long odyssey in the Great Patriotic War against Germany. It would be more than three years before he was finally reunited with his family and his sweetheart, Vera, the schoolmate he had promised to marry.

Kobylyanskiy started the war as a 76-mm infantry support gun crew commander for the 300th Rifle Division (and its later incarnations) and celebrated V-E Day as a battery commander. He took part in actions ranging from Stalingrad to the tip of the Zemland Peninsula at Pillau. His combat journey was a long process of exhausting marches punctuated by harrowing moments of intense combat. From the liberation of Sevastopol, through Lithuania's countryside, to the final storming of Knigsberg's heavy fortifications, Kobylyanskiy's memoir sweeps across the great expanses of the Eastern Front. His narrative is packed with dramatic details--including revealing depictions of forgotten or ignored aspects of certain battles--and insights into the daily life of the Soviet army: the relentless marches to locate and engage the enemy, the prejudicial treatment of female soldiers, and the plight of Soviet civilians.

Kobylyanskiy also discusses the role of military political officers (and his own conflicted views on communism), clarifies the place of Jews in the Red Army and discusses how his reaction to anti-Semitic utterances added a sense of responsibility to his fighting, and frames his account with personal glimpses into the stifling repression of Stalinist society, including the brutal collectivization program and resulting famine in Ukraine. But he balances such memories with warm recollections of some of his comrades and especially with an affecting portrait of his courtship of Vera, which sustained him in battle, and concludes with an emotional coda: their wedding ceremony in a war-ravaged but recovering Kiev.

By turns vivid, reflective, intense, and entertaining, Kobylyanskiy's narrative charts one warrior's epic journey and joins a select group of memoirs that deepen our understanding of what it was like for Russian soldiers on the Eastern Front.

Review Quotes

"The most important passages of this volume . . . focus on those aspects of military life that are typically ignored in the memoirs written by higher-ranking officers. Kobylyanskiy writes about endless night-time marches in freezing rain, the absence of sanitation and hygiene, heavy drinking, and sex. He also analyzes his feelings as a Jew in the Red Army. . . . A gutsy and interesting book."--Russian Review

"A reader who seeks a ground's eye view of the war on the Eastern front will be well served by reading this book. The author's candid coverage of both the moral and military issues provides a critical missing piece to the literature of the war on the Eastern front."--Military Review

"[A] must-read for scholars of the Eastern Front, researchers interested in Soviet social history, and military history enthusiasts. Read From Stalingrad to Pillau--you will not be disappointed."--Army History

"A candid, accurate, and revealing picture of life in a combat formation that played a significant role in many important Red Army battles and operations during the Great Patriotic War. . . . Covers forgotten or neglected aspects of the war in unprecedented detail."--David Glantz, author of Colossus Reborn: The Red Army at War, 1941-1943

"A very good read, and a significant contribution to the work of scholars such as myself who take a keen interest in the social aspects of soldiering in the Red Army."--Roger Reese, author of Red Commanders: A Social History of the Soviet Army Officer Corps, 1918-1991