Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution

In "Making Sense of War" Amir Weiner reconceptualizes the entire historical experience of the Soviet Union from a new perspective, that of World War II. Breaking with the conventional interpretation that views World War II as a post-revolutionary addendum, Weiner situates this event at the crux of the development of the Soviet - not just the Stalinist - system. Through a richley detailed look at Soviet society as a whole, and at one Ukranian region in particular, the author shows how World War II came to define the ways in which members of the political elite as well as ordinary citizens viewed the world and acted upon their beliefs and ideologies.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations ix List of Tables xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: Making Sense of War 7 PART I: DELINEATING THE BODY POLITIC 41 One Myth and Power: The Making of a Postwar Elite 43 Two "Living Up to the Calling of a Communist": Purification of the Rank and File 82 PART II: DELINEATING THE BODY SOCIOETHNIC 127 Three Excising Evil 129 Four Memory of Excision, Excisionary Memory 191 PART III: THE MAKING OF A POSTWAR SOVIET NATION 237 Five Integral Nationalism in the Trial of War 239 Six Peasants to Soviets, Peasants to Ukrainians 298 Afterword: A Soviet World without Soviet Power, a Myth of War without War 364 Bibliography 387 Index 411

About the Author :
Amir Weiner is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University.

Review :
[Weiner's] slice of the story focuses on the nature, process, and ontology of the regime's prewar, wartime, and postwar purges. He does this by tracing in painstaking, revealing detail the way these phenomena unfolded. Foreign Affairs As [Weiner] rightly observes, the second world war was a defining moment in the history of the Soviet Union and its ideology ... The power of totalitarian regimes to fashion new prejudices out of old is a subject that fascinates with horror; and it reminds us that the ancient hatreds which caused so much bloodshed and misery in the post communist world have often been quite carefully constructed, or at least revived, in relatively recent times. The Economist [A] difficult and disturbing but ultimately rewarding book. -- Lewis H. Siegelbaum Slavic Review Making Sense of War is an impressive study based on a broad reading of secondary literature and copious amounts of archival research in several countries... The greatest benefit of this new work is that it rightly foregrounds World War II in Soviet history and will cause many scholars to reflect on the meaning of 1917... Every scholar of the Soviet Union should read Making Sense of War. -- Karl D. Qualls The Russian Review Weiner's work is rich in information and implications. -- Ronald Grigor Suny Journal of Modern History A brilliant book... Weiner's insights into the impact of the war on Soviet ideology and the Soviet polity are often ironic and always valuable. -- Jacob W. Kipp Journal of Cold War Studies Amir Weiner returns us to the real, unadulterated Soviet Union. In Making Sense of the War, he indeed takes us into a new and little-known segment of its history, namely the country's wartime and postwar internal development. Until now, this subject has been ignored by Western historians. -- Martin Malia The New Republic