Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad: Soldiers to Civilians - Softcover

One of the great virtues of this book is its comparative angle. Dale has read widely in the international history of veterans, and often comments on how the Soviet experience fits into wider transnational patterns. The other virtue is Dale's unwillingness to write in one of the mushrooming sub-genres. Instead he combines social and cultural history, memory studies, and the history of medicine ... [A]nybody interested in the history of warfare and welfare in the twentieth century will benefit from reading this book.
Journal of Social History

Dale's scrutiny of the issue of demobilization has a remarkable freshness. Although the arguments he advances in Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad will be familiar to most scholars of the Soviet Union, the book is original in its ability to illuminate Soviet soldiers' embodied and intimate experience of homecoming. Dale masterfully brings to life individual experiences and expertly connects them to the larger tensions, conflicts and visions of model citizenship in late Stalinist society ... [This] is useful reading for any scholar interested in the comparative history of post-war transition.
European History Quarterly

Interesting and accessible. Robert Dale calmly leads us through the arguments and uses personal stories to illuminate them effectively.The Great Patriotic War did not end in 1945 -- at least not for the demobilized veterans. Soviet society had been torn apart. Turning soldiers back into civilians proved a formidable task. Robert Dale takes us through the painful process of reintegration, focussing on the extraordinary experiences of Leningraders. There could be no happy ending but, for surprising reasons, Dale also shows us how disaster was kept at bay.
Joanna Bourke, Professor of History, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

This book investigates the demobilization and post-war readjustment of Red Army veterans in Leningrad and its environs after the Great Patriotic War. Over 300,000 soldiers were stood down in this war-ravaged region between July 1945 and 1948. They found the transition to civilian life more challenging than many could ever have imagined. For civilian Leningraders, reintegrating the rapid influx of former soldiers represented an enormous political, economic, social and cultural challenge. In this book, Robert Dale reveals how these former soldiers became civilians in a society devastated and traumatized by total warfare.

Dale discusses how, and how successfully, veterans became ordinary citizens. Based on extensive original research in local and national archives, oral history interviews and the examination of various newspaper collections, Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad peels back the myths woven around demobilization, to reveal a darker history repressed by society and concealed from historiography. While propaganda celebrated this disarmament as a smooth process which reunited veterans with their families, reintegrated them into the workforce and facilitated upward social mobility, the reality was rarely straightforward. Many veterans were caught up in the scramble for work, housing, healthcare and state hand-outs. Others drifted to the social margins, criminality or became the victims of post-war political repression.

Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad tells the story of both the failure of local representatives to support returning Soviet soldiers, and the remarkable resilience and creativity of veterans in solving the problems created by their return to society. It is a vital study for all scholars and students of post-war Soviet history and the impact of war in the modern era.