Studies of these conflicts tend to examine oral testimonies, songs, memoirs, and letters as well as some diaries. (2) Due in part to low literacy rates, there have been far fewer studies of diary writing during the Russian empire’s participation in World War I or during Russia’s civil war of 1918-1922. (1) Recent figures in : Schechter (Brandon) : 2019, The Stuff of Soldiers : A History of the Red Army in World War II through Objects (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press), pp. However, just as these initiatives gathered steam in the late 1940s, they were abruptly halted, their collections were shelved, and their organizers were fired and sometimes arrested. The thinking was that such sources would provide crucial data for future scholars writing the history of this conflict. They later arranged interviews and collected reminiscences when the war ended. Recognizing the war’s monumental importance, local Communist Party authorities in major centers like Leningrad and Moscow started campaigns that encouraged citizens to keep diaries of the experience. This effort actually began just a few months after the Soviet Union was invaded in 1941. (2) There have been concerted efforts, both state-and privately-driven, to uncover and collect individual accounts, especially memoirs, oral histories, and diaries, which might shed light on the private, intimate, and everyday aspects of life in total war. (1) Given the enormous scale of the conflict, which in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation today has been dubbed the Great Patriotic War (Velikaia otechestvennaia voina), there has been a persistent hunger for a more personal and granular view of how individuals experienced and processed this traumatic ordeal. Scholars estimate that between twenty and twenty-six million Soviet soldiers and civilians perished. Nowhere was this truer than in the Soviet Union, which mobilized the largest army, some 34.5 million people, and which, in absolute terms, suffered the highest death toll. The Second World War was waged on a massive scale, inflicting unprecedented death and devastation.
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