Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 Catherine Merridale They died in vast numbers, eight million men and women driven forward in suicidal charges, shattered by German shells and tanks. They were the soldiers of the red Army, an exhausted mass of recruits who confronted Europe's most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. For sixty years, their experiences were suppressed, replaced by patriotic propaganda. We know something of how the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, let alone how they saw the world or why they fought. In this monumental work of investigation, Catherine Merridale rescues the Russian rank and file from the official piety of war memorials, offering at once a gripping history of Stalin's conscripts and a masterly narrative f the Eastern Front. Catherine Merridale is the author of the critically acclaimed Night of Stone: Death and Memory in the Twentieth-Century Russia. The professor of contemporary history at the University of London, she also writes for the London Review of Books, New Statesman, and the Independent.