Mark Edele, a highly regarded specialist of the Soviet Union during World War II, based in Australia, has written Stalin's Defectors, a succinct scholarly monograph about the 117,000 Soviet citizens who voluntarily crossed the front toward the Germans. The author establishes clearly, on the basis of enormous research, that Soviet desertion was special. Its rate was at least three times higher than among the western Allies, where large-scale defection across the frontline was rare.
This peculiar Soviet phenomenon, as Edele calls it, is all the more remarkable because of the many obstacles to defection: the NKVD (which massively shot soldiers suspected of disloyalty—over 10,000 by October 1941 alone); rumors about, and confirmed realities of, Nazi atrocities; and, last but not least, strong disapproval of defection among the Red Army rank and file. Many Soviet soldiers and even Soviet POWs were not averse to killing such “traitors.”
Edele explains the defections with discontent with Soviet life. Most defectors did not defect so as to collaborate with the Germans, but simply because they wanted out—they were refugees. As he puts it, “A significant minority of people were not only disinclined to fight for Stalin's regime, but were determined to leave it, cost what it may” (58).
The work engages very well with other studies, such as by Roger Reese, who has argued that the typical non-defector was young, urban, working-class or student, and Russian. Edele notes that Reese's observation needs to be qualified, for the “under-represented groups still made up extremely large sectors of those who willingly crossed over to the Germans. Russians constituted 55 per cent, 36 per cent were younger than thirty, 10 per cent were professionals, and 8 per cent held higher ranks” (89).
Edele grounds his findings in the larger debate on the role and impact of Soviet values. On the one hand, the defectors were special people, in taking a radical step evidently not made by most Red Army soldiers. On the other hand, however, defectors were “typical because the reasons to do so were widespread (but not universal) in a society polarized between a minority of supporters and another one of outright opponents of the ruling regime, with the majority stuck in the middle” (175–76). There is also a highly useful turn to the earliest interpretations, coined by the Mensheviks Boris Nicolaevsky and Boris Gurevich. Particularly Nicolaevsky's blurring of the distinction between surrender and defection, and his notion that political motives were paramount, have been influential for decades.
The sources for the book are highly diverse, ranging from memoirs to calculations based on Edele's fascinating main German source: contemporary notes made about 344 defectors interrogated by the 296th Infantry Division in 1942–43. Such a source must be treated with caution, of course. The German historian Christian Hartmann found many indications of a very strong antisemitism within this particular division. All the more remarkable, then, that only five of the 344 defectors explained their defectors in an antisemitic manner.
My one quibble with the book is that perhaps we are still expected to conclude too much from these interrogations. Edele notes that most defectors did not explain themselves in a narrowly political sense—as an expression of their wish to fight Stalin. Still, Edele underlines that the second-largest group (well over a third in his database) did give political motivations. But if they did, can we really believe them? Can we really conclude that “for many of those who actively sought surrender politics remained central”? (156). It was, after all, the wisest thing to say when facing Germans at that time.
The book is engagingly written. Various places in the book describe Major Ivan Kononov, who defected in August 1941, engaged in bloody anti-partisan operations in Belarus, became Ataman of All Cossack Forces within General Vlasov's movement, and ended up in Australia as a Polish Displaced Person. It is such a vivid tale that the reader has to be emphatically reminded that Kononov's motives were not typical. And although I cannot remember seeing any other work in Soviet history where all chapter titles have just one word (such as “Profiles” and “Implications”), it works well.
In short, Edele uses all the right sources, poses smart questions about a difficult and understudied topic, and clearly presents answers that significantly advance our understanding. For all these reasons, this excellent book must be highly recommended.
