Mark Edele
Biographic Data
| ID | 235435 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark Edele |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark |
| FAMILY NAME | Edele |
| SIGNATURE | EDELE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Western Australia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1783-7662 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Dreams and Nightmares: Imagining the Aftermath of War, 1815–1945
Thinking about and planning for the end of war generally begins as soon as fighting breaks out, if not long before. Yet few studies analyse how participants considered and prepared for war’s outcomes, and even fewer compare the dynamic of wartime projections in different times and places. Using a transnational longitudinal approach, this article focuses on a series of case-studies across Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia to examine …
Those Who Stayed: Polish Jews Who Remained in the Soviet Union after the Second World War
Of the 3.3 million Jews living in Poland in 1939, only 350,000 survived the Second World War. But of these, the majority—between 190,000 and 220,000—found sanctuary inside the USSR and thereby escaped becoming victims of the Nazi atrocities unleashed upon European Jewry between 1939 and 1945. After the war ended, most returned to Poland under the Soviet–Polish agreement on the repatriation of former Polish citizens from the USSR, and within a few…
Faustian Bargain: The Soviet–German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War, by Ian Ona Johnson
Journal Article Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War, by Ian Ona Johnson Get access Faustian Bargain: The Soviet–German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War, by Ian Ona Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021; pp. 368. £22.99). Mark Edele Mark Edele University of Melbourne, Australia [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Schol…
Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II
Starting with Soviet involvement in the war in Asia and ending with a bloody counter-insurgency in the borderlands of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics, the Soviet Union’s war was both considerably longer and more all-encompassing than is sometimes appreciated. Here, acclaimed scholar Mark Edele explores the complex experiences of both ordinary and extraordinary citizens – Russians and Koreans, Ukrainians and Jews, Lithuanians and Georgians, men a…
Who won the Second World War and why should you care? Reassessing Stalin’s War 75 years after victory
Seventy-five years after the Red Army won the war in Europe, this victory is marred by two controversies. The first asks: What was the contribution of the Soviets to victory in World War II? The second is a confrontation between East European and Russian war memories: Was Soviet victory a just war or a totalitarian nightmare of suppression, conquest, and terror? This essay reviews these polemics and argues that if put together, these two separate…
Writing Veterans’ History: A Conversation on the Twentieth Century
This article is a conversation between five specialists of veterans’ history on the current direction of the field and its importance to the study of war and society. The discussants offer an an overview of current methodologies, definitions and historiographical approaches. Concentrating on the experiences of twentieth-century veterans (particularly after 1945) and using a diverse range of case studies from across the world, this article also as…
The Memory Revolution Meets the Digital Age: Red Army Soldiers Remember World War II
This essay analyzes iremember.ru – an open-access oral history collection containing more than 2,500 interviews with Soviet veterans of the Second World War. Launched in 2000 as a small grassroots project, it soon received state backing and grew into a vital element of Russia’s contemporary memory landscape. The essay examines the origins of this project and its value as a historical source; just as well, it explores its evolution and the curious…
Alexander Statiev, At War’s Summit: The Red Army and the Struggle for the Caucasus Mountains in World War II
The Soviet Culture of Victory
The Soviet Union after the Second World War can serve as a prime example of how victory ’locks in’ a political system. In a mirror image of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s argument of how ‘cultures of defeat’ encourage social and political innovation, the Soviet ‘culture of victory’ reaffirmed a dictatorial system of government and a command economy based on collectivized agriculture and centrally planned industry. At the same time, however, the war also…
Boris Bogachev, For the Motherland! For Stalin! A Red Army Officer’s Memoir of the Eastern Front
Stalin's Defectors
Stalin’s Defectors is the first systematic study of the phenomenon of front-line surrender to the Germans in the Soviet Union’s ‘Great Patriotic War’ against the Nazis in 1941–5. No other Allied army in the Second World War had such a large share of defectors among its prisoners of war. Based on a broad range of sources, this book investigates the extent, the context, the scenarios, the reasons, the aftermath, and the historiography of front-line…
Obstacles
This chapter discusses the obstacles which were put in the way of those who wanted to cross the front line from the Red Army to the Wehrmacht. These obstacles were higher here than at other fronts. In addition to the normal military obstacles to crossing the line, and the widespread moral imperatives against betraying the fatherland, came threats to the lives of would-be-defectors and their families from the side of the Soviets, and often crimina…
Motivations
Both contemporaries and later historians have seen the mass surrenders of 1941 as a ‘plebiscite’ against Soviet power. This chapter investigates the extent to which this thesis can be supported by empirical evidence. It analyses the reasons for defection and shows that defeatism and the will to survive this war were slightly more important than political considerations. While a large minority was indeed opposed to Stalinism and motivated to go ov…
Defections
Chapter 1 serves as the introduction to the book. It outlines the problematic, source base, and basic conceptual framework of this study and introduces Ivan Nikitich Kononov, one of the book’s central protagonists. It also gives a general summary of the argument, discusses methodological problems, and situates the book in a wider historiographical context. The book reconstructs the motivations, background, and experience of a significant minority…
Scenarios
This chapter discusses the various ways in which defectors came across the front line. Scenarios varied. Some defectors came as part of organized desertions of entire units; more came in small groups; and about just as many came alone. The front line could be overcome simply by letting it pass, a particularly viable option in 1941, but also possible later in the war; others exploited holes in the front, used planes or tanks to get across, or absc…
Collaborations
This chapter considers what happened to defectors after they crossed the line. Many died in the nightmarish POW camps of the Wehrmacht. Many of those who survived became military collaborators with the Germans. They often retreated with the Wehrmacht and found themselves outside Soviet territory at the war’s end. From there, they were either repatriated to the Soviet Union or went into exile all over the world. Only a minority were prosecuted for…
Stalin's Defectors: How Red Army Soldiers Became Hitler's Collaborators, 1941-1945
This study's subject is the phenomenon of frontline surrender to the Germans in the Soviet Union's 'Great Patriotic War' against the Nazis in 1941-1945. Based on a broad range of sources, this volume investigates the extent, the context, the scenarios, the reasons, the aftermath, and the historiography of frontline defection. While the phenomenon of frontline defection tells us much about the lack of popularity of Stalin's regime, it does not pro…
Fighting Russia's History Wars: Vladimir Putin and the Codification of World War II
Vladimir Putin shows remarkable interest in history in general and World War II in particular. This article explores this historian-president's attempts to codify the memory of this war in an open attempt to transmit a useful past to the younger generation. It argues that top-down models of historical memory are of little explanatory value in the Russian situation. The president rides a wave of historical revisionism that he shapes at the same ti…
The Right to be Helped: Deviance, Entitlement, and the Soviet Moral Order, written by Maria Cristina Galmarini-Kabala
Not an Ordinary Man: Ivan Nikitich Kononov and the Problem of Frontline Defection from the Red Army, 1941–1945
The question of Red Amy soldiers crossing the lines to the Germans during the German‐Soviet war of 1941–45 has long obsessed historians. Some have treated all Soviet prisoners of war as deserters to the enemy, while others have tried to minimize the phenomenon. This paper explores newly available evidence from German and Soviet sources in an empirical exploration of the reasons, the extent, and the problems of the process of switching allegiance …
Violence from Below: Explaining Crimes against Civilians across Soviet Space, 1943–1947
The end of World War II brought little relief to the lands it ravaged most. Mass wartime violence continued in the Soviet space beyond the ‘false peace’ of 1945. Historians have sought to explain this violence in terms of the ‘wartime brutalisation’ of state and citizens alike, though this approach is limited in explaining how and why violence continued after 1945. This article shifts focus from psychology to social history to argue that the disi…
Take (No) Prisoners! The Red Army and German POWs, 1941-1943
Johannes-Dieter Steinert. Deportation und Zwangsarbeit. Polnische und sowjetische Kinder im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland und im besetzten Osteuropa 1939–1945
Johannes-Dieter Steinert. Deportation und Zwangsarbeit. Polnische und sowjetische Kinder im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland und im besetzten Osteuropa 1939–1945 . [Deportation and Forced Labour. Polish and Soviet Children in Nazi Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe 1939-1945] Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2013. 306 pp. Bibliography. Paper
Displaced Persons from the Soviet Union to Australia in the Wake of the Second World War
The ‘displaced persons’ (DPs) from Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, whom Australia took in as immigrants under the mass resettlement scheme after the Second World War, dramatically changed the country’s immigration patterns and demography. They paved the way for further diversity to come. There is a growing scholarly literature on displaced persons (DPs) after World War II, both in general and with reference to their postwar resettleme…
The Second World War as a History of Displacement the Soviet Case
The typical Soviet subject in the Second World War was a displaced person. Taking a broad view of the Second World War as beginning with the Sino—Japanese war in 1937 and ending only with the pacification of the Soviet western border in 1949, this essay quantifies displacements within Soviet borders as well as beyond them. Deportation, flight, evacuation, military and labour mobilisation, as well as repatriation, together encompassed the majority…
Soviet Veterans as an Entitlement Group, 1945-1955
The article explores processes of group integration and disintegration among Soviet veterans of World War II during the first postwar decade. Approaches that focus on generation, legal privilege, formal organization, social mobility, or ideological outlook miss the considerable sociocultural complexity of this group. Between the end of mass demobilization in 1948 and the foundation of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans in 1956, former soldiers …
The Limits of Demobilization: Global Perspectives on the Aftermath of the Great War
One hundred years ago, the European powers plunged into a soon-to-be global conflict that has been aptly described as ‘the great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth-century. Given the scope of the horrors which Europe and the wider world experienced between August 1914 and November 1918, this verdict seems more than justified: estimates of the casualties among the roughly 65 million mobilized soldiers range between eight and 10 million dead com…
Violence from Below: Explaining Crimes against Civilians across Soviet Space, 1943–1947
The end of World War II brought little relief to the lands it ravaged most. Mass wartime violence continued in the Soviet space beyond the ‘false peace’ of 1945. Historians have sought to explain this violence in terms of the ‘wartime brutalisation’ of state and citizens alike, though this approach is limited in explaining how and why violence continued after 1945. This article shifts focus from psychology to social history to argue that the disi…
Writing Veterans’ History: A Conversation on the Twentieth Century
This article is a conversation between five specialists of veterans’ history on the current direction of the field and its importance to the study of war and society. The discussants offer an an overview of current methodologies, definitions and historiographical approaches. Concentrating on the experiences of twentieth-century veterans (particularly after 1945) and using a diverse range of case studies from across the world, this article also as…
Take (No) Prisoners! The Red Army and German POWs, 1941-1943
Stalin's Last Generation. Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism
Juliane Furst, Stalin's Last Generation. Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (2010), xiv + 391 (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, £63.00/$99.00). A book-length s
Who won the Second World War and why should you care? Reassessing Stalin’s War 75 years after victory
Seventy-five years after the Red Army won the war in Europe, this victory is marred by two controversies. The first asks: What was the contribution of the Soviets to victory in World War II? The second is a confrontation between East European and Russian war memories: Was Soviet victory a just war or a totalitarian nightmare of suppression, conquest, and terror? This essay reviews these polemics and argues that if put together, these two separate…
The Memory Revolution Meets the Digital Age: Red Army Soldiers Remember World War II
This essay analyzes iremember.ru – an open-access oral history collection containing more than 2,500 interviews with Soviet veterans of the Second World War. Launched in 2000 as a small grassroots project, it soon received state backing and grew into a vital element of Russia’s contemporary memory landscape. The essay examines the origins of this project and its value as a historical source; just as well, it explores its evolution and the curious…
The Soviet Culture of Victory
The Soviet Union after the Second World War can serve as a prime example of how victory ’locks in’ a political system. In a mirror image of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s argument of how ‘cultures of defeat’ encourage social and political innovation, the Soviet ‘culture of victory’ reaffirmed a dictatorial system of government and a command economy based on collectivized agriculture and centrally planned industry. At the same time, however, the war also…
Soviet Veterans as an Entitlement Group, 1945-1955
The article explores processes of group integration and disintegration among Soviet veterans of World War II during the first postwar decade. Approaches that focus on generation, legal privilege, formal organization, social mobility, or ideological outlook miss the considerable sociocultural complexity of this group. Between the end of mass demobilization in 1948 and the foundation of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans in 1956, former soldiers …
Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared
In essays written jointly by specialists on Soviet and German history, the contributors to this book rethink and rework the nature of Stalinism and Nazism and establish a new methodology for viewing their histories that goes well beyond the now-outdated twentieth-century models of totalitarianism, ideology, and personality. Doing the labor of comparison gives us the means to ascertain the historicity of the two extraordinary regimes and the wreck…
Soviet veterans of the Second World War a popular movement in an authoritarian society ; 1941-1991: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941-1991
This book explores the fate of the millions of Soviet soldiers who survived the Second World War and returned to Stalin's state after victory, tracing the veterans' story from the early post‐war years right through to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. It describes in detail the problems they encountered during demobilization, the dysfunctional bureaucracy they had to deal with once back, and the way their reintegration into civilian life worke…
Veterans and the Village: The Impact of Red Army Demobilization on Soviet Urbanization, 1945–1955
This article re-evaluates a classical historical question: the impact on the process of urbanization of the demobilization of Red Army soldiers after 1945. One historical school focuses on the mass return to the village, while a rival interpretation claims that demobilization led to a further spurt in urbanization as soldiers refused to return to collective farms. Archival data now suggest a two-part process: first, soldiers returned to the villa…
Stalinist Society: 1928-1953
Preface Introduction PART I 1. A Stalinist Life PART II 2. Forces of Destruction 3. Patterns of Chaos 4. Family Chronicles 5. Limping Behemoth 6. Utopia, Apocalypse, and the Weather 7. 'Thank You, Comrade Stalin!' 8. Economy of Scarcity, Economy of Favors PART III 9. Politics of History Select Bibliography Index
War and Peace, Barbarism and Civilization in Modern Europe and Its Empires
Stalin's Last Generation. Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism
Juliane Furst, Stalin's Last Generation. Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (2010), xiv + 391 (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, £63.00/$99.00). A book-length s
Alexander Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands
Total War and Entitlement: Towards a Global History of Veteran Privilege
By comparing Australia with the USSR (and not with the UK or other British dominions as is most often done) we advance two principal arguments. Firstly, despite the claims of some historians, veterans as a social entity are not the exclusive product of postwar discourse and the postwar political, cultural and social milieux in the countries for which soldiers fought. Rather, their emergence as a social group reflects the experience of mass soldie…
Totalitarian Dictatorship: New Histories
1. Beyond the Delusion: New Histories of Totalitarian Dictatorship Daniela Baratieri, Mark Edele and Giuseppe Finaldi 2. Cold Empathy: Perpetrator Studies and the Challenges in Writing a Life of Reinhard Heydrich Robert Gerwarth 3. The Life and Death of General Blaskowitz Christopher Clark 4. Stalin and the World of Culture Sheila Fitzpatrick 5. The Great Manipulator: Francisco Franco Paul Preston 6. Blueblood and Blacksmith: Comparative View of …
What Are We Fighting for?” Loyalty in the Soviet War Effort, 1941–1945
When, beginning on June 22, 1941, German forces sliced through Soviet defenses, Soviet citizens severed their ties with the Stalinist state. In the Western Borderlands, annexed in 1939–1940 as a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact, locals welcomed the invaders with bread and salt as liberators from the Bolshevik yoke. Red Army men hailing from these regions left their posts and went home. Soldiers from the pre-1939 Soviet territories stationed in Uk…
Karel C. BERKHOFF. Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II
Journal Article Karel C. Berkhoff. Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II. Get access Karel C. Berkhoff. Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II.Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2012. Pp. 407. $35.00. Mark Edele Mark Edele University of Western Australia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 2, April 2013, Pages…
The New Soviet Man as a “Gypsy”: Nomadism, War, and Marginality in Stalin’s Time
This essay explores the history of nomadic Gypsies ( tsygane ) in the Soviet Union prior to, during, and after the Second World War. It asks what this history of itinerancy, displacement, and marginality can tell us about Soviet society more generally. It argues that nomadic Tsygane on Soviet territory under Stalin were not so much exotic outliers but rather an extreme example of the displacement and homelessness of these decades
The Limits of Demobilization: Global Perspectives on the Aftermath of the Great War
One hundred years ago, the European powers plunged into a soon-to-be global conflict that has been aptly described as ‘the great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth-century. Given the scope of the horrors which Europe and the wider world experienced between August 1914 and November 1918, this verdict seems more than justified: estimates of the casualties among the roughly 65 million mobilized soldiers range between eight and 10 million dead com…
The Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the Present, by Stephen Lovell
Journal Article The Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the Present, by Stephen Lovell Get access The Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the Present, by Stephen Lovell (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010; pp. 370. £19.99). Mark Edele Mark Edele 1University of Western Australia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 537, April 2014, Pages 508–510, https:…
Johannes-Dieter Steinert. Deportation und Zwangsarbeit. Polnische und sowjetische Kinder im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland und im besetzten Osteuropa 1939–1945
Johannes-Dieter Steinert. Deportation und Zwangsarbeit. Polnische und sowjetische Kinder im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland und im besetzten Osteuropa 1939–1945 . [Deportation and Forced Labour. Polish and Soviet Children in Nazi Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe 1939-1945] Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2013. 306 pp. Bibliography. Paper
Displaced Persons from the Soviet Union to Australia in the Wake of the Second World War
The ‘displaced persons’ (DPs) from Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, whom Australia took in as immigrants under the mass resettlement scheme after the Second World War, dramatically changed the country’s immigration patterns and demography. They paved the way for further diversity to come. There is a growing scholarly literature on displaced persons (DPs) after World War II, both in general and with reference to their postwar resettleme…
The Second World War as a History of Displacement the Soviet Case
The typical Soviet subject in the Second World War was a displaced person. Taking a broad view of the Second World War as beginning with the Sino—Japanese war in 1937 and ending only with the pacification of the Soviet western border in 1949, this essay quantifies displacements within Soviet borders as well as beyond them. Deportation, flight, evacuation, military and labour mobilisation, as well as repatriation, together encompassed the majority…
Dark trophies: Hunting and the enemy body in modern war, by Simon Harrison
"Dark trophies: Hunting and the enemy body in modern war, by Simon Harrison." Anthropological Forum, 25(1), pp. 88–89
Not an Ordinary Man: Ivan Nikitich Kononov and the Problem of Frontline Defection from the Red Army, 1941–1945
The question of Red Amy soldiers crossing the lines to the Germans during the German‐Soviet war of 1941–45 has long obsessed historians. Some have treated all Soviet prisoners of war as deserters to the enemy, while others have tried to minimize the phenomenon. This paper explores newly available evidence from German and Soviet sources in an empirical exploration of the reasons, the extent, and the problems of the process of switching allegiance …
Violence from Below: Explaining Crimes against Civilians across Soviet Space, 1943–1947
The end of World War II brought little relief to the lands it ravaged most. Mass wartime violence continued in the Soviet space beyond the ‘false peace’ of 1945. Historians have sought to explain this violence in terms of the ‘wartime brutalisation’ of state and citizens alike, though this approach is limited in explaining how and why violence continued after 1945. This article shifts focus from psychology to social history to argue that the disi…
Take (No) Prisoners! The Red Army and German POWs, 1941-1943
Stalin's Defectors
Stalin’s Defectors is the first systematic study of the phenomenon of front-line surrender to the Germans in the Soviet Union’s ‘Great Patriotic War’ against the Nazis in 1941–5. No other Allied army in the Second World War had such a large share of defectors among its prisoners of war. Based on a broad range of sources, this book investigates the extent, the context, the scenarios, the reasons, the aftermath, and the historiography of front-line…
Obstacles
This chapter discusses the obstacles which were put in the way of those who wanted to cross the front line from the Red Army to the Wehrmacht. These obstacles were higher here than at other fronts. In addition to the normal military obstacles to crossing the line, and the widespread moral imperatives against betraying the fatherland, came threats to the lives of would-be-defectors and their families from the side of the Soviets, and often crimina…
Motivations
Both contemporaries and later historians have seen the mass surrenders of 1941 as a ‘plebiscite’ against Soviet power. This chapter investigates the extent to which this thesis can be supported by empirical evidence. It analyses the reasons for defection and shows that defeatism and the will to survive this war were slightly more important than political considerations. While a large minority was indeed opposed to Stalinism and motivated to go ov…
Political science (37 works) · Law (33 works) · History (32 works) · Economic history (20 works) · Sociology (19 works) · World War II (18 works) · History (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (17 works) · European history and politics (14 works)