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Acknowledgements
     
     
    The opportunity to research and to write this book was a privilege, and I am indebted to many people for their generosity, patience, learning and support. The greatest burden was carried by a succession of research assistants and guides in the former Soviet Union, and in particular by the sociologist Oksana Bocharova and the ethnographer Mariya Belova. Elena Stroganova continued to offer wise and imaginative support at all stages, and I am also grateful to Ekaterina Pushkina and Aleksei Shimchuk in Moscow, to Khatuna Chkheidze in Tbilisi, and to Larisa Shipico in Yalta. The material from German archives was collected with the skilful assistance of Carsten Vogelpohl in Freiburg and Thomas Greis in Bristol.
    No project on this scale can succeed without funds, and I was particularly fortunate to secure the support of the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council, whose generosity enabled me to work and travel extensively in the former Soviet Union and then to read, reflect and write without the distractions of my normal university duties. The Council’s research support was invaluable in every way, and I am also grateful to the anonymous assessors who commented on my initial proposal. When I was in the process of completing the manuscript, a further period of leave, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, allowed me several more months’ peace of mind, and I am also grateful to the University of Bristol and to Queen Mary, University of London, for their patience and generous financial support. I owe a particular debt to the British Broadcasting Corporation, and especially to Tim Dee, one of its senior producers, for commissioning the programmes on Stalinism in Georgia and on the Crimea that enabled me to travel and work in two beautiful locations while benefiting from stimulating company and sparkling creative advice.
    One of the rewards of my travels was the opportunity to work in a range of archives and libraries. I would like to record my thanks to the staffs of the State Public History Library in Moscow, the Cambridge University Library, the British Library and the London Library. I would also like to thank the helpful staffs of the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Military Archive, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, and the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History and its affiliate, the Archive of the Komsomol. In Kursk, I was fortunate to work in both the State Archive of Social and Political History and the State Archive of the Kursk region, and a similar kindness enabled me to work efficiently in both the State Archive of the Smolensk region and the Centre for the Documentation of Contemporary History in Smolensk during my short stay there. I owe a great deal to the two researchers who found documents for me in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence in Podolsk, and should like to thank the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg for providing rich information from documents relating to German military intelligence. Finally, I am grateful to the staff of the Russian State Archive of Cinema, Sound and Photography for allowing me to find and reproduce so many of the photographs that illustrate this book.
    The lives of soldiers in war were a new research field for me. Fortunately, experts have been on hand at every stage to offer advice and comment. Among the many people whose conversation has enlivened my thinking I thank Ian Collins, Ira Katznelson, Vladimir Kozlov, Norman Naimark, David Reynolds, Artem Sheinin, Ben Shephard, Steve Smith and Simon Surguladze. Elena Senyavskaya in Moscow, whose own work continues to be an inspiration, was especially helpful in the early stages of research, as was her mentor, the ethnographer and war veteran Lev Pushkarev. I am also grateful to everyone who participated in the two workshops on culture and combat motivation that were organized at the Centre for History and Economics