Robert Dale’s book is a valuable addition to the re-examination of Soviet demobilization after WWII and its broader importance to Soviet society’s difficult and, perhaps, unfinished “transition” from war to peace. Taking veterans in Leningrad as his case study, Dale asks how successfully they were reintegrated into civilian society and turned into ordinary citizens. The book’s six chapters provide convincing evidence that most “able-bodied” veterans overcame significant obstacles to eventually reintegrate very successfully and became “ordinary” citizens in the thoroughly unordinary society of post-war Leningrad. This balanced answer negates the extremes of Soviet propaganda, which cast veterans into an entitled post-war generation of victors loyal to the regime who rebuilt the Soviet Union, and the recent “brutalization” trend in western literature, which argues that veterans’ wartime traumas hindered their civilian reintegration. Though balance is valuable, the crux of Dale’s contribution is the new evidence he musters to support his argument, which adds color to the mechanisms of veteran reintegration and transition, but also interrogates the very criteria used to evaluate these processes. In doing so, Dale’s work tells us not only more about who veterans were, but the humiliating injustices of the society to which they returned and the workings of the Stalinist regime which solidified them—a process began, at least in the western literature, by Mark Edele’s Soviet Veterans of the Second World War (2008).

By focusing on the immediate post-war period marked by enduring wartime devastation, food and housing shortage, Dale tells the story of veterans before that title gave them real entitlements and privileged status as a group, whose development Edele traces over fifty years. A condensed analytical timeframe in a short monograph has its advantages. Dale successfully interrogates a central claim of Soviet post-war propaganda, long accepted by many historians, that veterans enjoyed significant upward mobility in employment, to reveal that for many veterans the quality and speed of this employment and, generally, of the mobility itself was low and debilitatingly slow. Dale thus looks behind the impressive statistics of veteran employment used as proof of their successful reintegration to question this criterion of “success” and, importantly, tell a human story in a closed society beyond the numbers.

A condensed analytical timeframe also has its disadvantages. Dale’s narrative of stunted social mobility is less useful when applied to the mass influx of veterans into the party during and after the war. Veterans who stood in lines for days for or petitioned for years for the entitlements they were promised were naturally resentful of the party-state bureaucrats who denied them. Many veterans believed these bureaucrats sat out the war in the rear to enrichen themselves while they risked their lives at the front. Complicating matters was that by “May 1945 more than 3 million soldiers—one-fourth of the entire army was in the party, with more following after the war” (162), so that that increasingly it was veterans who “found work in precisely those administrative positions, such as district housing & which their former comrades found so disagreeable” (88). Dale notes this polarization, reminding us that the social fabric sown by shared wartime experience among veterans mattered little in the battle for survival in the post-war scarcity of Leningrad (56).

This polarization was only possible because of the varied options for social mobility that party membership opened for millions of veterans. Dale makes an important intervention to reveal that many who left the party after the war were veterans disillusioned with the unrealized promises of material and social advancements of membership (162). Even those who remained were often chided by fellow members for their ignorance of Marxism-Leninism and their role in the broader degeneration of party standards after the war (165–66). But among these millions, many did enjoy upward mobility sufficient to eventually form the innumerable and enduring leadership groups in party-state structures bound primarily by wartime experience and veteran status. This long-term process is much more important to explaining the impact of demobilization on Soviet society and its post-war development than membership regression among veterans. Analyzing this upward mobility, which often involved climbing on the heads of other veterans and civilians to get up the ladder, may reveal exciting evidence of the social hierarchies with which Dale is concerned and, more broadly, the un-egalitarian DNA of Stalinist social mobility.

This book may spur historians into such adventures and the dark space of Soviet society’s “transition” from war to peace, a term which by virtue of such works as Dale’s, seems less useful to describe this space.