The postwar Soviet occupation of eastern Austria was moved into the focus of more intensive research in the early 2000s. Compared to research on the Soviet occupation in Germany, this delay of about ten years seems to have several causes: First, Austria has no archives offering more detailed information about the background and motives of Soviet actions. In Germany, the Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR storing the documents of German-communist authorities provides at least some insights into the Soviet perspective. Secondly, Austria's neutralization in 1955 seems to have influenced not only this country's foreign policy but also political culture and historiography. After the Soviet withdrawal, the political intentions, as well as the crimes of Soviet soldiers, were rarely touched upon and Cold-War revisionism became popular among Austrian historians.

The early 2000s brought a big bang of research on the topic (e.g., Karner et al. eds., Die Rote Armee, Graz, 2005; Mueller, Die sowjetische Besatzung, Vienna, 2005; Sovetskaia politika v Avstrii, Vienna, 2005; and “Stalin and Austria,” Cold War History, 2006; Iber, Die sowjetische Mineralölverwaltung, Innsbruck, 2011). Although Soviet political planning and policies in Austria received a great deal of attention, the same could not hitherto be said about Soviet soldiers’ everyday life, crimes, and personal lives.

This lacuna is filled by Stelzl-Marx's massive volume. After a survey of the Soviet apparatus in Austria, in particular units for counter-espionage and surveillance, the author proceeds in the main part of the book to describe the “micro level” of the Soviet soldiers’ lives in Austria. Stelzl-Marx contributes significantly to our knowledge about what their daily routines looked like, what their deeds and misdeeds were, and how they and Austrian citizens were spied upon and punished for real and alleged crimes. Stelzl-Marx, an expert in Soviet trials of Austrian civilians, is to be lauded for reconstructing many of the cases and the fates of the accused. NKVD units “for the protection of the hinterland” were not only in charge of “cleansing” occupied territories of potentially “dangerous” people and of monitoring the soldiers’ discipline, but also of protecting Karl Renner, the Social Democratic political veteran who had volunteered to create a provisional Austrian government in 1945.

In NKVD reports on the soldiers’ discipline, a phenomenon well known from Germany (Scherstjanoi, Rotarmisten schreiben aus Deutschland, Munich, 2004) comes up: Soviet soldiers were struck by the difference between the living standards in the West and at home. In January 1946, for instance, a twenty-seven-year-old NKVD lieutenant was deposed from office and ousted from CPSU membership for having stated that “here in Austria, there are chandeliers, magnificent houses and clothing, while my family suffers from starvation and has nothing to wear” (309). Thus, the USSR would “never catch up and surpass” Europe. Stelzl-Marx analyzes this snapshot convincingly as an indication of three features characterizing the realm of the Soviet experience in Western countries. Many soldiers’ “culture shock” resulting from the cognitive dissonance between Communist propaganda and reality; the Soviet authorities’ tendency to punish any expression of such doubts as political misdemeanor; and, thirdly, their attempt at suppressing any such deviations through spying and an all-encompassing system of denunciation.

Soviet soldiers’ leisure time included not only sports and arts but also political lectures and exposure to other means of increasing ideological “education” and political “vigilance.” Yet, it seems that it was not possible to eradicate mushrooming corruption, thievery, alcohol abuse, and even more serious crimes. While Soviet soldiers themselves sometimes fell victim of their “amoral way of life”—such as 326 officers and soldiers of the twenty-sixth Soviet army who were reported on 11 May 1945 as suffering from alcohol poisoning—hundreds of thousands of European women were victims of Soviet rapes. Although Soviet authorities tried outwardly to downplay the dimensions of the crime, measures were taken to isolate soldiers from civilians. Stelzl-Marx devotes a great deal of work to shedding some light on the lives of some of the Besatzungskinder, children who were born to mixed Soviet-Austrian parents, and for enabling them to find and meet their relatives. This adds a specific humanitarian note to this rich volume. The author makes good use of the large number of oral histories, Soviet published documents, and particularly those records she has unearthed in the archives.