A warning for readers hoping for cheery shockworkers in lockstep and wheat-laden ladies in immaculate frocks: abandon all hope! Vicky Davis’ stellar study of Central Asia’s WWII experience is daringly bleak. This book pulls back the propaganda curtain to reveal citizens who were hungry, overworked, overtaxed, and undersupplied.

Davis’ book arrives at just the right time. It channels two happy currents in WWII historiography: a sudden swell of work on the Soviet home front, and an equally welcome stream on Central Asia’s role. Readers may recognize Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer’s superlative recent Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet Home Front During World War II (2021) as a major influence on Davis’ approach. Both books have sections dedicated to wartime evacuees, healthcare, conscription, industry, and agriculture. Both books also share a similar conclusion: conditions on the home front were brutal, and the atmosphere grim.

Conscripted to active duty were about 1.4 million from Uzbekistan, 1.2 million from Kazakhstan, 365,000 from Kyrgyzstan, and around 300,000 each from Turkmenistan and Tajikistan (20). This Central Asian contingent represents a fraction of the 34 million or more who served in the Red Army, but it amounts to a large portion of the region’s populace: roughly 20%–23% of the population was mobilized from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan (20). These conscripts were often regarded with contempt by their Slavic comrades, accused of “physical weakness and even cowardice” (35). Nevertheless, they faced all the dangers of the warfront: an estimated 30–40% never came home. Central Asia’s sacrifice was immense.

The sacrifices of the home front—not the war front—are the focus of Davis’ book, however, and this is where it makes a novel and substantial contribution. “Central Asia was gradually bled of its lifeblood,” Davis writes, “in order to meet the single wartime priority: that the army might survive to fight another day” (85). Food was scarce. Requisitions for the army extended even to private garden plots; divested of these, many farmers starved. In 1943, the state left Kyrgyzstan’s citizens with just 1.3% of their total year’s meat production, while the rest was shipped off to the front. Overall farm yields increased, but at great cost to the hard-driven farmers, some 70% of whom were women (99; 107–8). “How hard it must have been,” Davis writes, “to read in newspapers articles praising the number of sacks of flour sent off to the Red Army, while they struggled for every single grain of wheat and, driven by hunger, had to sell precious scraps of clothes or bed linen for a day’s food” (144).

Deprivations were also felt in understaffed Central Asian schools, and in hospitals that could not keep pace with spiking rates of dysentery, typhus, cholera, and tuberculosis. A flood of evacuees and deportees—as many as one million to Kazakhstan, over 500,000 to Uzbekistan, and 140,000 to Kyrgyzstan (231)—drained resources in every quarter, and stoked ethnic conflicts. Along with the well-known evacuation of artists and literati to Tashkent, over 160,000 Poles were deported to Central Asia, along with over 400,000 Soviet Germans, perhaps 200,000 Crimean Tatars, and hundreds of thousands from among the Chechens, the Ingush, the Meshketian Turks, as well as other persecuted groups from the Caucasus (276; 287; 293; 299). Forced together in overcrowded, hungry conditions, these Soviet citizens learned that “the ‘friendship of the peoples’ was not all it was cracked up to be” (262).

All this calls a question which the book, for all its many merits, does not persuasively answer. Davis—following several other recent studies—claims that Central Asia was “better integrated into Soviet society” thanks to the war experience (213), but the book’s catalog of wartime injustice makes this conclusion counterintuitive. At fleeting moments, Davis proposes that propaganda and collective self-preservation sufficed to let patriotism triumph over outrage. Far from supporting this conclusion, however, the book gives us incisive new reasons to question it. The most vivid takeaway from Davis’ groundbreaking study is not its argument about Central Asia’s integration into the USSR, but the sympathetic way it gives voice to its citizens’ bitter wartime experience. “Why was there so much rage?” One Kyrgyz informant said. “Because we lost so much in the war” (152).