Brandon Schechter's book attempts to tell the story of the Soviet military in the Great Fatherland War through a new lens: quotidian material objects and day-to-day life. To some degree he looks at material culture: weapons, uniforms, equipment. He also looks at more abstract questions: how the state and soldiers themselves saw their bodies, or how soldier sociability was tied to objects and rituals. Based on an impressive array of new sources, including soldier letters, diaries, and post-war interviews, his work is replete with concrete aspects of daily existence in the Red Army that will be new even to specialists.

Schechter's project requires careful navigation between two extremes: to one side lies antiquarianism—relishing the material remains of the past for their own sake, and neglecting their broader context and significance. To the other side lies imbuing every artifact with enormous cultural weight, beyond what the material object can bear. After all, sometimes a papirosa is just a papirosa. He generally does an exemplary job of balancing the material particulars of Red Army kit against their greater significance, though, at least to my taste, there are times when he goes beyond his evidence, as when he links Soviet foxholes and entrenchments to Soviet models of urbanization (109–10). The nature of military equipment and military practice is that they are at base functional: intended to allow soldiers to fight effectively. That necessarily imposes real constraints on design, independent of the societies that produce them.

To be sure, particular societies can and do have important differences in how they conceive of and produce such mundane equipment as dog tags, uniforms, rifles, and rucksacks, and Schechter's book is at its best when he draws out that comparative dimension, pointing out the specific Russianness or Sovietness of material objects as opposed to merely illustrating universals, such as the extraordinary importance of mail from home to all soldiers, Soviet or otherwise, and the desperation for reading material to fill empty hours.

Like many other scholars, Schechter finds a general pattern of degeneration and deprofessionalization of the Red Army with the massive losses of 1941, followed by a concerted effort in 1943 to raise professional and material standards, but he traces it through specific items of equipment and practice. Training became more systematic, and old uniforms were replaced by new tunics deliberately designed to look like old imperial uniforms, modeled on Russian peasant shirts. Soldiers and their units had far more firepower at their disposal than they did in 1941 and 1942. In another observation shared with other scholars, he notes the deliberate simplicity and ease of use of Soviet military technology.

When Schechter digs down into the details of daily life, he finds additional key distinctions between the Red Army and western armies. Treating its soldiers as interchangeable parts, the Red Army struggled for years for a system to track its personnel. Unlike western armies, which strove to return wounded soldiers to their home units, Red Army soldiers who could not be treated at the front were simply shunted back to random formations when they left hospital, with pernicious effects on morale. Only soldiers in elite Guards formations had the right of return after wounds. There was no regular system of leave or furloughs. Soldiers held tightly to what bits of personal property they could in a world where even their underwear was not their own: lucky charms, tobacco pouches, and particularly the spoons with which they ate. They dipped them into shared pots of hot food, as the Red Army avoided the preserved C-Rations and K-Rations typical of the American army. Soviet soldiers displayed a peculiar blend of attraction and revulsion to petty bourgeois creature comforts when Soviet soldiers reached German (or even Polish) soil. Though happy to loot watches, cameras, and fine clothing, luxuries taken for granted by their German or American equivalents, they condemned German coziness and German pornography as examples of both theft of the riches of conquered peoples, and devoid of real aesthetic value. Nonetheless, when the Red Army gave a semi-official imprimatur to looting at the beginning of 1945 by permitting the shipment of goods home, soldiers overcame their scruples. Specialists will learn much from Schechter; general readers will find the mundane details of life fascinating.