For the Motherland! For Stalin!

A Red Army Officer's Memoir of the Eastern Front

Bogachev Boris, Bogacheva Maria

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Boris Bogachev's highly readable account of life as a young platoon commander in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 is both a riveting tale of hardship and courage and a deeply informative military history.

The son of a Soviet military commissar, Bogachev volunteered to fight as soon as he turned seventeen. Life in the Red Army was harsh, with food shortages, inadequate equipment and fear – not only of the well-armed enemy ahead, but also of the trigger-happy political officers at his back. Bogachev fought in many campaigns during the war, including the 15-month Rzhev "meat-grinder", which resulted in terrible Soviet losses. On three occasions he was threatened with execution. On three occasions he was wounded. Determined and resourceful, he obtained papers authorising him to be treated in hospital, instead smuggling himself aboard a train across Russia to visit his family in Kazakhstan before returning to the front.

Bogachev, who retired from the Soviet army in 1984 a much-decorated colonel, offers his experience of the hell that was the Eastern Front with freshness and candour. He vividly conveys the wide gap between ideology and reality in Stalin's Russia, the warm camaraderie among those who fought the Nazis and his horror at the inhumanity of war.

About the Author

Boris Bogachev (1924-2015) was born in Penza, Russia. He was a teenager living in Odessa when Germany invaded the USSR in 1941. He joined the Red Army as a junior lieutenant, and was wounded three times. Later he trained as a military lawyer and was involved in the rehabilitation of Stalin's victims. He served as a judge on military tribunals before retiring in 1985.

Maria Bogacheva, Boris's daughter, translated the book from the original Russian. She was a lecturer in English at Odessa University from 1994 to 2005. She now lives in the UK.

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