The Eastern Front: War, Myth, and Memory

The Second World War in Eastern Europe is far from a neglected topic, especially since social, cultural, and diplomatic historians have entered a field previously dominated by operational histories, and produced a cornucopia of new scholarship offering a more nuanced picture from both sides of the front. However, until now, the story has still been disjointed and specialized, whereby military, social, economic, and diplomatic histories continue to give their own separate accounts. This collection of essays attempts to bring these themes into a more cohesive whole that tells a complex, multifaceted story of war on the Eastern Front as it truly was.

This is one of the few critical examinations that includes both perspectives and looks at the war as a multi‑front effort. It also reveals how myths are created around military conflicts and have direct relevance to current developments in Europe, linking them to a broader discussion of the Second World War, its impact and utility today. It gives a historical dimension to pressing issues and will be of interest and relevance to history students, policymakers, political scientists, diplomats, and foreign policy experts.

The Eastern Front will be a useful reference source, since some chapters rely on extensive new archival research and materials, ego sources, as well as extensive findings of non‑Western scholars, thereby bringing their work to the attention of a broader audience.

Yan Mann is an Associate Clinical Professor of History and the Program Lead of World War II Studies Master’s degree program at Arizona State University. His research interests include the relationship between individual and collective memory, the Stalin cult, censorship, and propaganda. He is the author of “Situating Stalin in the history of the Second World War,” in the edited volume, The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post‑Soviet Russia (2022) and “Manufactured Memory: Crafting the Cult of the Great Patriotic War,” in the edited volume, Terrortimes, Terrorscapes: Continuities of Space, Time, and Memory in Twentieth‑Century War and Genocide (2022).

Olga Kucherenko is a Faculty Associate at World War II Studies Master’s degree program at Arizona State University. Her research interests include conflict‑based propaganda, wartime childhood, and allied relations. She is the author of Soviet Street Children and the Second World War: Welfare and Social Control under Stalin (2016) and Little Soldiers: How Soviet Children Went to War, 1941–1945 (2011).