Never to Forget

Weekend · 22 June 2025 · Vladimir Maksakov

11 Books About War That Future Generations Should Read

Diaries, memoirs, reflections and accounts of what was lived through—and of those who did not survive. All these help one generation pass on, and another comprehend, the terrible truth of the twentieth century.

Leonid Andreyev — The Philosophy of Existence: Wartime Memoirs

Geleos, 2005

Wartime memoirs by the man who would become dean of the Faculty of Philology at Moscow State University. The author tries to make sense of what is happening, particularly in his seemingly out-of-place lyrical digressions and impressionistic sketches of nature. Some of these read like prose poems, building bridges back to peace. War is portrayed as an elemental force that destroys nature as well. Leonid Andreyev thinks a great deal about death, though he does not always write about it. In a sense, his text is a spiritual exercise intended, among other things, to reconcile himself to war. Culture can withstand the advance of barbarism, but only if we cultivate it within ourselves.

Olga Bergholz — My Diary, 1941–1971

Kuchkovo Pole, 2020

This diary was surrounded by myth for a very long time, making its complete publication all the more important. Remaining in besieged Leningrad, Olga Bergholz uses an existential crisis to rethink not only her own life but also what was happening to the country: the wedge of war temporarily drove out the wedge of terror. Tragedy and heroism are inseparable. Stoicism in the name of victory gives life new meaning, while everyday routines, almost ritualistic actions, help her keep her sanity amid the siege. She is a poet, and many entries in this exceptionally important diary read like drafts of poems.

Vladimir Gelfand — Diary, 1941–1946

ROSSPEN, 2016

A rare example of a diary kept at the front. The author is a young Jewish historian who tries to analyze the historical situation. He finds himself unable to do so, as familiar categories—including those of historical materialism—fail, and reality breaks out of every framework. All that remains is the effort to record events. The form mirrors the content: brief entries alternate with long reflections. Everyday military life takes its course: mortar-firing practice, digging dugouts, a short leave—a kind of new world within the war. The diary seems hardly to notice the filth of war, continually recalling the higher purpose of the struggle against fascism.

Lydia Ginzburg — Notes of a Blockade Survivor

Yauza, 2021

An experience at the limits of human endurance, changes in consciousness, the logic and psychology of the siege, rumors becoming a new reality—and Russian literature, which suddenly helps one understand and describe the impossible. Trauma can become a source of transformation. Amid the monstrous conditions of the siege, a person discovers not only an abyss around them but also searches within for another foundation for existence. The outstanding philologist creates a distinctive text of life under siege, bringing it close to existentialist philosophy. If an experience can be described, perhaps it can also be survived.

Ion Degen — War Never Ends

AST, 2014

The author of one of the most important poems about the war, beginning “My comrade, in mortal agony…” The Greek word from which “agony” derives means “contest,” and that idea also seems to describe Ion Degen’s wartime recollections. It is a fundamental contest in which life itself is at stake. The tank soldier frankly writes that he rejoiced when he killed Germans: the desire for revenge was intensified by the sense of a soldier’s duty. The enemy is no longer quite human; what matters most is that he is a fascist. The stories are deliberately unemotional, because no unnecessary emotion has a place in war. This is what turns a person into a soldier, ready to use every opening to kill rather than be killed. Ion Degen fulfilled that task: he was a frighteningly effective soldier, a patriot first of the Soviet Union and later of Israel. Yet beneath the words one senses the presence of another, higher power directing him and a vast multitude of other people.

Georgy Zhukov — Letters from a Soldier (1943–1945)

Delo, 2020

A teacher and lieutenant who shared the marshal’s name writes letters to his wife. They make room for everyday trench life and for terse but all the more vivid descriptions of combat. Most striking, however, is the extraordinary depth with which he speaks of his feelings. The author tries to create a text with almost the power of a prayer, not only to save himself from death (although he was seriously wounded), but also to preserve his humanity. It becomes a spiritual practice: the song “Dark Night,” copied out by hand and with mistakes, seems to become part of his own voice. Like millions of other soldiers, he claims this song-prayer as his own—not a song about hatred, but about love amid war. A strange and beautiful kind of religious feeling.

Igor Krivoguz — The Life of a Bit-Part Player in an Age of Upheaval

Ves Mir, 2021

The author went through the war in many roles between August 1942 and August 1945. He served as a partisan, a sapper and the commander of an anti-tank gun, seeking, as he himself put it, to present a multidimensional picture of the war. This was a conscious commitment to a many-voiced account. Many years later Igor Krivoguz checked his personal impressions against archival records, hoping to reach historical truth, but ultimately deciding to remain honest about his subjective perspective. In every new situation he adapted to different people and circumstances, attempting to overcome human alienation, which was replaced by another feeling: unity with the Party. And although people at the front were freer (even with death only a step away), the author candidly acknowledges that, for many front-line soldiers, Stalin was a symbol of victory.

Nikolai Nikulin — Memoirs of War

AST, 2024

The book that broke through the dam. What the author wrote about had more or less always been known, but never before had it been described with such completeness and force, or with so many staggering details. Swearing, filth, hunger and cold become a new dimension of daily life. War remakes a person amid senselessness, stupidity, cruelty and the constant proximity of death. To survive, a soldier stops thinking and relies chiefly on instinct. Only a stripping away of everything unnecessary may save him. These bitter reflections lead to the conclusion that heroism was forced upon soldiers: without their commanders’ mistakes, they would not have had to sacrifice themselves.

Dmitry Panov — Russians in the Snow: A Life Against the Backdrop of a Historical Blizzard

Spolom, 2003

Among the most complete memoirs of a Soviet combat pilot. The details are concrete and almost businesslike in their dryness. There is much irritation at the technical shortcomings of Soviet aircraft, for which people paid with their lives. Descriptions of combat alternate with memories of peaceful life, aerial warfare with preparations on the ground. The helpless anger of the early war years gives way to confidence in himself and his aircraft. The person and the machine complement each other.

Georgy Satirov — Reich: Memoirs of German Captivity (1942–1945)

NLO, 2024

Captivity as it was: labor camps in Germany in which a person could not merely exist but somehow live. Hard work brought a semblance of meaning; each camp developed its own particular—and terrifying—microcosm. As always, people differed, on both sides of the barbed wire: relations among prisoners, guards and local residents sometimes changed from one day to the next. Even in a camp that was not among the harshest, ethical dilemmas arose, and the author does not presume to settle them: the human tragedy was too great. As if to remind us of this, the text contains numerous dialogues which, even if not entirely exact, create a frightening sense of being there.

Mikhail Suknev — Notes of a Penal Battalion Commander

Tsentrpoligraf, 2007

One of those texts that reveal not “what really happened”—the author makes no such claim—but the complexity and ambiguity of wartime events. As the title suggests, the crucial episode of these memoirs concerns penal soldiers; more important, however, is that they are shown within the wider context of the war, without which there would have been no penal units at all. Mikhail Suknev describes getting to know them and trying to see them first and foremost as human beings rather than soldiers, with lives and histories of their own. He begins by attempting to debunk one myth about the penal soldiers but creates another of his own. At a certain point, these men (although he urges others not to label them penal soldiers) become, in his eyes, an elite unit that could confidently serve as an example to the entire Red Army.