Description: The book makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the Soviet population's experience of World War II as well as to studies of war and famine.
Review Quotes:
"The book is incredibly well documented and researched, and essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Soviet Union's wartime experience."--Social History of Medicine
"Hunger and War makes an extremely valuable contribution to scholarly understandings of the Great Patriotic War, in particular the relationship between state policies, popular experiences, and the extraordinary social costs of the war. It reveals for the first time, in remarkable detail, the full extent of hunger and food shortage across Soviet space."--Soviet and Post-Soviet Review
"Hunger and War . . . constitutes an important contribution to the current scholarship on the period of the Great Patriotic War. Focusing on the theme of food provisioning and consumption, the volume effectively bridges the traditional divide between scholarship on the battlefront and the home front. By bringing to light an impressive corpus of previously ignored archival sources, this new collection provides an important supplement to the existing literature on the topic."--CritCom
"Hunger and War broadens our horizons on a crucial dimension of the Soviet-German War. Indiana University Press has done an admirable job in producing the book, which will prove valuable to researchers and as assigned reading for students."--SLAVIC REVIEW
"The editors and Indiana University Press are to be very warmly congratulated for producing such a fine and necessary work. The editors have done an excellent job in putting together a very good team of contributors--men and women who not only know their individual specialist subject areas thoroughly, but also write in an engaging and thoughtful manner"--Europe - Asia Studies
"This excellent book adds much to our knowledge of the Soviet Union's home front."--American Historical Review
"The research is extensive and innovative, and the writing is deep yet engaging, resulting in a volume whose contribution to the historiography of World War II and to food studies in general will stand the test of time."--The Russian Review
"'Hunger and War' analyses several aspects of food shortages, starvation, and food provisioning in the Soviet Union. . . . [This is] . . . a coherent and informative volume that adds substantially to existing knowledge about Soviet food supply, military and civilian rationing, and starvation during the 'Great Patriotic War'.Dec. 2016"--Intnl Review of Social History
"The sustained treatment and tight focus make Hunger and War a compelling addition to the historiography of the Soviet Union at war."--International Review of Social History
"An extremely important book about an under-researched problem that will be of intense interest to historians of nutrition and food supply in wartime, the Great Patriotic War, the siege of Leningrad, and the history of Soviet medicine."--Dan Healy, Oxford University
"Hunger and War provides important new material and innovative analyses not easily available to English speaking audiences on an important subject that has received too little attention. The Soviet experience of war takes on a new dimension. . . . Wartime hunger in the USSR was more than aching stomachs; it was political and symbolic as well."--Jeffrey K. Hass, author of Rethinking the Post-Soviet Experience