The official picture of a people solidly united behind the government and the party falls apart under scrutiny. Nearly three-quarters of the infantry started life as peasants, and many had suffered the traumas of forced collectivization. Their feelings toward the regime ranged from sullen acquiescence to outright hostility, especially in Ukraine. In the early months of the war, as the Germans advanced at will, mass desertions were commonplace. Troops, seized by "tank fright," often panicked and fled.

The American experience of tight-knit platoons bound by loyalty and friendship did not exist in the Soviet armed forces. The extremely high casualty rates ensured a constant turnover in personnel. Most soldiers either died or were wounded within three months of reaching the front lines. Further, the government assigned political officers to every fighting unit to reinforce party discipline and to report on conversations. Mutual trust was impossible.

"Ivan's War" combines, quite effectively, painstaking historical reconstruction and sympathetic projection. Ms. Merridale, proceeding from campaign to campaign, describes from the top down and from the bottom up. She provides a coherent picture of the tactical decisions and industrial adjustments that altered the course of the war, and at the same time focuses on how such changes were reflected in the day-to-day experiences and feelings of the troops on the ground.

Something like despair defined the period up to Stalingrad, as the Soviet Union gave up great swaths of territory and 45 percent of its population to the Germans. Unlike the Americans or the British, Russians fought on knowing that their wives and their parents and their children were in the hands of the enemy. They were hungry, subsisting on a diet of soup, kasha, bread and tea. Rampant pilfering of army warehouses and supply trucks diverted more desirable food, as well as other war material, to the black market. Soldiers, lacking spades, dug trenches with their helmets, the same helmets in which they boiled potatoes.

Somehow, they fought on. As the Russians came to understand what was happening in captured Soviet territory, despair changed to a ferocious appetite for vengeance and, at Stalingrad, a growing confidence that the Germans could not only be stopped, but beaten. "Imagine it -- the Fritzes are running away from us!" a Russian soldier wrote to his wife after Stalingrad.