Brandon Schechter

brandon.schechter@nyu.edu
Articles by Brandon Schechter

What Russians Think When They Hear the Word “Nazi”

Claiming that a country whose head of state is a Jew with relatives who died in the Holocaust is a “neo-Nazi” state is absurd. Yet for many Russians, this claim could sound credible, because “Nazism” and the more commonly used “fascism” carry a different set of associations than for most people in Western Europe and North America.

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Excerpt from Brandon Schechter’s “The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects”

This book tells the story of that dramatic change—from a desperate, retreating band to a victorious army—as experienced by soldiers. The years 1941–1945 replayed in real life a universal tale that had become a major trope of Bolshevism: “the standard exodus and construction stories about the transformation of a motley crowd into a holy army.”

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