Word: werth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Russia at War, Werth...
RUSSIA AT WAR: 1941-1945 by Alexander Werth. 1,100 pages. Dutton...
...decades since the war ended, there has not been in English a complete history, in both military and human terms, of Russia's remarkable role. Author Alexander Werth is uniquely qualified to make the attempt. He is an English journalist who was born and raised in St. Petersburg and is perfectly bilingual. He spent all but a few months of the war actually in Russia. As a sympathetic left-wing nonCommunist, he was given unusual freedom of travel. He was one of the only two Western journalists allowed into Leningrad during the siege. He kept...
Stuffed with Shredded Paper. Many of the details are unfamiliar and fascinating. Strategically, for example, Werth rates the Battle of Kursk (north of Kharkov), in July 1943, as "Hitler's last chance to turn the tide," and thus as important as Stalingrad the previous year. Werth is at his best in eyewitness accounts of Leningrad or of his tour (in -40° C. weather) through the Stalingrad area just after the mop-up there. The item about Russian children using the stiffly frozen body of a German soldier as a sled makes a one-sentence summary of the horror...
...excellences, Werth's book is as irritating as the kind of Christmas present that has dozens of valuable tiny pieces to be groped for in a large box stuffed with shredded paper and excelsior. The style swings from a somewhat wide-eyed journalese to a plodding heroic prose. The best parts, it turns out, are lifted in great chunks from his earlier books of war reporting. He quotes endlessly from Pravda and Red Star editorials; he pads out his pages with Supreme Soviet speeches complete with the ritual enthusiasm of "(prolonged, stormy applause)"; he is mercilessly repetitious...