Central Asia in World War Two: The Impact and Legacy of Fighting for the Soviet Union by VickyDavis. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 408 pp. $31.45 (paper). ISBN 978‐1‐350‐37228‐3

Whereas contemporary scholarship on Soviet Central Asians in the Great Patriotic War has been written drawing extensively on Russian-language sources and state and regional archives in Russian Federation, Vicky Davis’s book challenges this Eurocentric approach by conducting a reverse experiment of writing on the Soviet war experience from margins to the center. Davis traces how the lives of Soviet citizens called to war from remote Kyrgyzstani villages near the border with China changed throughout the 1940s and beyond. This is a microhistory “of over three hundred [Soviet Central Asian] individuals,” whose lives had been permanently altered by war (p. 8). The source base is primarily comprised of data from the Issuk-Ko’l Archives (Kyrgyzstan), as well as from family archives, Russian-language local press, and interviews (conducted mostly in Russian). This work is “not a state-centric overview of political decisions and military maneuvers; rather, it weaves together the threads of many individual people behind the statistics” (p. 11). Even though state policies are the backdrop of the narrative, the personal stories of individuals loom large through their experience of evacuation and deportation, draft-dodging and Sovietization, commemoration [of war] and ambivalence. The book is structured chronologically and thematically and is divided into three parts. The first narrates the experiences of Central Asian combatants. Chapter 1 outlines sources, scope, and structure. Chapter 2 covers the chaotic regional conscription process. Chapter 3 details the discrimination and disaffection of ethnic minorities in the Red Army, tribulations of deserters and POWs, and those in penal and labor battalions. The second part focuses on the home front. Chapter 4 details the war economy. Chapter 5 summarizes social hardships, from challenges to patriarchal norms, food shortages, declining public health, and child-labor practices. Chapter 6 analyzes wartime propaganda for local consumption, a “cultural revolution” that ideologically aligned Central Asians with the rest of their Soviet kin. The third part considers the overall impact of the wartime population displacement on the region. Chapter 7 focuses on ethnically and socially diverse evacuees, while chapter 8 charts a different trajectory of displacement—that of the ethnically diverse deportees (Poles, Pontic Greeks, and Crimean Tatars). Chapter 9 concludes with an analysis of the Soviet memory of the war and underscores the differences in commemoration of the national war effort in various post-Soviet Central Asian republics. The book builds on and contributes to the burgeoning field of World War Two mobilization and mobility in Soviet Central Asia. The evidence base for the bulk of the book, immediately outside of Kyrgyzstanis’ experience, rests on recent Western scholarship, whereas recent post-Soviet Russian historiography dealing with the multinational war effort is conspicuously absent. One wonders if a proposed focus on ethnic minorities and rejection of the Eurocentric approach could have been elevated by choosing not to focus exclusively on a Russian-language Kyrgyz broadsheet and comparing it to coverage in Kyrgyz or any other minority language of Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Given the absence of archival materials dealing with the Central Asian communities and experiences outside of Kyrgyzstan, Soviet Kyrgyzstanis’ experiences emerge as a multilayered, multifaceted narrative, whereas experiences elsewhere in Central Asia are outlined only in cursory fashion. The ultimate question is how the experiences of predominantly rural Kyrgyzstanis compare to those elsewhere in rural and suburban Central Asia—outside of Tashkent, Frunze, and Alma-Ata—that Davis frequently relies on for comparative perspective. Does the wartime experience of often more Russified and better integrated urban dwellers in Central Asia differ from that of their multitudinous rural counterparts? Overall, Central Asia in World War Two is a unique book that offers new data on a lesser-studied Central Asian republic and attempts to balance the “big picture” with microhistory on the regional and provincial levels. This approach illuminates the war (and postwar) experiences of not only a titular (Kyrgyz) nation, but also those of ethnic minorities. It is a welcome addition to the subfield of multiethnic Soviet history that analyzes “national” republics as internally heterogeneous units. It weaves together the stories of everyday Central Asians (predominantly Kyrgyzstanis, but not exclusively so) on the war front and the home front. Davis’s book is written in engaging prose, connects pre- and postwar themes, and is, hence, a valuable resource for non-history majors to learn about Soviet history “from below” through the experiences of (often marginalized) individuals.