To the Tashkent Station

In summer and fall 1941, as German armies advanced with shocking speed across the Soviet Union, the Soviet leadership embarked on a desperate attempt to safeguard the country's industrial and human resources. Their success helped determine the outcome of the war in Europe. To the Tashkent Station brilliantly reconstructs the evacuation of over sixteen million Soviet civilians in one of the most dramatic episodes of World War II.Rebecca Manley paints a vivid picture of this epic wartime saga: the chaos that erupted in towns large and small as German troops approached, the overcrowded trains that trundled eastward, and the desperate search for sustenance and shelter in Tashkent, one of the most sought-after sites of refuge in the rear. Her story ends in the shadow of victory, as evacuees journeyed back to their ruined cities and broken homes. Based on previously unexploited archival collections in Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, To the Tashkent Station offers a novel look at a war that transformed the lives of several generations of Soviet citizens. The evacuation touched men, women, and children from all walks of life: writers as well as workers, scientists along with government officials, party bosses, and peasants. Manley weaves their harrowing stories into a probing analysis of how the Soviet Union responded to and was transformed by World War II.Over the course of the war, the Soviet state was challenged as never before. Popular loyalties were tested, social hierarchies were recast, and the multiethnic fabric of the country was subjected to new strains. Even as the evacuation saved countless Soviet Jews from almost certain death, it spawned a new and virulent wave of anti-Semitism. This magisterial work is the first in-depth study of this crucial but neglected episode in the history of twentieth-century population displacement, World War II, and the Soviet Union.

Manley's book is an impressive achievement. Through work in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Tashkent archives, along with the use of memoir and periodical sources, she effectively documents... Soviet society and the Soviet state as revealed in a moment of crisis.... She produces a nuanced understanding of how evacuation simultaneously exposed and healed fissures within and between various strata of the population in its leaders., This book is one of the most significant recent contributions to the history of the Soviet Union in the Second World War. A nuanced, complex, and confident interpretation of a rich and diverse source base, it is much more than just a careful study of... the Soviet evacuation of institutions, factories, and human beings, to rescue them from the German invasion of 1941. It is also a microstudy of Soviet society in the 1940s more generally.

Rebecca Manley is Associate Professor of History and Undergraduate Chair of the Department of History at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.