Soviet Internment

Memory, Nostalgia, and the POW Experience

Dr Maria Cristina Galmarini (College of William & Mary, USA)

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English

Bloomsbury Academic
16 October 2025

Series: Russian Shorts

Using a microhistory based on a unique set of life-writing sources, this book provides an unparalleled insight into the Soviet POW experience during the Second World War. It reconstructs key moments in the life of former Italian POW Umberto Montini, who was captured by the Soviet Army in 1942, interned in a prisoners’ hospital in Mordovia, and then repatriated to Italy in 1945.

Through an analysis of Umberto’s copious life-writings, Soviet Internment examines the testimony of a surviving WWII prisoner, whose memories were haunted by the fury of war and whose body carried deep physical and emotional traces but who nonetheless felt a nostalgic attachment to his place of internment. The book brings theoretical questions about memory, trauma, and European people’s political trajectories into sustained contact with an individual’s specific experience, organically prompting a reconsideration of key 20th-century events in the process.

By: Dr Maria Cristina Galmarini (College of William & Mary USA)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 208mm, Width: 132mm, Spine: 16mm
Weight: 540g
ISBN: 9781350507739
ISBN 10: 1350507733
Series: Russian Shorts
Pages: 152
Publication Date: 16 October 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Prologue 1. A Genealogy of Memory and Narration 2. Fascist Youth and the Call to Arms 3. The ‘Russian Front’ 4. Internment at Zubova Poliana 5. The Unhealing Wounds of War Select Bibliography Index

Maria Cristina Galmarini is Associate Professor of History and Global Studies at the College of William and Mary, USA. She is the author of Ambassadors of Social Progress: A History of International Blind Activism in the Cold War (2024) and The Right to Be Helped: Deviance, Entitlement, and the Soviet Moral Order (2016).

Reviews for Soviet Internment: Memory, Nostalgia, and the POW Experience

This fascinating study reconstructs the remarkable story of Umberto Montini, an Italian soldier who survived the Second World War and Soviet internment. Maria Cristina Galmarini examines the impact of war and captivity through a skillful analysis of Montini’s extraordinary personal archive, revealing how individuals made sense of traumatic memories and experiences, and rebuild fragile identities. * Robert Dale, Senior Lecturer in Russian History, Newcastle University, UK * Drawing on theoretical approaches to trauma, memory, and historical narrative, this fascinating book highlights two moments in the entangled history of an Italian youth captured on the Soviet front: the war itself, and the commemorations fifty years later, which spurred him to revisit the emotional landscape of his youth. * Diane P. Koenker, Professor Emeritus of Russian and Soviet History, University College London, UK *