1This monograph by Allen Frank is part of a growing field of research in recent years that revisits the history of Muslims and Islam in the USSR, especially since the institutionalisation of Soviet Islam during the Second World War (Jeff Eden, Eren Tasar, Bakthiar Babadzhanov, Ashiberk Muminov, Paolo Sartori, Devin Deweese, Stéphane Dudoignon, among others).

2Allen Frank's contribution to this field involves using an approach and method that he employed in his previous book on miracles in the Gulag, focusing on the Kazakhs. The aim is to give a voice to emic narratives (provided by the actors themselves) in the local language, belonging to genres or literary forms of the Kazakh tradition, and to open up a new perspective on the experiences of Central Asian Muslims in the great Soviet disciplinary institutions, such as the Gulag or the Army.

3In this book, Allen Frank focuses on Kazakh conscripts in the Red Army who were mobilized both at the front and behind the lines, as soldiers or workers supporting the war effort. He examines how they make sense of the war and their respective, often painful, experiences. He successfully shows that, while appropriating the Soviet patriotic narrative, they draw on their own repertoire of values, their recent history, and the memory of lineage or epic to conceive their place in the war.

4Indeed, Allen Frank presents a social history of the Red Army through the lens of its Kazakh soldiers, based on a specific and exceptional corpus of letter-poems in verse, which were written at the front and sent to families remaining in Kazakhstan. These compositions belong to the codified genre of khat-öleng or khat-shïgarma, and are read and sung in private and sometimes in public, according to the nomadic Kazakh tradition of orature and its performances.

5These letter-poems produce a narrative and thus a memory of the war that escapes censorship and is, to some extent, free from the stereotypes conveyed by the authorities. This form of ego-narrative invokes religious themes and references, as well as family memories of the recent past, and shows the intimate thoughts (family, lineage, religious imagination, native land, etc.), beyond any ideological prescription, in the concrete conditions of the Second World War, both at the front and in the rear. Allen Frank views them as a source of social and religious history, as well as literary performances and pieces of the Kazakh epic corpus.

6In the first part of the book, the author presents essential contextualization elements for the demonstration. He discusses the major institutions that govern Kazakh society, such as kinship and the auyl (nomadic settlement and, by extension, traditional Kazakh village), as well as the effects of Sovietization on them. He also explores the history of military conscription in the armies headed by the sovereigns of Kazakh tribes (Khans) and then in the Soviet army, from the colonization of the steppes by the Russian Empire until the Second World War. The author devotes a remarkable development to the epic literary genre of letter-poems, its social functions, and its formal and thematic characteristics. He first draws up a genealogy of the genre, which has roots in the practices of neighbouring Bashkir and Tatar societies, in which the Kazakhs have long been involved. He then analyzes the structuring character of military and warlike motifs, which refer to experiences on fronts as varied as those of the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, and, of course, the Second World War.

7This introductory section provides an opportunity to review the sources in which this collection of letter-poems has been discovered, from their publications in Tatar editorial spaces at the end of the 19th century and during the 1910s, to the works and compilations of letter-poems from World War II published in Kazakhstan, in Kazakh, from the 2000s onwards. Coming from private archives, literary collections, or museums, these writings appear as a reservoir of new sources on the Soviet experience that allow historians to move beyond from the prism of the state and its bureaucracy, and are bound to transform our reading of this period.

8The second part of the book is devoted to the war experience proper, seen from both the front and the home front, and thematically divided into five chapters respectively dedicated to 1) enlistment and events on the front, 2) wounds and hospital stays, 3) Islam in the Red Army, 4) connections with the home front, particularly in its lineage dimension, and finally 5) events and political interpretations embodied in letter-poems marked by different forms of patriotism. Based on this typological framework, the author translates and analyzes dozens of letter-poems. Their content often mirrors the recent hardships faced by the Kazakh people, including the 1916 rebellion, anti-religious repression, the 1930s famine, sedentarization, and attacks against traditional lineage social structures. But this material also reveals a paradox: Kazakh soldiers leverage precisely these social characteristics, attacked by Soviet policy but still the cement of communities, to support each other and, by extension, to support the Soviet war effort and defeat the enemy.

9The poems demonstrate and foster a sense of solidarity based on kinship ties, achieved through the invocation of ancestral spirits during battle, thereby situating the fight within a familial and social genealogy of courage. Furthermore, elements of Sufism appear to reinforce the idea of the sanctity of Soviet territory due to the presence of major shrines in Central Asia, such as that of Ahmad Yassawi. The letter-poems also draw upon Islamic philosophical concepts, including destiny, judgment, indulgence, and depreciation of the earthly world, to provide diverse analytical perspectives on the war. The use of religious thought, which challenges the established principles of Marxist philosophy and historical materialism, remains a means of justification and a resource for soldiers and their families to overcome the difficulties of war and defend the Soviet homeland. These insights converge with the accounts of many observers noting the fervor and observance of Soviet Muslims on the frontlines.

11The methodology and sources employed by Allen Frank provide a comprehensive and vivid depiction of the experiences of Kazakh soldiers and their families. This approach convincingly argues for the inclusion of grassroots perspectives in the general narrative of the Great Patriotic War. Moreover, this methodology highlights the significant potential of traditional literary forms specific to Central Asian societies for historiography. It encourages us to extend this approach to the social history of Soviet Central Asia and likely the Caucasus during the second half of the 20th century.