Soviet Internment: Memory, Nostalgia, and the POW Experience

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.

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).