Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union 1941-1945

The official history of the greatest land war ever fought, written by the institution with the most at stake in how it was told.

Above the title stands the corporate author: the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee. Below it, an editorial commission of twenty-nine chaired by the Party ideologist P. N. Pospelov and studded with marshals of the Soviet Union - Bagramyan, Sokolovsky, Zakharov, and A. A. Grechko, the serving Minister of Defence. M. M. Minasyan was working editor-in-chief of the text. At nearly a quarter of a million words, detailed down to individual divisions and river crossings, it is the single most authoritative one-volume statement of what the Soviet state wished the world to understand about 1941 to 1945.

Its central claim is true. The Soviet-German front was the main and decisive front of the Second World War, the theatre where the German army was actually broken, and the figures the book gives are of the right order: 181 divisions and eighteen brigades massed against the USSR in June 1941, some 77 per cent of the Wehrmacht's active strength thrown east. It was Soviet soldiers who fought the bulk of the German army for four years and destroyed most of it, and the Red Army that reached and opened the death camps. The price has no parallel in modern history: the official toll of twenty million given here, sixteen hundred towns razed, seventy thousand villages burned, a third of the national wealth destroyed.

An abridged translation of the second Russian edition of 1970, made at the height of the Brezhnev-era war cult.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.