History of the USSR, Part III

For the first time in this three-volume history, the date on the spine is the date of the text. Part Three is a second revised and enlarged edition, and the enlargement is real: the foreword records the tasks set by the Twenty-Sixth Congress of February and March 1981, the last chapter carries a section on that congress, and the chronological summary runs into the spring of 1981. The book was assembled in the year Brezhnev died.

It covers the Great Patriotic War and the four decades after it, and like its predecessors it is signed. The group is named in the front matter - D. A. Kovalenko as chief editor, with V. A. Kumanev, G. A. Kumanev, I. M. Volkov, I. S. Kremer and G. D. Komkov, together with L. K. Bayeva and N. P. Zimarina - under an editorial board headed by A. M. Samsonov, a corresponding member of the Academy and a serious historian of Stalingrad. G. A. Kumanev was a specialist in the wartime economy and evacuation; I. M. Volkov worked on postwar agriculture.

The war chapter shows it. A hundred and forty pages on 1941 to 1945 which, at the level of operations and production, are competent military history: the fronts named and their commanders with them - Zhukov, Vasilevsky, Rokossovsky, Vatutin, Yeremenko, Konev, Govorov, Meretskov, and Chernyakhovsky, killed in East Prussia.

The commission was legitimation, but the people executing it were not hacks.

Part Three of three.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.