The Road to Great Victory

Soviet wartime diplomacy from the German invasion to the defeat of Japan: the forging of the Grand Alliance, the second-front question, Lend-Lease, and the conferences at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam at which the shape of the postwar world was settled.

Vilnis Sipols was a Soviet diplomatic historian working from the published documentary record, and this is the companion to his volume on the diplomacy before the war. As a sustained account of the alliance from the Soviet side - what Moscow asked for, when, and how it read its partners - it is the fullest available in English, and the chapters on the second-front negotiations and on the three summits are detailed and closely sourced.

Where it begins is the first thing it tells you. The subject is announced as Soviet diplomacy from 1941, and the opening chapter starts at daybreak on 22 June. The choice of terminus is legitimate, since the Great Patriotic War did begin then - but it places the two preceding years of Soviet diplomacy outside the frame by design.

The introduction crosses those years in two sentences, moving from the failure of collective security straight to the German attack. The treaty of 23 August 1939 and its protocol, the entry into eastern Poland that September, the war with Finland, and the annexations of 1940 all lie in the gap it steps over.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.