The Great Patriotic War
Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union; after colossal losses, about 27 million Soviet dead, the Red Army fights its way to Berlin.
- Russia's War — Richard Overy, Penguin (1998)
- Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 — Catherine Merridale, Faber and Faber (2005)
- Counting Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Comment — Mark Harrison, University of Warwick, CAGE Working Paper 332 (2017)
- Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — Timothy Snyder, Basic Books (2010)
In August 1939 the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, with a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe between them. The USSR invaded eastern Poland, attacked Finland and annexed the Baltic states. Stalin ignored repeated warnings of a German attack.
- Russia's War — Richard Overy, Penguin (1998)
- Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — Timothy Snyder, Basic Books (2010)
Catastrophe
On 22 June 1941 Germany and its allies invaded with more than three million troops. In the first months the Red Army lost millions of men killed or captured. By December the Germans were at the gates of Moscow. Leningrad was besieged for nearly 900 days, from September 1941 to January 1944, and roughly 800,000 to a million civilians died there, most of them from hunger. Germany’s plans for the east called for the starvation and resettlement of tens of millions of Slavs. More than three million Soviet prisoners of war died in German captivity, and the Holocaust by bullets killed most of the Jews in the occupied Soviet lands.
- Russia's War — Richard Overy, Penguin (1998)
- Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — Timothy Snyder, Basic Books (2010)
- Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 — Catherine Merridale, Faber and Faber (2005)
Turning the tide
The defence of Moscow in winter 1941, the battle of Stalingrad (August 1942 – February 1943), where an entire German army was surrounded and destroyed, and the tank battle of Kursk in July 1943 turned the war. Factories evacuated beyond the Urals out-produced Germany. In 1944 the Red Army drove the Germans out of Soviet territory, and on 2 May 1945 Berlin fell. Germany surrendered late on 8 May, already 9 May in Moscow, which is why Russia marks Victory Day a day later than Western Europe.
- Russia's War — Richard Overy, Penguin (1998)
- Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 — Catherine Merridale, Faber and Faber (2005)
The cost
The Russian government’s figure, based on a 1993 study by the Russian Academy of Sciences, is 26.6 million Soviet dead, including about 8.7 million military deaths. Some historians argue for higher military losses, but most accept a total in the range of 26–27 million.
- Counting Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Comment — Mark Harrison, University of Warwick, CAGE Working Paper 332 (2017)
- Russia's War — Richard Overy, Penguin (1998)
- Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — Timothy Snyder, Basic Books (2010)
Soldiers fought out of patriotism, out of hatred for the invader, and also under the threat of their own side: Order No. 227 of July 1942, “Not one step back”, set up blocking units and penal battalions.
- Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 — Catherine Merridale, Faber and Faber (2005)
- Russia's War — Richard Overy, Penguin (1998)
Memory
Under Stalin, Victory Day was downplayed; Brezhnev made it a public holiday and a near-sacred cult in 1965. Since the 2000s the state has made the victory the core of Russian identity, with ever larger parades. The “Immortal Regiment”, started in 2012 in Tomsk as a grassroots march in which people carry portraits of relatives who fought, was soon taken over by the state. Many Russians see any criticism of the Soviet war record as an insult to their grandparents, which is something worth understanding before you start a conversation about it.
- The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia — Masha Gessen, Riverhead Books (2017)
- Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 — Catherine Merridale, Faber and Faber (2005)
The Soviet people, above all Russians, saved Europe from Nazism at an unequalled price. Those who question the Soviet role, or equate Stalin with Hitler, are "falsifying history"; since 2014 this has been a criminal offence in some forms.
- Russia's War — Richard Overy, Penguin (1998)
- The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia — Masha Gessen, Riverhead Books (2017)
The Soviet Union did help defeat Germany, but it began the war as Hitler's partner under the 1939 pact, invading Poland and annexing the Baltic states, and "liberation" in 1944–45 brought a new occupation, deportations and communist rule.
- Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — Timothy Snyder, Basic Books (2010)
- God's Playground: A History of Poland (2 vols, revised edition) — Norman Davies, Oxford University Press (2005)
The Eastern Front decided the war against Germany, where most German military losses occurred. Both the heroism and sacrifice of Soviet citizens and the crimes of Stalin's regime, before, during and after the war, are real and need to be held together.
- Russia's War — Richard Overy, Penguin (1998)
- Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 — Catherine Merridale, Faber and Faber (2005)
- Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — Timothy Snyder, Basic Books (2010)
Why it matters today
Victory Day, 9 May, is the one memory that unites almost all Russians. Nearly every family lost someone, and many march with their portraits in the "Immortal Regiment". The state has made the victory the centre of national identity, and now uses its language, "Nazis", "fascists", to describe Ukraine and the West.