The Soviet Union at War, 1941–1945

Introduction

David R. Stone

When German troops crossed the Soviet border on 22 June 1941 their three million men and three thousand tanks represented over 80 per cent of the strength of the Nazi military machine. From that point until the final destruction of Adolf Hitler’s regime in May 1945, the majority of German troops, along with the majority of their tanks, aircraft and weaponry, fought on the Eastern Front against the Soviets. This simple fact–that the Second World War was won and lost in the East, in what Russians term the Great Fatherland War–belongs at the very beginning of this book. Too often, though naturally and understandably, Western people focus on the parts of the war that are most familiar to them: the fall of France, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Atlantic convoys, the struggle for North Africa, the bombing campaign against Germany, the Normandy invasion.¹ But, dramatic and compelling as these events were, the stark truth remains that most of the German soldiers who died fighting for the Nazi regime were killed fighting against the Soviet Union.

The Soviet people paid a terrible price for their victory. The United States and the United Kingdom each had approximately 400,000 servicemen and women killed during the Second World War, in action or through disease or accident. The United States escaped significant casualties at home, while the United Kingdom suffered 65,000 civilian dead. But these figures pale into insignificance next to Soviet losses. Though Stalin attempted to downplay the situation after the war, it is now clear that 25–30 million Soviet citizens died as a result of the war, 8–10 million while serving in the military, the rest civilians who died from starvation, disease or deliberate extermination. The scope of their sacrifice staggers the imagination. For every American or British soldier who perished, twenty Soviet soldiers died. One thousand Soviets died every hour of every day of every month of every year from June 1941 to May 1945.²

The goal of this book is tell the story of the Soviet Union at war–how the Soviet government managed the war and how the Soviet people lived and fought and died. It is not intended to be a strategic or operational history, following the movements of armies on the battlefield. There are a number of excellent works that already do just that.³ Nor is it intended to cover Soviet foreign policy. Instead, its goal is to examine how the Soviet state and Soviet society dealt with the problems and opportunities created by the war, and how the Soviet war effort changed over time. Other excellent works have tried to capture the Soviet home front, beginning with the Russo-British journalist Alexander Werth, who spent the war as a correspondent in the Soviet Union. Others have ably followed, though a flood of research in recent years justifies a fresh look at the experience of Soviet society at war.⁴ The authors in this collection all seek to build on those foundations by pulling together the wealth of new sources available since the opening of Soviet archives, as well as a host of new findings from Russian and Western scholars alike. All the contributors are accomplished researchers, but what they have done here is not focus narrowly on their own work, but instead synthesize the findings of many scholars to improve our general understanding of the Soviet Union at war.

Though this book does not cover the operational and strategic history of the war in any detail, a brief recapitulation of the main events will help put the subsequent chapters into broader context. The Second World War began on 1 September 1939, when Adolf Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland. That invasion, however, had been preceded by key diplomatic developments.

Though the precise motivations of Joseph Stalin’s diplomacy in the run-up to the Second World War are still in question, most scholars agree that Soviet foreign policy from Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 to the Czech crisis of 1938 was one of opposition to Hitler and Nazism. The Soviet Union established military alliances with France and Czechoslovakia, and in the League of Nations Stalin’s foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, pushed the notion of collective security as a bulwark against German expansion. The West’s craven behaviour in 1938, however, as the Czech government was abandoned and browbeaten into ceding Hitler the Sudetenland, raised serious doubts in Soviet minds about the West’s reliability as a potential partner against Hitler. As a result, when Hitler’s pressure campaign turned against Poland in 1939, and Britain and France guaranteed Polish security, Stalin found himself in the enviable position of being able to choose sides.

Britain and France had committed themselves to the defence of Poland. If the Soviet Union opposed him as well, Hitler faced the prospect of a two-front war, just like the First World War that Germany had lost in 1918. On the other hand, Soviet support for Germany, or even neutrality, would enable Hitler to win an easy victory over Poland and then fight a one-front war in the West. Over the summer of 1939 Stalin weighed up offers from the two opposing sides. Though his precise thinking remains a matter for debate, it is clear that the British and the French were slow and half-hearted in their efforts to hammer out an alliance with the Soviet Union. Hitler, in contrast, was eager, even desperate, for cooperation. He could also offer Stalin chunks of Poland and Eastern Europe to sweeten the deal. On the night of 23/24 August the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named after Stalin’s and Hitler’s foreign ministers, pledged non-aggression between the two sides, and in a secret addendum divided Eastern Europe between the two dictators. Hitler’s hands were freed for the invasion of Poland that came a week later.

Hitler’s forces overran Poland much more rapidly than the Soviets had anticipated, and the Red Army had to scramble in mid-September 1939 to occupy its allocated sections of eastern Poland. While Germany then turned her attention to the war against Britain and France, Stalin concentrated on absorbing the territories Hitler had promised him and building up the Red Army for the war that the Soviet leadership accepted as a matter of course would at some point involve the Soviet Union. After minor adjustments to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union absorbed the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania during 1939 and 1940, fought a disastrous war with Finland that at great cost succeeded in pushing the Soviet-Finnish border westward away from Leningrad, the Soviet Union’s second city, and annexed the Romanian region of Bessarabia in June 1940.

This Soviet expansion, however, pushed Hitler towards his fateful decision to attack Stalin, whose evident interest in the Balkans clashed with Hitler’s own plans for European domination. The Soviet moves also threatened Germany’s Romanian oil supply, and undermined the idea that Nazi Germany could further coexist with the Soviet Union. After the fall of France in May/June 1940, Hitler found himself frustrated by Britain’s refusal to accept defeat and his own inability either to bomb her into submission or launch a seaborne invasion. Blaming the obstinacy of the British on their hopes of Soviet intervention against Germany, Hitler began to consider the possibility of a war to destroy the Soviet Union. Encouraged by the Red Army’s inept performance against Finland, and believing the Soviet Union to be an inherently weak state of subhuman Jews and Slavs, Hitler began to make serious preparations for war at the end of 1940.

Stalin and the rest of the ruling Communist Party had long seen war as a distinct possibility, and had been preparing for it in earnest since the early 1930s. Soviet ideology held that the capitalist world outside was seething with potential conflicts, and foreign powers might at any time seek to eliminate the threat communism presented to them and seize Soviet resources by making an attack on the USSR. Capitalist powers might just as easily fight among themselves, and the Soviet Union would then need to watch carefully to determine whether the conflict would entangle it, or whether it might turn war to its own advantage to spread communism and liberate the oppressed working classes of the capitalist world. Stalin seems to have recognized that his alliance with Hitler was only temporary, and the Red Army continued to make hasty preparations for war from 1939 through to 1941. There was a great deal of work to be done, however, and Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s had removed the independent thinkers, skilled managers and bureaucrats who were now desperately needed to ready the Soviet Union for war. When Hitler’s armies finally attacked on 22 June 1941, the Red Army’s disastrous performance and the near-collapse of the Soviet state revealed just how far behind Stalin’s regime still was.

Understanding the Soviet war effort first requires a grasp of the particular nature of the Soviet political system and the man at its head: Joseph Stalin. Even the most mundane details of daily life were affected by the policies Stalin made in the uniquely centralized Soviet regime. In some ways the Soviet system bore a superficial similarity to a Western state. It had an elected legislature in the Supreme Soviet (though elections were stage-managed, single-candidate affairs, and that legislature had no real power), and was governed by a cabinet made up of the heads of various government departments (though they went by the title of People’s Commissars instead of secretaries or ministers). The Soviet Union’s nature as a one-party state, however, meant that those superficial similarities were outweighed by profound differences. Real decisions were made by the inner circle of the ruling Communist Party, often by Stalin himself. Over the Soviet Union’s existence, real power had steadily moved to a smaller and smaller group, from the Communist Party’s leading Central Committee, then to the Politburo (a subcommittee of the Central Committee), and finally by the end of the 1920s to Stalin himself. As the party’s General Secretary, Stalin had made his grab for power in the 1920s on the basis of his domination of the party bureaucracy, using his control over appointments and the flow of information to outmanoeuvre his opponents. He expelled all rivals from the party’s governing Central Committee and Politburo, packed them instead with his loyal followers and made his own authority absolute.

Scholars have debated for decades the extent to which Stalin’s Soviet Union was truly totalitarian, for its vast spaces and inefficient bureaucracy meant total control was an unattainable dream. On the other hand, there is no question that Stalin and the ruling Communist Party believed there was no sphere of life that was legitimately private or beyond the justifiable reach of the state. Though the Soviet government did not have the capacity to achieve total control over its population, it certainly made a total claim on its subjects. As constructed by Stalin during the 1930s, the Soviet state monopolized all significant economic activity, permitted no questioning of the ruling elite or its communist ideology, determined what literature and art its people could enjoy, and permitted no meaningful exercise of popular authority. Decisions were made by a handful of men in the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo, and even that august body was dominated by Stalin himself. In the Great Purges of 1937 and 1938 Stalin had eliminated all past and potential rivals, along with a substantial number of people who were neither, and his power was unchallenged by the time war approached. By the late 1930s, though, he had withdrawn to a large degree from the formal structures of party rule, relying instead on informal meetings and late-night drinking bouts with the old cronies who made up his inner circle, often bypassing the Politburo and other mechanisms of party governance.

Stalin was firmly in control in 1941. The war with Germany was not unexpected, though its timing and manner may have been; indeed, Stalin seems to have anticipated that war with Germany would not come until Hitler had defeated Britain, in a year or two years’ time. Contrary to subsequent myth, Hitler’s betrayal of their non-aggression pact did not reduce Stalin to ineffectiveness. Records from his secretariat reveal that he was in his office meeting with the highest state, party and military officials almost around the clock in the first few days of the war. According to some accounts, some members of his inner circle were quite optimistic, and expected that the German attack would be repelled in a matter of days.⁵

Reality quickly set in. The Politburo met twice in the first day of the war and again the next with military participation. The People’s Commissar of Defence Semyon Timoshenko reported that the damage from the German attack, particularly to the Soviet air force, was much worse than expected. Nevertheless, the mechanisms of Soviet governance still functioned, with the Politburo deciding policies and overseeing the conversion of state institutions from peacetime to wartime functions.⁶ This apparent normality rapidly broke down. The same records that reveal Stalin spending hours managing the war in its first few days also show his mysterious disappearance from the Kremlin a week into the war. On 29 June 1941, soon after the fall of Minsk made clear to the Soviet leadership how serious their position was, Stalin lost his nerve, declared that he and his compatriots had destroyed the legacy that Vladimir Lenin had created for them, and fled to his dacha outside Moscow. After a day, his closest advisers followed him there, and evidently Stalin did not know whether they had come to arrest him or to hail him. In the event, they told him that he was essential to the war effort, and begged him to return to the Kremlin.⁷

Having regained his self-possession, Stalin reorganized his regime to fight the war more effectively. On 30 June 1941 the State Committee of Defence (GKO) was created to coordinate all facets of the war effort by serving, in effect, as Stalin’s war cabinet; he himself was the chairman.⁸ Initial membership included four other members of his inner circle: Vyacheslav Molotov, his foreign minister, as deputy chair; Kliment Voroshilov, his long-time puppet as former head of the Red Army; veteran administrator Georgii Malenkov; and Lavrentii Beria from the secret police. Early discussions had envisaged strengthening the GKO’s economic credentials by including Anastas Mikoian and Nikolai Voznesenskii, two men with extensive experience in economic management, but at Beria’s insistence they were temporarily left in their existing positions. They, along with Stalin’s long-time political henchman Lazar Kaganovich, became plenipotentiary representatives of the GKO, and full members only in 1942. In late 1944 Nikolai Bulganin replaced Voroshilov. The GKO’s members divided up tasks among themselves, with Malenkov, for example, taking responsibility for overseeing aviation.⁹

To a remarkable degree the GKO conserved methods of governance that Stalin had already established. There was substantial overlap between the membership of the GKO and of the ruling Politburo. More importantly, the GKO initially lacked any supporting bureaucracy and personnel of its own, and relied instead on the existing staff of the party’s Central Committee and Politburo, as well as on the present Soviet cabinet –the Council of People’s Commissars.¹⁰ This blending of Soviet government with the Communist Party was nothing new; rule in the Soviet Union had always combined state and party authority. The leadership of the party, first under Lenin and then after a struggle for power in the mid-1920s under Stalin, had dictated policy to more traditional state organs. With overlapping membership between the supreme bodies in the Communist Party (the Politburo and Central Committee) and the highest offices in the state, the Soviets had devised an efficient means of directing an enormous state apparatus through an ideologically defined party.

As the authority running the Soviet war effort, the GKO further blurred the already indistinct line between the Communist Party and the Soviet state. Its decrees were obligatory for state, military, party and economic organizations alike, as well as for ordinary Soviet citizens. Its formal creation came from a three-way decree by the Soviet Union’s highest formal government body (the Supreme Soviet), its governing cabinet (the Council of People’s Commissars), and the Communist Party’s Central Committee. The GKO might seem a wasteful duplication of effort–the Soviet state already had a government, and the Communist Party already told it what to do–but it offered a concentration of formal authority. Stalin had already ruled effectively through a small number of intimates without the need for formal procedures. In wartime, though, the GKO gave that inner circle the formal, legal and political authority to govern directly. In comparison with the large and unwieldy Council of People’s Commissars, the GKO could move quickly and decisively. It also provided a significant benefit in terms of reassuring the Soviet public, by delivering a signal (even if its practical significance was limited) that the regime was taking steps to better organize itself for war.

None of these organizational shake-ups affected Stalin’s centrality to the system. While his predecessor Lenin had enjoyed authority almost as absolute but without holding a swathe of formal offices, Stalin held positions to match his personal power: he was general secretary of the party, minister of defence, and chairman of both the GKO and the Stavka, the Red Army’s high command. After his breakdown in late June, Stalin gave his first speech to the Soviet people since the outbreak of the war on 3 July, and after that began making regular appearances at the People’s Commissariat of Defence to oversee the war effort. On 8 August the rubber-stamp legislature, the Supreme Soviet, appointed Stalin as Supreme Commander (Verkhovnyi Glavnokomanduiushchii) to round out his array of titles.¹¹

Though Stalin’s authority had originated in the party, and remained as mighty as ever, the party itself fell into decline during the war. It held no formal Congress, breaking its pattern of meetings in 1925, 1927, 1930, 1934 and 1939. The party’s Central Committee, in theory its highest governing body, met in full plenary session only once during the war, when it dealt with the weighty matter of the Soviet national anthem. The Politburo, officially a subcommittee of the Central Committee but which had functioned as the supreme power in the Soviet Union, fell into disuse, for just as before the war Stalin relied on informal gatherings of his inner circle, almost all of whom were members of the GKO. The formal structures of Soviet government had only secondary importance. The Supreme Soviet, for example, provided a veneer of legality by rubber-stamping policy initiatives that originated with Stalin, and when it met, which was rarely, handled mechanical tasks like approving the award of medals.¹² Much as he had done before the war, Stalin continued to serve as the coordinator and link between the military, the party and the Soviet state.¹³ Formal division of authority fell by the wayside. Even though the GKO was not technically an instrument of operational command, it was the GKO in October 1941 that set the Mozhaisk line as the key defensive position west of Moscow.¹⁴

Over time, the GKO did become more formal and bureaucratic in its task of running the struggle against Germany. Its management of an immense war effort required a substantial supporting staff, as it took over responsibility for entire sections of the Soviet economy from the Council of People’s Commissars. Created in December 1942, the GKO’s Operational Bureau under Beria’s leadership took responsibility for monitoring and overseeing the Soviet economy’s wartime functioning. The GKO, again at Beria’s instigation, also managed the Soviet Union’s research into atomic energy. As the end of the war approached, it set up a body under Malenkov to manage reparations: the seizure of enemy goods and property as compensation for Soviet damages sustained during the war. These and other subcommittees under the GKO did not have substantial bureaucracies of their own, and the GKO continued to rely in large part on the existing administrative infrastructure of the Council of People’s Commissars. Despite the creation of the superior GKO, the Council of People’s Commissars, under the leadership of Voznesenskii, did not disappear. The GKO took over direct management of branches of the economy serving the war effort, including weapons, ammunition, tanks, aircraft, chemistry and metallurgy, while the Council of People’s Commissars retained its functions of economic planning and management of economic sectors not directly related to the war effort, such as non-military production, agriculture, culture, construction and regional administration. The GKO remained supreme; it set the broad outlines of policy and the Council of People’s Commissars was left to work out the details.¹⁵

Even this generalization requires some qualification. The natural tendency of Stalin’s system of administration was to devolve to micromanagement when Stalin or one of his cronies decided to take up matters of detail. The GKO approved individual weapons systems, for example, and enumerated a detailed list of improvements and modifications for the design of the T-34 tank. Its purview even extended to specifying the issuing of a handkerchief to every Red Army soldier.¹⁶ Over the course of the war the GKO issued 9,971 individual decisions, two-thirds of them economic or production-related.¹⁷

The Second World War tested Stalin’s regime in every way, and victory was presented after the war as a justification and validation for the terrible suffering Stalin had imposed on Soviet society in the years before the war. Certainly matters such as the total mobilization of human and material resources, the rationing of scarce goods and the careful management of the ubiquitous propaganda campaigns had all been mastered by the Soviet regime well before the war, and were easily applied to the conflict with Germany. Stalin’s foremost general during the war, Georgii Zhukov, wrote memoirs that were by no means a paean to Stalin, but nonetheless endorsed and justified his policies of industrialization and collectivization:

The peoples of the world generally realize that before all else it was Soviet soldiers and Soviet weapons that saved Europe from the plague of fascism, that the destruction of Hitler’s Germany is the greatest historical achievement of the Soviet nation. I think that the foundation for this was already laid in those years when the Soviet people at the call of the party took up the industrialization of the country.¹⁸

Even 1998’s four-volume Great Fatherland War 1941–1945, written by a group of senior and well-regarded Russian historians well after the fall of communism, stressed the importance of the Soviet system to victory in the Second World War. Before Vladimir Putin’s and then Dmitrii Medvedev’s administrations placed a heavy premium on Russian patriotism, Soviet nostalgia and the legitimizing role of Soviet victory, this work concluded that the Stalinist system’s monopoly on power brought victory, that

such centralization in wartime conditions played, undoubtedly, a positive role. In contrast to other countries, the USSR had only state/cooperative property, thanks to which the state held in its hands all economic levers. This allowed it to achieve maximal concentration of all material resources, carry out a rapid transformation of the economy to wartime production, achieve a shift to the east of people, industrial equipment, and raw materials on an unheard of scale …

This does, of course, imply a positive evaluation of Stalin and the Communist Party in the war effort.¹⁹

To some degree, the authors of this book provide evidence to support this interpretation. There is no question that pre-war policies did have concrete and specific benefits when war finally came. Nicholas Ganson, for example, shows that the decentralization of food supply and rationing during the 1930s laid the groundwork for survival during the war, while Mark Harrison’s chapter on industry and the economy notes the usefulness of pre-war mobilization preparations and extensive plans for conversion to wartime production. This same phenomenon took place in civil administration as well. Locally, defence committees sprang up voluntarily in part in response to the pervasive atmosphere of preparation for war in the 1930s, and the GKO made such committees mandatory in October 1941 for towns around Moscow.²⁰ In scientific research, to take only one aspect of Soviet society, upon the outbreak of war the Soviet government redirected the Academy of Sciences to a whole series of war-related technological challenges and problems: radio navigation, chemical defence, substitutes for scarce raw materials, to name only a few. As early as August/September 1941 the Academy of Sciences had a list of 200 specific scientific tasks. As part of the evacuation, branches of the Academy were established deep in the Soviet rear, in Siberia and Central Asia. While these extraordinary efforts were the result of wartime exertions, they were built upon pre-war links between science and defence. The Academy of Sciences had military representatives attached to it long before the war began, and military priorities had been an important part of its research initiatives. Though the terror of the 1930s had disrupted those links, the Scientific-Technical Council attached to the GKO to steer research was able to draw upon an existing military-scientific infrastructure.²¹

At the same time, the chapters in this book show the ways in which Stalin’s dictatorship made fighting the war far harder than it might otherwise have been. The same policies that industrialized the Soviet Union and centralized state control over its agriculture did enormous damage. As Jean Lévesque shows, collectivization had terrible consequences for the Soviet peasantry. Much earlier, the scholars Holland Hunter and Janusz Szyrmer applied counterfactual analysis to show the concrete damage to the productivity of the Soviet economy caused by Stalin’s crash industrialization and the chaos of collectivization.²² Stalin’s purges of the Red Army cost the Soviet Union many skilled and experienced officers precisely when they were most needed to manage military expansion and fight Hitler’s army.

Moreover, the war forced abrupt reversals in a number of Stalin’s policies. Among the most notable was the Soviet policy towards religion. The Soviet Union’s avowedly atheist ruling ideology had always been hostile to religion, though the intensity of its repression varied significantly over time. The war, however, compelled Stalin to rehabilitate religion, provided that religious leaders recognized the need to call upon their congregations to defend the Soviet state. In addition, Stalin’s efforts to tap into Russian patriotism were greatly assisted by the easing of restrictions on Russian Orthodoxy. Sergii, the Metropolitan of Moscow, whose Church had almost disintegrated under the Soviet regime’s onslaught, called on believers to fight the Germans on the very day of the invasion, two weeks before Stalin could bring himself to address the Soviet people and ask the same, and the Orthodox on the whole fell into line behind their leadership.²³ Considerations of foreign policy also dictated a re-evaluation of religion’s place. Stalin’s alliance with the United States and the United Kingdom compelled him to defer to Western sensibilities about freedom of religion without ever abandoning the Soviet Union’s commitment to atheism. As the tide of war turned, the need to restore Soviet authority in western borderlands led Stalin to re-establish the abolished Moscow Patriarchate in order to use Russian Orthodoxy as a tool of Soviet control. The Russian Orthodox Church, conditioned for centuries to cooperate with the Russian state, found this bargain easy to accept. It assisted the Russian Orthodox with a number of its own priorities, notably the struggle against heresies and splinter groups within Orthodoxy itself, as well as the rivalry with Catholicism in the borderlands between Russia and Poland. Not least, Sergii’s loyal service to the defence of the Soviet Union, and his fight against clerics in occupied territory who had gone over to the German side, won him Stalin’s permission to occupy the vacant office of Patriarch in 1943.²⁴

Nationality policy, closely linked in many ways to religion, also changed dramatically under the impact of the war. In the 1920s and 1930s Soviet policy towards the half of its population that was not ethnically Russian, but instead divided among dozen of ethnic groups (Ukrainians, Georgians, Jews, Germans and Uzbeks, to name only a few), was remarkably cosmopolitan. The Soviets downplayed Russian national identity, despite the Russian people’s status as the largest single ethnic group and the Russian language’s role as the means of communication and administration. Instead, Soviet policy cultivated non-Russian nationalities, pushing a policy of ‘rooting’ (korenizatsiia) to find, train and promote local communists into positions of authority. The Soviet Union had a federal structure, in which the largest ethnic groups had their own union republics, possessing flags, cultural institutions and many of the attributes of sovereign states. The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, in which most ethnic Russians lived, was the largest of the union republics but it did not possess any formal precedence over the rest. Indeed, it lacked some of the privileges of other republics (its own branch of the Communist Party, for example).²⁵ While the Soviet Union never abandoned its ethnic federalism entirely, the Second World War refocused attention and prestige on Russian identity particularly, as the regime drew on Russian national symbols and Russian patriotism to make ethnic Russians once more first among equals in the multi-ethnic, multi-national Soviet Union.

In short, the historical record is too complex to employ the Second World War either to fully endorse or repudiate Stalin’s pre-war policies. This book’s aim is different–to focus instead on the concrete experience of the Soviet people at war, their triumphs and tragedies, to give a better sense of how the society that defeated Hitler managed to achieve its goal.

Notes

1

David Glantz, ‘American Perceptions of Operations on the Eastern Front During World War II’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 1, no. 1 (1988), 110–28; Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies, The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture (Cambridge, 2008), 1–2.

2

Two books by Catherine Merridale do something to humanize the scale of those horrific losses: Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (New York, 2001) and Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York, 2006). For a detailed discussion of Soviet military losses during the war, see G.F. Krivosheev, Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (London, 1997).

3

Among the books focusing on operations and strategy, John Erickson’s voluminous The Road to Stalingrad (New York, 1975) and The Road to Berlin (London, 1983) stand out for taking full advantage of published sources on both the German and Soviet sides before the opening of Soviet archives. David Glantz and Jonathan House’s When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence, KS, 1998) covers much of the same ground more concisely and with much better maps, while beginning to integrate newly available primary sources. Richard Overy, Russia’s War: Blood Upon the Snow (New York, 1997)