Russia at war 1941-1945

The most important single Soviet publication on the war years, not only in terms of sheer bulk, but also for the valuable information it contains is the monumental six-volume (five published to date) History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union (Istoriya Velikoi Otechestven-noi Voiny Sov.Soyuza), referred to as IVOVSS. In the Introduction I refer to some of its numerous weaknesses —its stodgy writing, its ever-repeated clichés, its suppression of many awkward facts (for instance the "Moscow panic" of October 16, 1941), the virtual deletion of names of people now out of favour, even though they

played an important part during the war years; the magnification of Khruschev's role in the war; the tendentiousness in the treatment of some of the diplomatic episodes just before and during the war ; the pooh-poohing of Lend-Lease, and so on. This collective work by dozens of Soviet scholars and various kinds of experts, working under an

editorial committee composed of professional historians, leading Party ideologists and a number of generals, and the whole of it published by "The Department of History of the Great Patriotic

War of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism attached to the Central Committee of the

CPSU" is, of course, a book which has gone through the most careful process of "vetting"

at the highest Party level. And yet, despite all this, IVOVSS still contains an immense amount of information most of which was not available in the Stalin days. It contains, for example, a very thorough and, on the whole, convincing explanation of the numerous

reasons for the Red Army's disastrous reverses in 1941 ; it analyses very carefully the reasons, both military and economic, for the relative failure of the second phase of the Russian counter-offensive in the winter of 1941-2; it tells, with masses of new details, the story of the stupendous effort to keep the country's war economy going, with the main armaments production being concentrated in the East. The History is based almost entirely on archive material, and this includes such valuable sources as AVP SSR

(Foreign Policy Archives), AMO SSSR (Archives of the Ministry of Defence), the war

archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism (IML); the Central Party Archives of the same Institute (TsPA IML), the Komsomol and Trade Union Archives, the State Archives of the October Revolution (TsGA-OR), the War History Archives of the Central

Committees of the Communist Parties of the Ukrainian, Belo-russian and of other Federal Republics of the Soviet Union, and similar archives of the different ministries and of the various obkoms (regional party committees)—for instance, those of Smolensk, Briansk, etc. (chiefly on Partisan warfare) or of Sverdlovsk, Cheliabinsk, etc. (chiefly on the war industries). Although these quotations from the various archives are inevitably selective, they still contain much new information. On foreign policy too, the History also quotes some revealing documents, for instance some of the dispatches from Astakhov, the Soviet chargé d'affaires in Berlin, on his conversations with Weizsäcker and Ribbentrop during the summer of 1939— dispatches from which Stalin and Molotov could obviously draw

certain conclusions.

I have also, in writing this book, made use of not only a number of general Soviet

histories of the war (none of them very satisfactory) but also of a wide range of

monographs on various episodes of the war (some, particularly those on Leningrad, are excellent), and an even greater number of personal reminiscences by generals, partisan leaders, etc. Of these books, hundreds of which have appeared, especially since 1958. I give as detailed a list as possible. On the other hand, in listing Western books pertaining to the immediate pre-war period and the war years in Russia, I have confined myself to only some of the most important titles. The same applies to German books on the war in the Soviet Union.

DIPLOMATIC AND OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS

Correspondence between the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR (Stalin) and the Presidents of the United States (Roosevelt and Truman) and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain (Churchill and Attlee) during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45. 2

vols. Moscow, 1957.

Documents of British Foreign Policy 1919-39. London, 1947 and after.

Documents of German Foreign Policy. Series D. 1937-45. 10 vols. Washington, 1957.

Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSR, vols. 1-4. Moscow, 1957, publication continuing.