The RIA-Novosti press agency -now known as Sputnik in the West -has one of the best archives of Soviet Second World War photographs and for this remarkable book Alexander Hill has made a superb selection of them. These striking images record vividly, as only photographs can, the brutal conflict on the Eastern Front and the extraordinary experience of the soldiers and civilians who were caught up in it. Every aspect of the struggle is depicted -the fighting on the front lines and behind the lines, aerial combat and naval warfare, the ordeal of living under German occupation, the war industries and Lend-Lease and the massive sacrifices made at every level of Soviet society to defeat the Germans. The photographs and captions take the reader through the entire course of the war, from the Nazi-Soviet Pact and Soviet expansion into Poland, Finland and the Baltic Republics, through Operation Barbarossa and the German advances of 1941 and 1942, to the momentous battles at Stalingrad and Kursk and the sequence of massive offensives mounted by the Red Army that drove the Wehrmacht back to Berlin. The landscapes over which the armies moved, and the shattered towns and cities they left behind, are recorded as are individuals whose faces were captured by the camera during this devastating conflict over seventy years ago. AUTHOR: Professor Alexander Hill teaches at the University of Calgary, Canada and is a leading expert on the military and political history of Russia and the Soviet Union since 1917. He has written extensively on Soviet military, naval and strategic history during the Second World War, focusing in particular on the partisan movement, naval warfare and Lend-Lease. In addition to publishing many articles on these subjects, he is a former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Slavic Military Studies and the author of The Red Army and the Second World War. 360 b/w illustrations
