"You can't win, you can't lose!" – it’s not hard to guess how this slogan sounded to the developers of the Barbarossa plan. It would seem that the moment for an attack on the Soviet Union, taking into account the purges among the command personnel and the incompleteness of the reorganization of the Red Army, was chosen successfully, and the “Achilles heel” - the concentration of resources and the defense industry in the European part of our country - was discovered, but no, reality set a comma where, as the authors of this book are convinced, it should be. Separating facts from myths, Elena Prudnikova explains the real reasons not only for our defeats at the first stage of the war, but also for the inevitable revenge. How well do our contemporaries know the history of the war, who do not exclude the possibility of a victorious “blitzkrieg” in the absence of certain mistakes of the Fuhrer? In order to refute such speculation, Sergei Kremlev is considering virtual options for military operations – ours and the Wehrmacht’s. This approach, the author is sure, allows us to finally clarify the inevitable logic of the development of events in 1941.