Mark Solonin’s book “On Peacefully Sleeping Airfields...” became the top bestseller of 2006, selling record copies. Now, on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the beginning of World War II, the leading military historian returned to the aviation topic, radically reworking, correcting and expanding the first edition of his book, essentially rewriting it anew. Why, having enormous numerical superiority, the Red Army Air Force was defeated in the first days of the Great Patriotic War? How did the Luftwaffe manage to gain complete air supremacy so quickly? Where did the vaunted “Stalinist falcons” go, who swore to maintain “the tranquility of our borders”, who threatened to crush the enemy with “little blood, a mighty blow”? An aviation engineer by training, Mark Solonin convincingly, with numbers and facts, proves the complete inconsistency of the Soviet version of the events of 1941, explaining the crushing defeat of our aviation by the “suddenness of an enemy strike,” and gives his own answers to the most complex, acute and “inconvenient” questions of Russian history.