Kharkov was not called “the damned place of the Red Army” for nothing. During the Great Patriotic War, the heaviest battles for this city cost us enormous casualties; Soviet troops suffered serious defeats here twice. In May 1942, the unsuccessful offensive of the Red Army ended in the “Kharkov disaster,” which led to the collapse of the Southwestern Front and the German breakthrough to Stalingrad and Caucasus. The consequences of this defeat were so tragic, and the losses in manpower and equipment were so great that Stalin said, addressing the main culprits of the failure, Timoshenko and Khrushchev: “If we informed the country in its entirety about the catastrophe that the front experienced, then I’m afraid , that they would treat you very cool ... "A year later, the enemy again inflicted a sensitive defeat on us near Kharkov - as a result of a counterattack by selected SS tank formations, Soviet troops were driven out of the city with heavy losses. And only in August 1943, already during the Battle of Kursk , Kharkov was finally liberated completely. After changing hands four times, the city turned into ruins. The writer Alexei Tolstoy, who visited it in 1943, wrote: “I saw Kharkov. This was probably what Rome was like when hordes of Germanic barbarians swept through it in the fifth century. A huge cemetery..." Read about all these battles, about the true cost of victories, about the causes and culprits of defeats in the new book by Valery Abaturov and Richard of Portugal, “Kharkov - a cursed place of the Red Army.”