This book is strikingly different from most English-language writings about the Second World War. This study refutes the most common Western ideas about the Red Army. Following the beaten Nazi warriors, who tried to explain their own defeats either with the “incompetent leadership of the Fuhrer,” or with tales of “10-fold numerical superiority of the Russians,” or with references to the notorious “generals Dirt and Frost” , modern Western historians continue to retell old anti-Soviet myths - to this day, extremely derogatory assessments of the Red Army prevail in foreign military-historical literature: stupid command, incompetent officers, half-wild "Ivans" meekly carrying out the most insane orders, suicidal attacks, mountains of corpses, barrier detachments , shooting at their own people, etc., etc... The author of this book, a leading military historian and the best American specialist on the Great Patriotic War, decisively breaks with these propaganda cliches, trying to give an objective analysis of the real combat capabilities of the Red Army, to trace the evolution of its officer corps throughout the war, impartially assess the professional training of the Soviet command and the training of the Soviet soldier. This book is a story about how the Soviet military machine literally rose from the ashes, how the defeated Red Army of 1941 turned into the Victory Army.

Translation: Victor Fedorov