The question of why the Great Patriotic War began very unsuccessfully for the USSR is still the subject of heated debate. The answers to it were given in a variety of ways, from the most banal to the very absurd. At the same time, for almost all authors of historical works, the factor of the balance of forces and means of the parties faded into the background, since they supposedly existed in approximate equality. A paradox, and nothing more! The Nazi troops were seemingly no stronger than the Red Army, but they defeated it in almost all the numerous battles in the first months of the war. So was it really all about subjective and situational factors? But were the forces of the parties really equal? In his new book “Paradoxes of 1941” A.P. Rusakov tried to fully and thoroughly understand the quantitative and qualitative balance of forces and means of the opposing sides at the beginning of the war. It not only carried out a thorough calculation of the number of combat aircraft, tanks, armored vehicles and other weapons and equipment in the troops of the USSR, Germany and its allies, but also determined their true combat effectiveness and combat readiness.