Standing squarely in the middle of the Soviet Union’s timeline is the Great Patriotic War, the Russian name for the eastern front of the Second World War. In recent years historians have tended to give this war less importance than it deserves. One reason may be that we are particularly interested in Stalin and Stalinism. This has led us to pay more attention to the changes following the death of one man, Stalin, in March 1953, than to those that flowed from an event involving the deaths of 25 million. The war was more than just an interlude between the ‘pre-war’ and ‘post-war’ periods. It changed the lives of hundreds of millions of individuals. For the survivors, it also changed the world in which they lived.

Why, on Sunday, 22 June 1941, did the Soviet Union find itself suddenly at war all the Great Powers over the preceding forty years. During the nineteenth century international trade, lending and migration developed without much restriction. Great empires arose but did not much impede the movement of goods or people. By the twentieth century, however, several newly industrialising countries were turning to economic stabilisation by controlling and diverting trade to secure economic self-sufficiency within colonial boundaries. German leaders wanted to insulate Germany from the world by creating a closed trading bloc based on a new empire. To get an empire they launched a naval arms race that ended in Germany’s military and diplomatic encirclement by Britain, France and Russia.