The Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945
The Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Shock of Barbarossa
In August 1939 Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact with Hitler. For Stalin this was a pragmatic attempt to buy time and territory: it kept the USSR out of the war that was about to engulf Europe and allowed Soviet expansion into eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and Romania. Hitler intended it as a temporary measure while he dealt with the West.
On 22 June 1941 Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest land invasion in history. Three German army groups struck simultaneously across a front stretching over 2,000 kilometres. The Red Army was caught almost entirely unprepared. Stalin had received multiple warnings from his own intelligence services and from the British, but had dismissed them. In the first weeks, the Wehrmacht advanced hundreds of kilometres, encircling and destroying entire Soviet armies. Soviet losses in the first six months ran into millions of men killed, wounded or captured.
Operation Barbarossa began on 22 June 1941. The Red Army’s disorganised response was partly caused by the earlier purge of its officer corps, which had removed thousands of experienced commanders. Stalin had also ignored intelligence warnings of a German attack.
The Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1944
German and Finnish forces encircled Leningrad (formerly Petrograd, today St Petersburg) by September 1941 and maintained a siege for approximately 872 days until January 1944. The civilian population suffered extreme privations: in the worst winter of 1941–42, daily bread rations fell as low as 125 grams for some categories of worker. Estimates of civilian deaths during the siege range from approximately 800,000 to over one million, the vast majority dying from starvation and disease rather than German bombardment.
The city refused to surrender. Supplies were brought in across frozen Lake Ladoga — the “Road of Life” — in winter. The siege became a symbol of Soviet resistance and endurance. When Soviet forces broke through the German lines in January 1944, ending the siege after 872 days, it was celebrated throughout the USSR as a testament to the indomitable spirit of the Soviet people.
The Battle of Stalingrad lasted from August 1942 to February 1943 and is widely regarded as the turning point of the war on the Eastern Front. German forces under General Paulus drove deep into the city, reducing much of it to rubble in brutal street fighting. Soviet General Chuikov led the defence, famously ordering his troops to stay so close to the Germans that German air power could not be used effectively.
In November 1942, Soviet Marshal Zhukov launched Operation Uranus, cutting off the German Sixth Army inside Stalingrad. On 2 February 1943, Paulus surrendered with approximately 91,000 surviving German soldiers. It was the first major German defeat on the Eastern Front and transformed the strategic situation. The Battle of Kursk in July 1943 — the largest tank battle in history — confirmed the Soviet strategic advantage.
The German Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad on 2 February 1943 — Germany’s first major defeat on the Eastern Front. After Stalingrad, the strategic initiative shifted to the Soviet Union. The Red Army advanced westward for the remainder of the war.
Soviet Casualties and Sacrifice
The scale of Soviet suffering in the war was staggering. Total Soviet deaths are estimated at approximately 27 million people — military and civilian combined — though some estimates are higher. This represented around 14 per cent of the entire Soviet population. No other country suffered comparable losses in the war. The Soviet Union bore by far the greatest burden of fighting against Germany: historians estimate that roughly 75 to 80 per cent of all German military losses occurred on the Eastern Front.
For the Soviet population, the war was known as the Great Patriotic War — a name that framed it as a defensive struggle for national survival rather than simply a global conflict. The memory of the war became foundational to Soviet identity and remains central to Russian national consciousness today.
The Soviet Union emerged from the war with its western regions devastated. Thousands of towns, factories, railways and farms had been destroyed. The Fourth Five Year Plan (1946–50) prioritised reconstruction and a rapid return to industrial production. By 1950, Soviet industrial output had broadly recovered to pre-war levels, a remarkable achievement given the scale of wartime destruction.
Recovery was funded in part by reparations extracted from defeated Germany and occupied Eastern Europe. But the human cost continued: post-war food shortages led to another famine in 1946–47 in which hundreds of thousands died. Living standards for ordinary Soviet citizens did not return to even pre-war levels for many years.