Curated playlist
1941 in the Soviet Union
- Anglo-Soviet AgreementOn the 12th of July 1941, two men sat down in Moscow to sign a document that would reshape the war in Europe. Sir Stafford Cripps, Britain's Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet People's Commissar of Foreign…
- Battle of UmanThe Battle of Uman began on the 15th of July 1941 and lasted just over three weeks, yet in that time the Wehrmacht encircled and destroyed two entire Soviet armies. The 6th and 12th Soviet Armies, caught in a pocket near the Ukrainian city…
- Hunger PlanThe Hunger Plan was a blueprint for murder by starvation, drafted not by soldiers in the field but by bureaucrats at a conference table in Berlin. On the 2nd of May 1941, senior German officials sat down for what the documents call a…
- Continuation WarThe Continuation War placed Finland in one of the strangest positions of the entire Second World War: a small Nordic democracy fighting alongside Nazi Germany, insisting it was not actually an ally. On the 25th of June 1941, Finland…
- Battle of Smolensk (1941)The Battle of Smolensk began on the 10th of July 1941, roughly 400 kilometers west of Moscow, and what unfolded over the next two months would alter the course of the entire Eastern Front. The German Army had already driven 500 kilometers…
- Soviet–Japanese Neutrality PactAfter Stalin signed the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, he did something almost no one had seen him do. He personally saw off Japan's Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, at a train station. Stalin rarely appeared before foreign diplomats…
- Anglo-Soviet invasion of IranThe Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran began before dawn on the 25th of August, 1941, when Royal Air Force aircraft crossed into Iranian airspace and dropped bombs on Tehran and Qazvin. The attack had a name: Operation Countenance. It would be…
- First Battle of KharkovIn the fall of 1941, Kharkov stood as a vital rail and air link connecting Ukraine to Crimea, the Caucasus, the Dnieper region, and the Donbass. The city housed the Kharkov Tractor Plant, which designed and developed the Soviet T-34 tank.…
- Siege of Sevastopol (1941–1942)On the 4th of July 1942, the last organized defenses of Sevastopol collapsed after 250 days of siege. When German and Romanian forces finally raised their flags over the port city that day, they had fired nearly 50,000 tons of artillery…
- Soviet occupation of the Baltic states (1940)The Soviet occupation of the Baltic states in 1940 unfolded against the backdrop of a continent already consumed by war. On the 14th of June 1940, the same day Soviet forces issued an ultimatum to Lithuania, the world's attention was fixed…
- Occupation of the Baltic statesThe occupation of the Baltic states is one of modern Europe's longest and most contested erasures of national sovereignty. In August 1939, in the early hours before dawn, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a ten-year non-aggression…
- Winter campaign of 1941–1942The winter campaign of 1941-1942 began on the 5th of December 1941, and the Soviet Union was fighting for its life. Nazi Germany had launched Operation Barbarossa months earlier, driving deep into Soviet territory. Now, as temperatures…