ABSTRACT
Soviet historians are only now beginning to penetrate the secrets of the darkest regime of the twentieth century, that of Stalin. One estimate has put the number of people killed or imprisoned by him at 40 million, and it is already clear that he was a murderer on a scale surpassing Hitler. By the same token, Soviet military historians no longer seek to palliate Stalin’s responsibility for the disasters of 1941, which derived not just from the way he was taken so badly off guard by the Germans, but from the wholesale purge of the Russian officer corps in the late 1930s.
