Great Patriotic War

Background

The Great Patriotic War was the Soviet and Russian name for the Eastern Front of World War II, the conflict fought between the European Axis powers and the Soviet Union, along with Poland and other Allied participants. It began on 22 June 1941 with the German-led invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa and ended on 9 May 1945 with the capture of Berlin and the signing of the German Instrument of Surrender. The fighting covered a vast area stretching across Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Northeast Europe, and Southeast Europe, including the Baltics and the Balkans.

The war became the central military confrontation in Europe and was decisive in the defeat of Nazi Germany and its allies. Axis forces initially advanced deeply into Soviet territory and came close to Moscow, but the offensive stalled after the failure to capture the city. Major turning points followed at Stalingrad and Kursk, where Soviet victories broke German offensive power and shifted the initiative to the Red Army. The scale of the conflict was extreme, with roughly 30 million deaths on the Eastern Front out of an estimated 70–85 million deaths in the wider Second World War.

Its consequences extended beyond the immediate defeat of Germany and the end of the war in Europe. The Soviet victory was followed by large-scale territorial, political, and military changes across Eastern Europe, including the advance of Soviet power and the defection of some Axis allies such as Romania and Bulgaria. The war also left a lasting place in Soviet and Russian historical memory, where the term Great Patriotic War remained the standard designation for the 1941–1945 struggle against Nazi Germany. In historical scholarship, the Eastern Front was described as the largest military confrontation in history and as a defining theatre of the Second World War.