JONATHAN DIMBLEBY

Terrific a tour de force Sir Richard Evans Military history at its very best Keith LoweA gripping and authoritative account of the year that sealed the fate of the Nazis from the bestselling historian June 1944 In Operation Bagration more than two million Red Army soldiers facing 500 000 German soldiers finally avenged their defeat in Operation Barbarossa in 1941 The same month saw the Allies triumph on the beaches of Normandy but despite the myths that remain it was the events on the Eastern Front that sealed Hitler s fate and destroyed Nazism In his new book bestselling historian Jonathan Dimbleby describes and analyses this momentous year covering the military political and diplomatic story in his evocative style Drawing on previously untranslated German Russian and Polish sources we see how sophisticated new forms of deception and ruthless Partisan warfare shifted the Soviets fortunes how their triumphs effectively gave Stalin authority to occupy Eastern Europe and how it was the events of 1944 that enabled Stalin to dictate the terms of the post war settlement laying the foundations for the Cold War Visceral and compelling authoritative Sinclair McKay Extraordinarily vivid and absorbing Brendan Simms

A SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER'The best single-volume account of the Barbarossa campaign to date' Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny'A page-turning descent into Hell and back . . .this fresh and compelling account of Hitler's failed invasion of the Soviet Union should be on everyone's reading list for 2021' Dr Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire_______________________________The largest military operation in history. The turning point of the Second World War. The most important year of the twentieth century.Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of Russia in June 1941, aimed at nothing less than a war of extermination to annihilate Soviet communism, liquidate the Jews and create Lebensraum for the German master race. But it led to the destruction of the Third Reich, and was cataclysmic for Germany with millions of men killed, wounded or registered as missing in action. It was this colossal mistake -- rather than any action in Western Europe -- that lost Hitler the Second World War.

Winston Churchill famously described Russia as 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma' and even today it remains a country little understood by the West. In this revealing portrait, Jonathan Dimbleby crosses eight time zones and covers 10,000 miles in an attempt to get to the beating heart of the new Russia. His epic journey takes him from the Arctic city of Murmansk in the west to the Asian port of Vladivostok in the east, and he encounters an extraordinary range of people: urban intellectuals and entrepreneurs, war veterans and migrant labourers, spiritual leaders and aging rock stars, bootleg vendors and fish poachers, loggers in the forests of Siberia and fellow journalists under siege in an increasingly autocratic society. Russia is both a deeply personal odyssey and a mesmerizing account of a country undergoing profound economic, cultural and political change.