Stalin's War

This is the third volume by the acclaimed Hungarian collector-and-photographer team, identifying and explaining historic Soviet militaria from private collections. A wide range of uniforms, insignia awards, weapons, equipment, documents and ephemera from the Soviet Union's Great Patriotic War are illustrated, in more than 230 close-up color studies, supported by more than 60 fascinating monochrome photographs that have survived, unpublished, in private hands. This volume includes explanations of Soviet military symbolism from the early days of the Communist state, but concentrates on the period of key interest between 1943 and 1945, when Stalin consciously revived many of the visual traditions of the Tsarist years in order to harness Russian patriotism against the Nazi invaders.