New Books In Eastern European Studies

The war on the Eastern front remains relatively less well explored as compared to the western front of World War II. Yet some of the most titanic battles in modern military history occurred on the steppes of eastern Europe. Stalingrad and Moscow are names known to most but less well-known are the vast battles that occurred in Byelorussia. By June 1944, Stalin and his generals had launched Operation Bagration involving more than two million soldiers marching across fronts hundreds of miles wide. In his latest work, Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War (Oxford UP, 2024), Jonathan Dimbleby chronicles the military, political, and diplomatic events of the final months on arguably the most crucial front of World War 2. Dimbleby draws on previously untranslated accounts from ordinary Russian and German soldiers to chronicle the curtain call of the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Endgame 1944 provides insights into the major German and Russian players balanced off with accounts of the trials of individual sold