The ultimate chronicle of Russia's Second World War, using newly released sources to analyse the human sacrifice and suffering beneath the statistics. In June 1941, breaking the controversial Nazi-Soviet non-aggression treaty and catching Stalin by surprise, the armies of the Third Reich invaded Russia in a devastating Blitzkrieg, that saw them destroy the Soviet airforce on the ground, reach the gates of Leningrad in six weeks and fix their sights on Moscow. Hitler's intention was to raze both cities to the ground and cultivate the rich Russian countryside for the benefit of the German people. The Soviet People were fighting for their lives. `The Furies Unleashed' sets out to tell the military, diplomatic and social story of Russia in the Second World War on a scale that has never been attempted before – to connect the history of the fighting with the saga of human suffering – and to reassess its far-reaching impact. Making use of collections of previously top-secret documents released in post-Soviet Russia and consulting a mass of new memoirs published after the collapse of the USSR, Steven Merritt Miner brings to bear his huge knowledge and experience of the conflict in the creation of an updated narrative of this monumental clash. Taking account of the tangled ethnic, national and regional realities and also the cultural, social and economic factors that both devastated and made possible the bloody triumph of the Russian people, "The Furies Unleashed" will present a 'civic history' of what the Russians call the Great Patriotic War.