After Stalingrad

In the wake of the Red Army's signal victory at Stalingrad, the Soviet High Command expanded its counteroffensive into a full-fledged winter offensive which nearly collapsed German defences in southern Russia. History has recorded the many dramatic triumphs the Red Army achieved during the initial phases of this winter offensive, culminating with its rapid advance deep into the Donbas and Khar'kov regions in February 1943, but as is so often the case, history has misled its audience for several cogent reasons. On the one hand, the Soviet Union historians, anxious to conceal the ambitiousness of its offensive, willfully avoided describing the offensive's true scope and the many shortcomings the Red Army experienced during its conduct. On the other hand, German and other Western historians, frequently basing their accounts on inaccurate Soviet sources, focused only on the most dramatic aspects of the offensive, ignoring much of their adversary's actions and missing his intent.

This volume restores the lost and concealed to the historical record. Exploiting newly-released Russian archival materials, it reveals the unbounded ambitions that shaped the Stavka's winter offensive and the full scope and scale of the Red Army's many offensive operations. For example, it reflects on recently-rediscovered Operation Mars, reexamines the Red Army's dramatic offensive into the Donbas and Khar'kov region during February and describes how the Stavka expanded the scale of its offensive in mid-February 1943.