Anna Reid (born 1965) is an English journalist and author whose work focuses primarily on the history of Eastern Europe.
Reid read law at Oxford University and studied Russian History at the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies. After working as a consultant and business journalist, she moved to Kyiv, where she was the Ukraine correspondent for the Economist from 1993 to 1995. From 2003 to 2007 she worked for the British think-tank Policy Exchange, editing several of their publications [1] [2] [3] and running the foreign affairs programme. [4]
Reid has published three books on East European history: Borderland: a journey through the history of Ukraine,The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia, and Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II: 1941-1944. Critics have praised her for her highly descriptive narratives of the locations she studies. [5] She has received especially high praise for Leningrad, which is the first 21st century book-length account of the Siege of Leningrad (modern-day Saint Petersburg) by the Germans from 1941 to 1944. [6] In its use of newly discovered primary sources from the Siege, including private diaries of ordinary citizens who suffered from cold and starvation during the winter of 1941-1942, the book has been called "a relentless chronicle of suffering." [7]
Her most recent book, A Nasty Little War: The Western Intervention into the Russian Civil War, chronicling the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, was published in 2023. [8]
The Continuation War, also known as the Second Soviet-Finnish War, was a conflict fought by Finland and Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union during World War II. It began with a Finnish declaration of war on 25 June 1941 and ended on 19 September 1944 with the Moscow Armistice. The Soviet Union and Finland had previously fought the Winter War from 1939 to 1940, which ended with the Soviet failure to conquer Finland and the Moscow Peace Treaty. Numerous reasons have been proposed for the Finnish decision to invade, with regaining territory lost during the Winter War regarded as the most common. Other justifications for the conflict include Finnish President Risto Ryti's vision of a Greater Finland and Commander-in-Chief Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim's desire to annex East Karelia.
Operation Barbarossa was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during World War II. It was the largest and costliest land offensive in human history, with around 10 million combatants taking part, and over 8 million casualties by the end of the operation.
The siege of Leningrad was a prolonged military siege undertaken by the Axis powers against the city of Leningrad on the Eastern Front of World War II. Germany's Army Group North advanced from the south, while the German-allied Finnish army invaded from the north and completed the ring around the city.
Tatyana Nikolayevna Savicheva, commonly referred to as Tanya Savicheva, was a Russian diarist who kept a diary in 1942 whilst enduring the siege of Leningrad during World War II. During the siege, Savicheva recorded the successive deaths of each member of her family in her diary, with her final entry indicating her belief to be the sole living family member. Although Savicheva was rescued and transferred to a hospital, she succumbed to intestinal tuberculosis in July 1944 at age 14.
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum is an American journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. Applebaum also holds Polish citizenship.
Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov was a Soviet politician. He was the Soviet Union's "propagandist-in-chief" after the Second World War, and was responsible for developing the Soviet cultural policy, the Zhdanov Doctrine, which remained in effect until the death of Joseph Stalin. Zhdanov was considered Stalin's most likely successor but died before him.
Eastern Borderlands or simply Borderlands was a term coined for the eastern part of the Second Polish Republic during the interwar period (1918–1939). Largely agricultural and extensively multi-ethnic with a Polish minority, it amounted to nearly half of the territory of interwar Poland. Historically situated in the eastern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, following the 18th-century foreign partitions it was divided between the Empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary, and ceded to Poland in 1921 after the Treaty of Riga. As a result of the post-World War II border changes, all of the territory was ceded to the USSR, and none of it is in modern Poland.
Reichskommissariat Moskowien was the civilian occupation-regime that Nazi Germany intended to establish in central and northern European Russia during World War II, one of several similar Reichskommissariate. It was also known initially as the Reichskommissariat Russland, but was later renamed as part of German policies of partitioning the Russian state. Siegfried Kasche was the projected Reichskomissar, but due to the Wehrmacht's failure to occupy the territories intended to form the Reichskommissariat, it remained on paper only.
Victoria Jane Nuland is an American diplomat who served as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from 2021 to 2024. Her husband is Robert Kagan, an American historian. A former member of the US Foreign Service, she served as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs from 2013 to 2017 and the 18th U.S. ambassador to NATO from 2005 to 2008. Between July 2023 and February 2024, Nuland served as acting deputy secretary of state following the retirement of Wendy Sherman.
The six Leningrad-class destroyer leaders were built for the Soviet Navy in the late 1930s. They were inspired by the contre-torpilleurs built for the French Navy. They were ordered in two batches of three ships each; the first group was designated Project 1 and the second Project 38. These ships were the first large vessels designed and built by the Soviets after the October Revolution of 1917.
The 6th Red Banner Combined Arms Army is a field army of the Red Army and the Soviet Army that was active with the Russian Ground Forces until 1998 and has been active since 2010 as the 6th Combined Arms Army. Military Unit number в/ч 31807.
Saint Petersburg is the second largest city in Russia, after Moscow and the fourth most populous city in Europe.
Upon the outbreak of World War I, Ukraine was not an independent political entity or state. The majority of the territory that makes up the modern country of Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire with a notable far western region administered by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the border between them dating to the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
The Hunger Plan was a partially implemented plan developed by Nazi bureaucrats during World War II to seize food from the Soviet Union and give it to German soldiers and civilians. The plan entailed the genocide by starvation of millions of Soviet citizens following Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. The plan created a famine as an act of policy, killing millions of people.
The 872-day siege of Leningrad, Russia, resulted from the failure of the German Army Group North to capture Leningrad in the Eastern Front during World War II. The siege lasted from September 8, 1941, to January 27, 1944, and was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history, devastating the city of Leningrad.
The Siege is a 2001 historical novel by English writer Helen Dunmore. It is set in Leningrad just before and during the Siege of Leningrad by German forces in World War II. The book was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2002 and for the 2001 Whitbread Prize.
Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 had its Leningrad première on 9 August 1942 during the Second World War, while the city was under siege by the Nazi German forces.
Kommuna is a submarine rescue ship in service with the Russian Navy's Black Sea Fleet and the world's oldest active duty naval vessel.
This is a select bibliography of English language books and journal articles about the Soviet Union during the Second World War, the period leading up to the war, and the immediate aftermath. For works on Stalinism and the history of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, please see Bibliography of Stalinism and the Soviet Union. Book entries may have references to reviews published in English language academic journals or major newspapers when these could be considered helpful.
The Fastov massacre was a pogrom against the Jewish population of the Ukrainian city of Fastov in September 1919 by units of the White Army.
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