The Great Patriotic War devastates the Soviet Union
Leningrad starves, Stalingrad turns the tide, and roughly 27 million Soviet citizens die
Quick facts
- Operation Barbarossa begins
- 22 June 1941
- Siege of Leningrad
- 8 September 1941-27 January 1944
- Leningrad civilian deaths
- Around 1 million
- Total Soviet deaths
- Approx. 27 million (estimate, disputed)
What happened
Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 with more than three million German troops and 600,000 allied soldiers, catching Soviet forces unprepared and destroying 124 Red Army divisions while taking 3.8 million prisoners within six months. German forces besieged Leningrad from 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944, deliberately trying to starve a city of about 2.5 million people; the siege killed around one million civilians, with supplies surviving only via truck and boat routes across frozen and open Lake Ladoga. The Battle for Moscow (September 1941-April 1942) killed 2.5 million of the roughly seven million soldiers involved before a Soviet counterattack stabilized the front, and the Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-1943 became the war's turning point on the Eastern Front. Soviet losses across the war are estimated at around 27 million, roughly two-thirds of them civilians, though the exact figure remains disputed and the Russian government's own 1993 study put total war losses at 26.6 million.
Why it matters
The Soviet Union bore the overwhelming weight of the war against Nazi Germany; roughly three-quarters of all German military and material losses of the Second World War occurred on the Eastern Front. That sacrifice, and the resulting Red Army occupation of Eastern Europe by 1945, is the foundation both of the Soviet Union's postwar status as a superpower and of the Cold War division of Europe that followed almost immediately.
How we know
German and Soviet military records document the campaign's major battles and casualty figures; postwar Soviet and post-Soviet Russian government studies, including a 1993 Russian Academy of Sciences study, have produced varying total death toll estimates that historians continue to debate.
Sources
- Mark Cartwright, World History Encyclopedia. Siege of Leningrad · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Dave Sutton, Australian War Memorial. The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945 · Reputable sourceawm.gov.au · The domain "awm.gov.au" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- World War II → · See the dedicated World War II timeline for the full global war, including the Western and Pacific theaters alongside the Eastern Front.