"26,000,000 is the commonly agreed on estimate of USSR deaths from the war." At one level you should temper this appalling statistic: a whole lot of it was "se

"26,000,000 is the commonly agreed on estimate of USSR deaths from the war." At one level you should temper this appalling statistic: a whole lot of it was "self-inflicted", by the games and machinations Stalin played. Mass slaughter of the USSR's own people was a policy long before the war---that the people who did their 1939 census were sent to the Gulag should be sufficient telling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_(1937) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_(1937) ---and the war just enabled a continuation if not increase in this. Note also how the continuous purges of Army officers left the Red Army in a crippled state prior to the invasion.