The Soviet troops encircled and trapped the German forces. Following six more weeks of fierce combat in which both sides took heavy casualties, some 91, surviving German soldiers surrendered between January 31 and February 2, After the victory at Stalingrad, the Soviet army remained on the offensive, liberating most of Ukraine, and virtually all of Russia and eastern Belorussia during In the summer of at Kursk, in Russia, the Germans attempted one more offensive, but were badly beaten by the Soviet army in what is now considered the military turning point on the eastern front.
In the summer of , the Soviets launched another major offensive, which liberated the rest of Belorussia and Ukraine, most of the Baltic states, and eastern Poland from Nazi rule. In January , a new offensive brought Soviet forces to the Oder River, in Germany proper, about miles from Berlin. On April 25, Soviet advance patrols met American troops at Torgau on the Elbe River in central Germany, effectively cutting the country in half. After more than a week of heavy fighting in the streets of Berlin, Soviet units neared Hitler's central command bunker.
On April 30, , Hitler committed suicide. Berlin surrendered to Soviet forces on May 2, The German armed forces surrendered unconditionally in the west on May 7 and in the east on May 9, On May 9, the Soviet army entered Prague, the last major city still occupied by German units. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia.
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For Teachers Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust. Wise — International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. About This Site. Glossary : Full Glossary. The Soviet Union and the Eastern Front.
More information about this image. German-Soviet Relations, — The German-Soviet Pact , also known as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact after the two foreign ministers who negotiated the agreement, had two parts.
On my first trip to Moscow, as a language student in the s, I bought a record of that Soviet national anthem. I paid more for the plastic bag to carry it in than for the actual record. It is a small example of the economic contradictions that meant the Soviet Union could not have survived.
Tauris, In , when Kazakhs took to the streets to protest against the Soviet government in Moscow, nobody had an inkling that firing up the demonstrators in Soviet Kazakhstan was a heady cocktail of ingredients that would gather momentum around the USSR and help bring it down five years later. The scale of resistance took Moscow by surprise, an indication of how disconnected from the thinking of ordinary Soviet citizens their leaders had become.
The reformer Mikhail Gorbachev had recently come to power promising glasnost, so that his people could freely voice their opinions in a more tolerant Soviet Union. When the Kazakhs took to the streets to do that, Gorbachev sent in the security forces to quell the demos with bloodshed. In , the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc and the humiliating Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan after a decade of pointless warfare confirmed that the superpower was waning.
In , the Kazakhs had no idea all this was looming. But they were unwittingly holding up a mirror to the failings of the Soviet system, which was not fit for purpose — and could not, in those historical circumstances, survive. The Soviet Union could not have survived, because by the Communist Party had lost control of the media and thus the public sphere.
Key to the survival of any dictatorship is strict control of the media, which shapes public opinion and promotes tacit acceptance of a regime. Though many Soviet citizens may have claimed not to believe what was written in their newspapers, they were never aware of just how far removed from reality the reports were.
When Mikhail Gorbachev ascended to power in , it was his policy of glasnost that let the genie out of the bottle. Some historians have viewed this move as a result of the fact that Gorbachev born in was the first leader of the Soviet Union to have cut his political teeth in a de-Stalinised USSR.
But his policy backfired. Glasnost meant that news outlets could lay bare the failings of the Soviet system and the Communist Party. In fact, in , Gorbachev pinpointed Chernobyl and the resulting media fallout as the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union. World War II and its aftermath. The Soviet Union set the pace in the space race by putting a man into orbit. Post-Stalin thaw. Civilians in Czechoslovakia show their defiance of Soviet authority, but their Prague Spring was soon crushed.
The Brezhnev era. Glasnost, perestroika and Chernobyl.
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