"The Road to Stalingrad"

The object of the present work [The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin's War with Germany: Volume One, by John Erikson] can be set down briefly enough: it is designed to investigate the kind of war the Soviet Union waged, the nature of command decisions and the machinery of decision-making, the course of military operations, Soviet performance in the field and the economic effort behind the lines, the emergence of Soviet 'war aims' - beyond mere survival - and, finally, the Soviet style of war. In sum, it is an attempt to probe how the Soviet system functioned under conditions of maximum stress: from this point of view it is less military history per se and might more properly be regarded as a form of social history.

-from the Preface

A reading of the preface indicates that this must be a most well-written and powerful work, as it is reputed to be.