Military Russia War

Long-time adversaries Germany and the Soviet Union put their hostilities to the test in World War II. Despite a temporary truce in the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-aggression Pact in 1939, the Germans and the Soviets knew that the time was coming when they would face one another on the battlefield. But Operation Barbarossa was the beginning of the downfall of the Third Reich, as the dogged Russian refusal to succumb and the menace of the Russian winter demonstrated that the Soviet Union would not surrender as other European nations had done.

Partly out of dire circumstances and partly from a cultural worldview, it was the Soviet Union who first pressed female pilots into direct combat when Hitler invaded Russia. Ahead of Stalingrad, Stalin publicly declared that “women should be given the right to fly and fight for their country.” As a result, more than 800,000 women served in the Soviet military during the war years.

No nation suffered more losses during the Second World War than the Soviet Union. The figure most historians recognize as roughly accurate is 20 million. The exact figure is impossible to tally for a number of reasons: destroyed records, inexact pre-war records, Soviet politicization of the population figures before and after the war, and much more. No matter what the exact total was, what is known is that the Soviet population only recovered its losses from the war in the late 1950s.

Münchhausen era un capitano di cavalleria russa nel 1740 che partecipò a due campagne contro l'Impero ottomano. Le storie su Münchhausen furono collezionate e pubblicate da un autore anonimo nel 1781 ed una versione in inglese venne pubblicata a Londra nel 1785 da Rudolf Erich Raspe. Nel XIX secolo, la storia aveva subito numerose trasformazioni ed espansioni da parte di molti autori ed era stata tradotta in numerose lingue totalizzando più di cento diverse edizioni.