Russia's War: A History of the Soviet Effort, 1941-1945

This was exactly what I was after. An excellent and clear account of the Second World War from the Soviet perspective. It doesn't go into deep military or tactical details, which I was relieved about personally and made it easier to follow. Other than that it covers all major aspects of the war on the Eastern Front, from the build up, the war itself, to the aftermath. Published in 1999, it makes use of documents and evidence that was only finally made available after the fall of Communism. There may be more up-to-date sources now, but as far as I can tell this is still in line with the current academic view on the subject and a fantastic overview.

There was a lot of focus on the motivations and decisions made by Stalin and Zhukov in particular. Stalin is shown to be a product of history and his Russian Imperialist predecessors; just as the Soviet Union relied on the gulags for war time production, the tsars had also exploited forced labour; the myths, legends and heroes of Russian history, as well as the Orthodox Church, were brought back into the public eye during to the war to galvanise the population, despite all these ideas being oppressed in the early years after the Revolution; finally, there has always been the idea of collectivism vs individualism in Russian history and this was used to encourage the gigantic sacrifice made by the Soviet people (“for the greater good”). The later chapters were also fascinating to me, detailing anti-Semitic politics of the regime, the beginnings of the Cold War, de-Stalinization and the myths surrounding WWII that would later be exploited by the state.

Russia's War was an illuminating read, and surprisingly readable considering the difficult subject matter. I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in WWII history, especially if you never really considered it from a Russian/Soviet perspective.