When Stalin Learned Germany Had Surrendered | WW2 Story

Описание: A narrative account of the moment Joseph Stalin received confirmation of Germany's unconditional surrender on the morning of May 9, 1945 — Victory Day in the Soviet Union — told through the human and political dimensions of a triumph purchased at a cost almost beyond historical reckoning. The story traces Stalin's journey from the paralysis of June 1941 to the absolute authority of May 1945, examining the particular quality of a man who had managed the Soviet war effort with total control and total concealment of his inner life through four years of catastrophic loss and ultimate victory. It follows the senior Soviet commanders who received the surrender confirmation from their various positions — Zhukov in Berlin having just presided over the signing ceremony, Konev nursing the competitive frustrations of a career spent in Zhukov's shadow, Rokossovsky at Wismar having survived the purges that destroyed most of his contemporaries — and the celebrations that erupted in Moscow streets among a population releasing four years of compressed grief and anxiety into something indistinguishable from joy. It examines Stalin's immediate turn to the post-war strategic landscape — the occupation of Eastern Europe as a security buffer, the shift from Roosevelt to Truman in the American relationship, the imminent removal of Churchill from office mid-Potsdam conference, the gap between Soviet and western interpretations of the Yalta agreements — and the twenty-six to twenty-seven million Soviet dead whose names the official narrative of heroic victory could acknowledge only in the aggregate. At its core, the story explores the relationship between victory and cost, between the official language of triumph and the private arithmetic of grief, and between the man who had driven the Soviet war machine to its ultimate conclusion and the human reality of what the driving had consumed.