Earliest evidence of Yersinia pestis? As DNA analysis of human remains continues to expand, evidence is mounting that Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague, has been ravaging human populations for millennia. Now a new study has identified the…
Analysis of two votive offering vessels from Pompeii is enhancing our understanding of Roman domestic rituals.
On the face of it, Operation Barbarossa – Nazi Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union – is straightforward to understand. Germany was at first strikingly successful, then faltered, and ultimately failed to subdue the Soviets, leading to rout and…
REVIEW BY ANDRÉ VAN LOON To get straight to the point: the strength of Soviet Secret Police Chiefs lies in its weakness. It is an engrossing read and yet a partial historical account, which leaves the deepest questions about the…
REVIEW BY CALUM HENDERSON St Petersburg has an immensely dark history. Built largely by slave labour on the orders of Peter the Great in the early 1700s, it has endured more than its fair share of assassination, revolution, flooding, and…
• The making of Russia: Peter the Great & the Battle of Poltava
• American apocalypse: how the Civil War was finally won
• Endgame WWII: the fall of Berlin, 80 years on
• Master and commander: Admiral Anson
• Kamikaze: fire from the sky
In our special feature, Stephen Roberts examines first the life of Peter the Great, a pivotal figure in Russian history, then looks in detail at the Battle of Poltava that established Russia for the first time as a major power on the European stage.
Infographics: Calum Henderson / Images: WIPL/Wikimedia Commons
Younger readers might be forgiven for thinking that Enemy at the Gates is merely a novelisation of the 2001 film of the same name. But the movie – directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Jude Law – in fact takes its title from William Craig’s groundbreaking 1973 history of Stalingrad, the first Western history to make extensive use of Russian sources.
REVIEW BY NICK EVANS Abdudzhalil Abdudzhalilov called himself the ‘last of the Mohicans’. Until his death in 2015, he was the last inhabitant of the village of Gamsutl in Dagestan, in the south of the Russian Federation. A spectacular image…
REVIEW BY CALUM HENDERSON Throughout the Cold War, various American presidents liked to say that the West and the Soviet Union had never fought one another directly, with the obvious implication being that they wanted to keep it that way.…
REVIEW BY CALUM HENDERSON Leningrad – today known as St Petersburg – was a key military and industrial target in the early years of the Second World War. But the city also held a psychological attraction for the invading armies…
REVIEW BY TOBY CLARK This new book by Dr Ben Wheatley of the University of East Anglia can claim success in the fields of both academic and popular history. With a nod to the Soviet ideal of ‘deep battle’, Wheatley…
This issue, we’re giving away three signed copies of The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: the hidden truth at the centre of WWII’s greatest battle by Iain MacGregor The foundation of the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II…
Researchers conducted genetic analysis of bone and tooth remains from 13 Neanderthals from two sites in the foothills of the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia.
The study aims to improve our understanding of the social identities of people living in this region between c.9,000 and 7,500 years ago by exploring what their burials can tell us about their relationships with the animals in the world around them.
There were two revolutions in Russia in 1917. In March, tens of thousands of striking workers, peasants, and soldiers — exhausted by the privations of the First World War — took to the streets of Petrograd (St Petersburg) in protest.…
A besieged city, a hostile army enveloping on all sides, and a ruthless commander refusing to surrender – this was not 1942, but 1919, when the city in southern Russia then known as Tsaritsyn was on the verge of being…
REVIEW BY ANDRÉ VAN LOON. The Story of Russia is a thorough work of historical writing that unfortunately leaves aside its most interesting ideas after the book’s introduction. Figes starts with a fascinating series of hypotheses: that Russia has been…
As the Russian army commits appalling atrocities in Ukraine, it might not feel like the best time to recall the heroism of the Red Army in the Second World War. But this year marks the 80th anniversary of the titanic…
Over a career as one of Britain’s most prolific military historians, Sir Antony Beevor has produced some of the most compelling narratives of 20th-century conflict. Perhaps most famous for Stalingrad, Beevor has subsequently published a series of well-received studies of…
The plate was found in 2021 at the Devitsa V cemetery in the Ostrogozhsky District of the Voronezh region, Russia.
MHM Editor Neil Faulkner recalls one of the great works of military history.
Barley starch granules from the residue inside one of the straws hint that people were using them to drink beer.
Discovered at Denisova Cave in Siberia, the bones have been dated to 200,000 years ago
The Eurasian Steppe: People, Movement, Ideas is an ambitious scholarly volume tracing the origins of the European identity in the Eurasian steppe, the vast expanse of land that stretches from Hungary through to the Ural Mountains and China. Covering a…
This is thought to be a fertility goddess known as Artimpasa, or, in ancient Anatolia, as Cybele.
Archaeologists excavating a Middle Don burial ground in the Ostrogozhsky District of the Voronezh region, Russia, have discovered a unique silver plate depicting winged Scythian gods and griffins.
A vast number of flint artefacts – including scrapers, arrowheads, and axe fragments – were recovered from all five settlements.
This book convincingly argues that Stalin’s war began long before the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, and can really be said to have begun in the late 1920s. Initially, this was a war of suppression at home, combined…
Gudin’s one-legged skeleton was found in the summer of 2019 in a park under the foundations of a dancefloor in Smolensk.
New dating of the Shigir Idol, the oldest known wooden monumental statue in the world, has revealed that it was created even earlier than previously thought.
David Porter on Military History's doomed inventions.
• Barbarossa: biggest invasion in history
• Braddock at Monongahela, 1755
• Butterfly Effect at war
• Crusader strategy
• French invasion of Britain: Fishguard, February 1797
Eighty years ago next month, on 22 June 1941, Adolf Hitler unleashed the largest military invasion force in history, when he ordered almost 3,700,000 Axis troops with 3,000 tanks, 7,000 guns and 2,300 aircraft to advance into the Soviet Union along a front that extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Less than six months later, following startling early successes, leading German units would reach almost to the gates of Moscow, before plummeting temperatures and the onset of the Russian winter finally brought their advance to a halt.
David Porter analyses the tense relationship between the two most powerful dictators in Europe during the countdown to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.