If you'd tried flying the old Russian tricolour in Stalin's USSR the NKVD would have had a word. Has the hammer and sickle flag been consigned to the memory hole?

Dull. The original was *much* better. Although I'm not sure who did the true original, it's been floating around for years.

Nitpick: Fat Man and Little Boy have the same icon.

I love this especially "Germany created the event Operation Barbarossa"

I don't know who wrote this, but aside from omitting the hammer and sickle flag, they overlooked the prewar Russo-German pact. You know, the one under which they divided Poland like two muggers dividing their first victim's loot.

I'm going to open myself up to more than my fair ration of excrement, but didn't the Russians fight the war stupidly?

Not at the end. At the start. I look at Joe Stalin and the only conclusion I can draw is that I can be the lamest tactician ever born if I can luck into the dictatorship of a country with a dozen or so times to trade for the opportunity to learn what I'm supposed to be doing.

Time zones. That would have been time zones. Not "times."

OMG! That old Eddie Izzard joke!

MattP: IMO, it is clear that the worst blunder made in the war was Stalin's 1941 decision that Germany was not going to attack, and therefore make no preparations for the attack because these might be taken as a threat and provoke fighting.

(I exclude strategic errors such as Germany's decision to start the war and Japan's decision to attack the US and UK.)

Of course one can't blame Russians for that - Stalin was not a Russian.

Stalin's blunder set the USSR up for a huge sucker-punch at the start of the campaign, which cost the Soviets most of their existing forces, and forced them into costly emergency measures to stave off complete defeat in the next six months.

Just about everything that went wrong on the Eastern Front for the Soviets traces back to that.

Rich, I agree.

Although his bad idea in 1941 was compounded IMO by his preceding bad ideas that his army didn't need weaponry or officers.

I am sometimes confronted by leftists who claim the Russians bore the brunt of the battle in WWII. They cite the death toll.

Being open to new ideas I then tell myself, "OK, maybe they have a point. Let's check it out."

So I look into it.

Every time I emerge with the impression that had not Stalin fit the definition for derogatory terms for male genitalia all those millions of Russians wouldn't have been killed.

But he's a great war leader because if you can trade a couple of thousand miles of territory and a bazillion peepes as cannon fodder, you'll buy the time to read "Warmaking strategery for dummies."