Internationalism No. 80, October 2025 Page 6 In June 1941, Germany launched its attack on Russia, taking by surprise the army and the air force, much of which was destroyed on the ground, because Stalin had refused to believe the reports that Hitler intended to break the 1939 Pact. From that moment onwards, the war on the eastern front took on massive dimensions and was waged with unprecedented violence. In her essay Le front Germano-Soviétique (1941-1945): Une apocalypse européenne [in A. Aglan and R. Frank, La Guerre-monde , 2015], Masha Cerovic writes that about fourteen million soldiers lost their lives ; more precisely, nine million Soviets, four million Germans, and almost one million among their allies . It is calculated that the Russian population paid a price of over twenty million human lives, including the fallen and those who died of illness and starvation: hundreds of thousands of them were partisans, executed without pity. A hug...