Konev's Golgotha: Operation Typhoon Strikes the Soviet Western Front, October 1941 - Hardcover

Filippenkov, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1910777374 ISBN 13: 9781910777374

Publisher: Helion and Company, 2016

Synopsis

This book is a historical study of the events of October 1941 in the Viaz’ma pocket, based on documents found in the Russian Federation’s Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense, the German Bundesarchiv, and the US National Archives.

Mikhail Filippenkov describes the events that took place through the simultaneous, comparative analysis of Soviet and German combat reports according to time, and in the manner of reporting from the places of those events as they happened. The author writes about these events with chronological accuracy, not on the level of army headquarters and higher, but exclusively on the level of the combat units down to the division-level, and with concrete geographical reference to the combat maps of those times.

Particular attention is paid to the events that took place in the vicinity of Sychevka in Smolensk Oblast’, because what happened there has never been deeply researched or examined by anyone in Russia. Unfortunately, research must rely primarily on the combat reports and combat documents of the units of the Wehrmacht’s Panzergruppe 3., since almost no documents on the Soviet side have been preserved. They were either destroyed together with the units and formations trapped within the Viaz’ma pocket, or destroyed at an order from above to those units and formations which managed to escape encirclement more or less intact, in order to erase any record of the disaster.

About this title

About the Author

Mikhail Filippenkov was born in Moscow in 1959. A lawyer by education and training, until 1991 he worked in the department of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs' struggle against embezzlement and speculation. In 1991, he was released from service in the rank of major. Until 1998 he worked in a business that dealt with the international trade of consumer goods. Since 1998 and to the present day, Filippenkov has been a legal advocate for civil rights. Simultaneously, he has taken an interest in research in to the history of Smolensk Oblast - his father's native land. Filippenkov is married and has a son, Aleksei Mikhailovich Filippenkov, an executive policy-maker and economist who is also busy with literary efforts, and who has recently written the novel Voronka [The Shell Hole] on the events of the First World War on the Western Front.

Review

“ ... an interesting and engaging read.” (Canadian Army Journal)

Edition details

• Publisher: Helion and Company
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1910777374
• ISBN 13: 9781910777374
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 176