This vivid and moving account of everyday life in wartime Moscow tells how people in the capital organised their lives to survive the four terrible years that followed the Nazi invasion in June 1941. Ordinary people endured constant bombings, a huge death toll, and living conditions of almost unimaginable hardship, yet they fought and worked as never before to defend their country. Men and women in their thousands enlisted or were conscripted into the Red Army and the Home Guard, and those who stayed behind in the factories worked double and treble shifts and took part in rifle drill in the parks in their lunch hour. Actors in ballet slippers were to be found in the crowds digging trenches around the perimeter of the city, and the streets were barricaded with sandbags and anti-tank devices. Thousands of children were evacuated and crèches hastily arranged to care for those remaining, while older schoolchildren visited soldiers in hospital, watched for firebombs at night or helped out in the factories, making Molotov cocktails, mines and machine guns.

Moscow and its heroic resistance presaged for the watching world the defeat of Nazi Germany. The authors graphically recreate the Muscovites' life of appalling cold, lack of food, relentless toil and, finally, the euphoria of victory.

Moscow's experiences are set in the wider context of the war, including a reappraisal of the Tehran, Moscow and Yalta conferences. This remarkable story, meticulously researched and told in fascinating detail, is illustrated with 75 black-and-white photographs of the time.

Alternate cover for isbn 0701130091