Tomb of the Panzerwaffe

Aleksei Isaev was born in 1974. Since the year 2004 up to the present date, he has written approximately 20 books on the history of the Eastern Front in the Second World War, with a particular emphasis on the events of 1941 and the Stalingrad battle. His particular research interest today is the war's final period. In the years 2007-2010, he worked as an academic scholar in the Russian Ministry of Defense's Institute of Military History. He was a contributor to the new 12-volume official Russian history of the war. Thanks to the opening of the previously classified military archives in Russia, since then he has done a lot of work with the war's documents as an independent scholar. Mikhail Kolomiets was born in Moscow in 1968. He is a 1994 graduate of the Moscow Higher Technical Institute. Upon graduation, he did his compulsory military service in the Soviet Army. His childhood interest in military history gradually focused on the history of the armored vehicles and tank forces of Russia and the Soviet Union between 1914 and 1950. In 1992 Kolomiets began work in the Russian State Military Archive, at a time when a large amount of the Red Army documents dating to the period before 1941 were still classified. Thanks to his specialization in the institute, he was able to obtain one of its allotted access passes, so he was one of the first to become acquainted with the documents of the Red Army's Main Motorized Armor and Tank Command from the 1931-1941 period. In September 1995, he became one of the first independent scholars to receive access to the documents in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Kolomiets is the author of several dozen books on the history of the creation and combat employment of the armored vehicles of Russia and the Soviet Union. Stuart Britton is a freelance translator and editor residing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He has been responsible for making a growing number of Russian titles available to readers of the English language, consisting primarily of memoirs by Red Army veterans and recent historical research concerning the Eastern Front of the Second World War and Soviet air operations in the Korean War. Notable recent titles include Boris Gorbachevsky's Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier's War on the Eastern Front 1942-45 (University Press of Kansas, 2008) and Yuri Sutiagin's and Igor Seidov's MiG Menace Over Korea: The Story of Soviet Fighter Ace Nikolai Sutiagin (Pen & Sword Aviation, 2009). Future books will include Lev Lopukhovsky's detailed study of the Soviet disaster at Viazma in 1941, Svetlana Gerasimova's analysis of the prolonged and savage fighting against Army Group Center in 1942-43 to liberate the city of Rzhev, and more of Igor Seidov's studies of the Soviet side of the air war in Korea, 1951-1953.