Name Mark Solonin | Role Historian | |
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Mark Solonin (born May 29, 1958, in Kuybyshev, USSR) is a Russian author who has written on the history of World War II, an aviation engineer by training.
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Solonin's studies focus on the opening weeks of the Soviet-German War, known as the Great Patriotic War, with the goal of finding a reason why Stalin's Soviet Union, after years of preparation for a large-scale war, having reinforced its army with the best up-to-date weaponry and, finally, having amassed the biggest army size in the world, suffered a crushing defeat in the summer of 1941. The author-proposed answer is that the reason for the catastrophe lies beyond the sphere of tactics, strategy or German's notorious "first strike". In his opinion, the Soviet Union and its military were unprepared for the war in terms of morale and organization - after the first shots were fired, the Red Army became an ungovernable mob of armed people, which swiftly abandoned their weapons and turned into endless columns of unarmed prisoners-of-war. To support this conclusion ("sensational and scandalous" as the Russian editor put it), he provides his own hour-by-hour analysis of military operations of the first days of the war.
Regarding WWII he argues that "A European war became unavoidable. It began precisely one week after the signing of the pact."
Solonin has written seven books that have been sold over 270 000 copies in Russia. Every book contains hundreds of source references (both from Soviet/Russian and Germany military archives), comparative tables on planning, weaponry and armor, author-drawn schemes of military operations. His works have been translated into Polish, Germany, Czech, Estonian, Lithuanian and Romanian.
Solonin criticized the new Russian culture minister and revisionist historian Vladimir Medinsky as "a propagandist of the shameless Goebbels variety".