On November 22, 2011 Josef Stalin's sole surviving child, Lana (formerly Svetlana) Peters (her married name following her 1967 defection from the Soviet Union and marriage to her third husband - an American) died of cancer. Born on February 28, 1926 she was 85 years old.
The remains of six former soldiers from the Red Army are to be reinterred from their current burial location in Finland. Currently located in South Karelia the remains were discovered outside the city of Lappeenranta and will be moved to an official cemetary for Soviet prisoners of war who died during the 1941-1944 war fought between the Soviet Union and Germany and its Axis allies - including Finland.
In October of 1942 the German Sixth Army, under General Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus, came as close as perhaps it ever did to defeating the Soviet defenders of Stalingrad - led most prominently by General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov's 62nd Army. At best, by October 1942 the 62nd Army numbered 50,000 men and 80 tanks. According to those present it was nowhere near these numbers and the Germans held overwhelming advantages in men and machines.
In an assault beginning on October 14th, five German divisions - over 90,000 men, 2,000 guns and mortars, 300 tanks, and waves of Stuka's forged a path
Following the Red Army's stunning June-July 1944 defeat of Germany's Army Group Center, and the subsequent Soviet drive into Eastern Poland, one of the great tragedies of World War II unfolded in Warsaw. On August 1st 1944, the long-suffering Polish resistance and population, led by Polish Brigadier General Bor-Komorowski, launched a city wide uprising as the Red Army's 1st Belorussian Front approached Praga and crossed the Vistula.
