This volume is a perfect example of how you should not write a book. The author is not a trained historian and, like many other Russians that have taken an interest in the Second World War, he's happy to go digging through memoirs, secondary literature, and published primary source collections (sometimes even visiting the archives themselves) and put everything he has discovered on paper. The end result is page after page of reference material, tables, charts, photos, and limited biographies of mentioned officers/commanders that should have been put into an appendix or two. Not doing so takes away from the reading experience and bogs down readers in needless details which the author should be synthesizing and contextualizing into a cohesive narrative.
This volume that should have taken up no more than 100 pages of text to describe the condition of the Soviet Air Force located in the Baltics followed by another 200 or so pages of reports, observations, combat accounts, biographies, and photographs/maps. Readers will have to do a lot of hunting to find the various gems that this text contains and, to be honest, it isn't always worth it. This is, at best, a missed opportunity, and, at worst, a waste of time for those without a solid background on the Soviet Union and the Second World War.
This volume that should have taken up no more than 100 pages of text to describe the condition of the Soviet Air Force located in the Baltics followed by another 200 or so pages of reports, observations, combat accounts, biographies, and photographs/maps. Readers will have to do a lot of hunting to find the various gems that this text contains and, to be honest, it isn't always worth it. This is, at best, a missed opportunity, and, at worst, a waste of time for those without a solid background on the Soviet Union and the Second World War.