The history of the Soviet Union in World War II has begun to be transferred from the realm of the regime's ideologues to the domain of professional and amateur historians. The post-Soviet rewriting of the wartime experience is part of a larger international process of reinterpretation that has coincided with the end of the Cold War and the transformation of the power relationships that the post-war settlement had for so long held in place. In the Cold War version that dominated in the ‘free world’, erstwhile enemies like Germany, Italy, and Japan became allies while recent allies, notably the Soviet Union and China, were refigured as cosmic enemies.

Because of the central place that the wartime victory had occupied in the Soviet state's legitimating ideology, the version of the war that had been available in monographs and in popular accounts was the story of an heroic and popular struggle waged by a talented military leadership under the guidance of the all-knowing Communist Party. The very fact that Soviet historians wrote not about the Second World War, but about the ‘Great Fatherland War’, a specifically Soviet war virtually removed from the rest of humanity's experience of that conflict and elevated to mythical status, set the parameters for the largely didactic genre of writing. The general focus of this historiography, narrow and constrained as it was by Party and military censors and self-censors, was to elaborate the ‘sources of victory’ and thereby to help legitimate various aspects of the Stalinist and, later, post-Stalinist regime.