Nowhere else was World War II as bloody and destructive as it was in Eastern Europe, and of all nations it was the Soviet Union that paid the highest price for victory. The scale of death and destruction is hard to comprehend even today. How Soviet society, its economy and military prepared for the upcoming war, mobilized and persevered during the conflict, and ended up storming Berlin in 1945 is explored in this course. Questions of socialist economy at war, technological innovation, and gender dimensions of modern war and warfare form core topics of the course.