About the Author

Mikhail Filippenkov was born in Moscow in 1959. A lawyer by education and training, until 1991 he worked in the department of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs’ struggle against embezzlement and speculation. In 1991, he was released from service in the rank of major. Until 1998 he worked in a business that dealt with the international trade of consumer goods. Since 1998 and to the present day, Filippenkov has been a legal advocate for civilian rights. Simultaneously, he has taken an interest in research in to the history of Smolensk Oblast – his father’s native land. Filippenkov is married and has a son, Aleksei Mikhailovich Filippenkov, an executive policy-maker and economist who is also busy with literary efforts, and who has recently written the novel Voronka [The Shell Hole] on the events of the First World War on the Western Front.

Reviews

An incredibly detailed account of one particular engagement between German and Russian troops, examined in minute detail by author Filippenkov and based on Russian and German archive documents, most of which he was lucky to find still intact and not destroyed on the orders of Hitler and Stalin.
*Books Monthly*