The Moscow victory had served chiefly to change people’s attitudes towards the Germans. After December 1941, the mystical fear aroused by the German Army disappeared. The Stalingrad victory, on the other hand, served mainly to change people’s attitudes towards themselves, to develop a new form of self-consciousness in the army and in the population as a whole. Soviet Russians began to think of themselves differently, to adopt a different manner towards other nationalities. The history of Russia was no longer the history of the sufferings and humiliations undergone by the workers and peasantry;
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