Last time we spoke about the end of the first year of the eastern front. The Red Army pressed on Army Group Center, while Meretskov’s Volkhov Front prepared a Leningrad breakout despite crippled supply lines. In Leningrad, famine worsened; cannibalism surfaced and NKVD records show arrests, even as the Kirov Tank Factory kept producing tanks. The Baltic/Sevastopol fronts saw stubborn resistance: the Soviet submarine fleet, though hampered by ice and poor training, managed limited successes; five transports, a submarine, and two tankers sunk by year’s end. Army Group North protected the Leningrad corridor against repeated Soviet attempts to sever it, while Meretskov’s 4th and 54th Armies attempted operations west and south of Lake Ladoga to relieve the siege. In Army Group Center, Hitler’s retreats were banned, but local withdrawals continued, fueling a leadership crisis as Zhukov exploited gaps and the 1st Guards Cavalry Corps disrupted Kaluga and Sukhinichi. Guderian’s retreat sparked relief demands and Guderian’s removal. On the southern and Crimean fronts, Sevastopol withstood heavy pressure; Kerch and Feodosia saw mixed Soviet landings and German counterattacks, with Petrov’s defense holding deep into late December. Overall, December 1941 ended with Soviet momentum, strained German logistics, and a desperate balance as winter intensified. This episode is New Year, New Offensives Well hello there, welcome to the Eastern Front week by week podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about world war two? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on world war two and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel you can find a few videos all the way from the Opium Wars of the 1800’s until the end of the Pacific War in 1945.    January 1st arrived with a nation in flux. After 193 days of campaigning, a remarkable turn of events had unfolded: a shocking invasion pushed the Wehrmacht toward the gates of Moscow, and the closing weeks of 1941 saw the Red Army mounting a determined counteroffensive. Stalin had managed to keep the communist state intact against overwhelming odds, while his generals scrambled to reorganize both army and industry on the fly, improvising plans as new realities emerged on every front. By December, with German forces only kilometers from the Kremlin, the Red Army had carefully marshaled its resources and prepared to strike back. The invaders found themselves facing a reeling front and signs of growing disarray, and there was a rising sense that the long, grinding struggle might tilt in favor of the Soviets. Yet the Germans managed to hold the line. Despite being defeated in detail in several engagements, they reorganized around a new set of defensive positions and steadied their posture for the year ahead, ready to resist the anticipated Soviet push and to exploit any moment of weakness in the enemy’s momentum.   In Army Group North, what would come to be known as the Lyuban Offensive had been in the planning stages since the third week of December. The original start date was set for December 25, but delays in preparations pushed it back to after the new year. Meretskov was nominally in command of the offensive’s main effort with the Volkhov Front, yet Stalin had dispatched a coordinator from the Stavka to oversee the operation. This was Commissar Mekhlis, a figure infamous for his ruthless reputation and a readiness to discipline anyone he believed might be disobeying orders in spirit as well as in letter. According Khrushchev “He had a particularly