For the last six days I enjoy reading Stalin- grad by Antony Beevor (Penguin Books, 1998), the best battle history I have ever read. It is a superb work of narrative history on the colossal battle of attrition at Stalin- grad, the epic turning point of the Second World War. And it reads like a novel rather than a history book it really is.

As a special bonus, in the book I found a photo of Vasily Ivanovich Zaitsev from the Siberian 284th Rifle Division, the most famous sniper in the Stalingrad battle theater. I first read about Zaitsev in early 1950's, then after some forty years saw a movie on him, and I perceived the story about Zaitsev almost like a legend, with some historical reality, I thought. Beevor, however brings the story as a brilliantly researched subject. Zaitsev was not only a superb sniper, he established a school of sniperism where he taught not only the technical and tactical lessons but the ‘doctrine of sniperism’.

On the top of that, he invented one more lethal device: he attached the telescopic sight from his sniper’s rifle to an anti-tank gun to take on machine-gun nests, by slotting a shell right through their loophole.