Honest and irrepressibly frank, Bessonov's dramatic memoirs reveal just what it was like to fight on the Eastern Front. There he played a part in this clash of titans and he witnessed the shuddering collapse of the Third Reich. The cataclysmic battle of Kursk in 1943 put an end to Hitler's hopes of victory on the Eastern Front and it was Bessonov's first battle. From then on the Germans were forced into a long, bitter, painful retreat that ended in the ruins of Berlin in 1945. At the forefront of the drive to expel the Germans from Russia, and push on to the gates of the Reich's capital, were men like Evgeni Bessonov. A tank-rider, and officer in an elite Guards unit of the Red Army, Bessonov rode tanks from Kursk, through a western Russia and Poland devastated by the Germans, and right into the heart of Nazi Germany. Tank Rider is the atmospheric memoir of Evgeni Bessonov telling of his years of service in the vanguard of the Red Army and daily encounters with the German foe. He brings large-scale battles alive, recounts the sniping and skirmishing which tried and tested soldiers on both sides and narrates the overwhelming tragedy and horror of apocalyptic warfare on the Eastern Front.