While the conflict most Western audiences know as World War II began in September 1939 with Hitler’s invasion of Poland, the events of The Diamond Eye demonstrate that the Soviet war experience had its own turning points. In August 1939, the foreign ministers of the USSR and Germany, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, signed a nonaggression pact with secret protocols ceding Polish territory to the Soviet Union and recognizing Soviet rights to the Baltic states. Most historians agree that Stalin intended the pact as a measure of temporary security, as he had also considered an alliance with France and Britain. The pact ran counter to the animosity between the two nations during the 1930s, and territorial disputes and other issues occurred prior to Hitler’s decision to invade in the summer of 1941.

Stalin and his advisors were stunned by the invasion; likewise, in the novel, Mila and her friends are preparing for vacation rather than hostilities. The beginning of Operation Barbarossa, as Hitler called his invasion, marked the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War against fascism.

The phrase evokes the “Patriotic” or “Fatherland” war of the 1810s, when Napoleon’s empire was tsarist Russia’s adversary. This explains Quinn’s artistic choice to have Kostia carry a copy of War and Peace.