The Second World War was a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. In some aspects of this complexity, we will refer to, as far as our resources and scope allow, in the pages that follow.

Here, let us suffice to give the reader a preview by stating that the chapter of this war that will concern us in this brief report is not so much its general history, its overall plot, and its outcome, but rather the phase of its preparation and the initial period of its conduct.

In the course of the war's preparation and the formation of its fronts, which covers the entire decade of the 1930s, two "historical bases," if one may use this expression, emerge for the future confrontation: a) The redistribution of the world. This element is the one that directly connects the Second World War with the First. It pertains to the familiar phenomenon rooted in the permanently uneven and disproportionate development and "re-development" of capitalism in its monopoly phase. This aspect became urgent after 1929, with the outbreak of the Great Depression, which definitively put an end to the period of relative stability in interwar capitalism. The connection between the two world wars indeed appears very close. Even their main fronts are the same.

b) The attempt to destroy socialism. This element is a new aspect of the Second World War. It also appeared in the First, but only in a much less developed form. In the Second World War, it emerges in its complete form: In the necessity to destroy a specific power, the USSR.

[Excerpt from the text of the preface]