The celebrations had been premature. The victory at Stalingrad had wounded the enemy severely, but it had not permanently broken him. Even the gains of February 1943 proved ephemeral. The Soviets held on to Kharkov for barely a month. In March, they were driven back, leaving the city to the Fascists once again. It was a bitter moment for the army and a catastrophe for Kharkov's citizens, who now faced the redoubled anger of their conquerors as well as the privations of another hungry spring. Far away, in the unimaginable light of the Tunisian desert, Montgomery's troops were driving Rommel and his men toward the sea. The outcome of the Soviet Union's war was still unclear.

That spring, the Soviet leadership gathered to consider the coming year's campaign. On 8 April, Georgy Zhukov, newly created Marshal of the Soviet Union and decorated with the first ever Order of Suvorov, First Class, delivered his assessment of the enemy's plans. Grave and businesslike, he told the general staff that Germany lacked the resources for a new push in the Caucasus or along the Volga. But the Fascists were far from beaten. Winter was never their best time of year; nor were the sodden weeks of spring, when melting snow dissolved into thigh-high mud. But for two summers already, their tanks and horses had raced eastward over sun-baked ground, driving the Soviet army back, encircling whole divisions at a time, instilling panic in many of the rest. As the days lengthened and the mornings warmed, they would attack again. Zhukov believed that they would choose a narrow front and muster concentrated forces for a direct strike, whose ultimate objective would probably be Moscow. The blow would come from the places where German forces were strongest, namely the open wheat fields between Orel and Belgorod. Its likely focus would be the region around Kursk, a city in the black-earth zone near the border with Ukraine. The Soviet front line bulged westward at this point, exposing the Red Army's flanks from the northwest to the southwest. In Zhukov's view, the onslaught, when it came, would be designed to devastate. The Wehrmacht was running short of men. This was a battle that would be decided by aircraft, artillery, and tanks.

Zhukov's assesment, which drew on detailed intelligence from British sources, was correct, although the timing of the attack was difficult to calculate. For once, too, Stalin accepted the military analysis, including the advice to prepare, in the first instance, for resolute defense. It was not what preware propaganda had prescribed, with its images of bold strikes at the Fascist barricades, but the strategy that summer would be to take the German blow, absorbing it with line after line of defense. Only then, when the extravagant advance had been stalled, would the Soviets go into the attack.