This article discusses the issues of defense of the Caucasus in general, and in particular, the city of Grozny during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. The oil-producing and machine-building Grozny was of strategic importance, both for the ruling circles of Nazi Germany, in their aggressive plans, and for the Soviet command, which considered this North Caucasian city one of the main bases for providing the front with fuel. The article pays special attention to the historiography of the topic under study. The whole body of sources and literature on the topic of the defense of the Caucasus during the Great Patriotic War that was studied allows us to elaborate a conditional sorting by different chronological periods. The article presents the data and eyewitnesses of the described events, as well as the memoir literature of military leaders during the war. The authors studied some rich material about the investigated events in the Soviet historical literature. The authors of the article used some data from the memoir sources of the German Wehrmacht, which allow us to look at the history of events from the enemy side. Some dissertation works devoted to the topic of defense of the Caucasus during the Great Patriotic War are considered. The publications of contemporary authors about the events of 1942-1943 in the North Caucasus are also relevant in the study of the stated topic.
