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Stalin's War: A New History of World War II
A major new history of the Second World War by a prize-winning historian
We remember World War II as a struggle between good and evil, with Hitler propelling events and the Allied powers saving the day. But Hitler's armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit the spoils of war. That role belonged to Joseph Stalin. Hitler's genocidal ambition may have unleashed Armageddon, but as celebrated historian Sean McMeekin shows, the conflicts that emerged were the result of Stalin's maneuverings, orchestrated to unleash a war between capitalist powers in Europe and between Japan and the Anglo-American forces in the Pacific. Meanwhile, the United States and Britain's self-defeating strategy of supporting Stalin and his armies at all costs allowed the Soviets to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism.
A groundbreaking reassessment, Stalin's War is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the roots of the current world order.
We remember World War II as a struggle between good and evil, with Hitler propelling events and the Allied powers saving the day. But Hitler's armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit the spoils of war. That role belonged to Joseph Stalin. Hitler's genocidal ambition may have unleashed Armageddon, but as celebrated historian Sean McMeekin shows, the conflicts that emerged were the result of Stalin's maneuverings, orchestrated to unleash a war between capitalist powers in Europe and between Japan and the Anglo-American forces in the Pacific. Meanwhile, the United States and Britain's self-defeating strategy of supporting Stalin and his armies at all costs allowed the Soviets to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism.
A groundbreaking reassessment, Stalin's War is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the roots of the current world order.
768 pages, Hardcover
First published April 20, 2021
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May 1, 2022
“The European war that broke out in September 1939 – pitting Britain, France, and Poland against Germany, with the USSR claiming to be neutral – did not have Hitler’s planned or desired lineup of belligerents. He had sincerely believed that France and Britain would back down, as they had done when he confronted them over Czechoslovakia. Nor did this war serve genuine French or British interests, as was made clear both in the dilatory approach to fighting these powers took…and in the final reckoning six years later, which left the French and British empires in ruins and Poland under Soviet domination. But it was precisely the war Stalin wanted…”
- Sean McMeekin, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II
For the briefest moment in 1945, much of the world celebrated the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Almost immediately, though, things began to fall apart. Friends became enemies; enemies became friends. Barbwire was unspooled, walls went up, and the Cold War descended.
Among many other things, this realignment drastically changed the historiography of the Second World War. For years, the western allies – especially Great Britain and America – celebrated their own contributions as preeminent, trumpeting the Battle of Britain and the D-Day landings in Normandy as the hinges of great events. Meanwhile, behind the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union was doing the exact same thing, constructing a version of the Great Patriotic War in which they did all the work, while conveniently forgetting the interlude where Hitler and Joseph Stalin embraced, connived, and split Europe between themselves.
With the end of the Cold War – and the opening of archives – came a revising of old narratives in the west. Even mainstream, popular historians tended to give the Soviet Union the lion’s share of the credit, without ever leavening that with a dollop of criticism. As this happened, the former Soviet Union, maintaining admirable message discipline, vigorously nodded its head in agreement. This resulted in bestselling authors such as Max Hastings bowing before the Red Army while openly mocking the armed forces of the west.
In Stalin’s War, Sean McMeekin attempts to provide a much-needed counterweight to this reflexive, uncritical acceptance of the Soviet Union’s role in World War II. Unfortunately, in reframing the USSR as the big-baddie, and the western allies as mendacious enablers – if not outright abettors – McMeekin has produced a shrill, 666-page screed that undercuts its own enormous research with slanted interpretations of the evidence, logically fallacious reasoning, and hindsight-based judgments that consistently refuse to acknowledge contemporary realities.
***
Before going any further, it might be helpful to describe what Stalin’s War is, by explaining what it is not.
First, it is not a general history of the Second World War. That much should be obvious. It focuses on the Soviet Union, especially its relationship with the United States and Great Britain.
Second, it is not a standard military or political history, either. While McMeekin proceeds chronologically, from 1917 to 1945, he is not interested in explaining what actually happened in an objective or unbiased manner. Instead, every occurrence is filtered through McMeekin’s Communist-hating worldview, so that even a sky-high look at the siege of Stalingrad devolves into an argument.
There were times when it seemed like McMeekin – a multilingual First World War expert I have enjoyed reading in the past – appears to vanish, replaced by the ghost of a young, Red-baiting Richard Nixon, or a hysterical Joe McCarthy.
***
Stalin’s War is divided into six sections, starting with Soviet foreign policy and ending with the failures at Yalta. For me, the second section, describing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its baleful consequences, is the most valuable.
Often underemphasized, or softened, or gilded, Stalin’s decision to join forces with Hitler is imperative in any critique of the Soviet Union’s wartime actions. As McMeekin discusses in depth, the USSR raced neck-and-neck with Hitler to gobble up as many sovereign nations as possible. The two regimes split Poland – with Stalin actually receiving a larger share – and then turned in different directions. While Hitler looked west, Stalin shored up the east, invaded Finland, then annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, swallowing these countries with barely a burp. Of course, in true Stalin style, tens of thousands of people were murdered, enslaved, or deported.
Beyond mere hypocritical opportunism, Stalin provided strategic cover for the Nazis. While Hitler likely would have invaded Poland regardless, gaining Stalin’s consent was hugely important to him, as it assured the safety of his eastern flank, while he looked over his shoulder at the western allies who had guaranteed Poland’s independence.
***
Having claimed to have won the war, it’s important to remember how the Soviets helped start it. Nevertheless, McMeekin is constantly undermining his positions with unforced errors, such as the reliance on extremely dubious evidence.
More damaging is his polemical ardor, which is poorly directed. The best example of this is his cartoonish portraitures of the leading figures.
Stalin – who McMeekin unsubtly refers to as the Vozhd – is all-knowing, all-seeing, and all-powerful, the nations of the world mere pawns in his hands. Did you think that Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 for their own imperialist aims? Wrong. Stalin manipulated them into doing it. Think that Franklin Roosevelt bucked public opinion to prepare for a war with Germany because Hitler threatened America’s vital interests? Wrong. Roosevelt was actually coopted by Stalin’s superspies. Think that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because the United States stood in the way of its Pacific ambitions? Wrong again. It was Stalin the whole time, the man behind the curtain. Sure, you might wonder why – if Stalin was such a damn genius – Germany ended up in Moscow’s suburbs. McMeekin doesn’t wonder, though.
In terms of caricatures, FDR is Stalin’s opposite. At best, a clueless old man; at worst, a Soviet asset. This portrayal does not rely on new evidence, but on insulting adjectives. Roosevelt never asks Stalin for anything; he “pleads.” He doesn’t try to form a relationship with his ally; he “flirts” with him.
McMeekin spends an entire chapter complaining about FDR’s 1943 call for “unconditional surrender,” seeing this as a major mistake that caused Germany to fight harder (as though they had been pulling their punches so far). As a World War I historian, McMeekin knows exactly why unconditional surrender was necessary, but he doesn’t care. Rather, he decides that FDR should have worked on a negotiated surrender. Leaving aside the issue of “negotiating” with Hitler, the mind boggles at what kind of terms could have been hammered out, given that Hitler had swallowed most of Europe, killed millions of people, and imprisoned and looted millions more.
Churchill gets off a little better. McMeekin faults him for vacillating, and for not recognizing that the USSR was the real enemy all along. In what might be the dumbest statement I’ve ever seen from a historian, McMeekin suggest that in 1940, when Great Britain was hanging on for its life against Hitler, Churchill should have declared war on the Soviet Union!
Just to recap: according to McMeekin, Stalin is the worst, FDR a close second, and Hitler a distant fourth.
***
McMeekin’s portrayal of Germany is troubling, to say the least. In his erratic epilogue, he even argues that the United States – despite having war declared on it – shouldn’t have been fighting Germany at all. Ignoring this morally questionable proposition, McMeekin blithely disregards the danger Nazism represented. When a man has a gun to your head, you don’t have time to worry about the guy behind him with a knife. You deal with the most critical thing first.
McMeekin doesn’t see it this way. He labels the actions taken by Churchill and FDR to defeat Germany, especially with regard to Eastern Europe, as “betrayals.” He thinks that somehow – perhaps by magic – these two leaders should have ended the war with Germany, while simultaneously keeping Stalin from occupying territory that he – for the most part – already occupied. Did Stalin achieve diplomatic coups at Teheran and Yalta? Yes, but Stalin mainly got what he wanted because he took it, and there was nothing that FDR or Churchill could’ve done to stop him, short of starting another war (a course that McMeekin undoubtedly would’ve supported).
***
Democracies have a huge disadvantage vis-à-vis totalitarian regimes.
Churchill and Roosevelt didn’t get to make five-year plans like Stalin. They were subject to elections, which continued throughout. Churchill and Roosevelt couldn’t tell wholesale lies to their people. They were subject to a free press, and vigorous analysis. Churchill and Roosevelt were subject to a least some ethical constraints. Stalin did what he wanted, how he wanted, without worrying about decency. Anyone who opposed him ended up with a bullet in the base of the skull.
I found it really strange that McMeekin ignored this, and kept pretending that Churchill and Roosevelt could simply have matched Stalin’s ruthlessness, without acknowledging all three men inhabited vastly different political, economic, and moral systems.
***
The negativist tone McMeekin embraces obscures the positive contributions of the western allies. McMeekin’s discussion of manpower distribution clearly shows the importance of the multiple fronts opened by Great Britain and America (roughly half of Germany’s military was engaged in either defending these fronts, or preparing for potential invasions elsewhere). He also establishes – with pure, objective numbers – the critical magnitude of Lend Lease aid to the Soviet Union. To be sure, McMeekin – being McMeekin – bemoans the fact that the Soviets took so much from the United States, without ever saying thank you, but it allowed the western allies to gain their objective at a fraction of the USSR’s death toll.
***
Every time I review a book on D-Day, someone, somewhere, writes to tell me that the Soviet Union actually “won” the war. The Second World War, though, was not a single conflict, but a series of interrelated ones.
So let’s break it down. The USSR definitely “won” the war against Poland, executing and deporting thousands, a crime that – had it occurred at any other time – would have proved an indelible reputational stain. It also defeated Finland and the Baltic States, in acts of aggression that mirrored Hitler’s. As to Japan, the Soviet Union did next to nothing. In point of fact, the Soviet Union – showing it knew how to pick friends – had a nonaggression pact with Japan, allowing Japan to rampage freely in China without worrying about the Manchurian border. Stalin eventually broke the treaty when it became convenient for him.
With regard to Germany, the Soviet Union definitely did most of the killing. But it would not have prevailed without the western allies. Great Britain and the United States opened three different fronts, tied down half the German military, engaged in a bombing campaign that literally destroyed the Luftwaffe, and provided the Soviet Union with everything from patents and raw materials, to tanks and Spam. Without this, the Soviet Union ends up suing for peace.
Aside from military conquests, Stalin’s War raises the question as to whether the Soviet Union won the peace. Certainly, it ended up controlling half of Europe. At the same time, the United States didn’t exactly devolve into a communist hellscape. Instead, America’s economy boomed, the country’s power reached stratospheric levels, and it had a brief moment on the mountaintop, with nothing over it but sky.
***
The only absolute victory achieved by the Soviet Union is in the realm of storytelling, painting itself as the virtuous defender of the Russian homeland against Nazi hordes. Its version is so compelling that the USSR’s premeditated invasions, mass murders, mass rapes, and mass deportations have largely been hand-waved by modern historians. Controversial actions taken by the western allies – such as the bombing of Dresden – have rightfully been discussed and deconstructed. But little has been said of the Katyn Forest.
The Second World War is nearly eighty-years finished, but the fight over its memory continues. To that end, there is a need for a clear-eyed evaluation, a dispassionate resetting of the scales. Regrettably, Stalin’s War is not the book to do it.
- Sean McMeekin, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II
For the briefest moment in 1945, much of the world celebrated the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Almost immediately, though, things began to fall apart. Friends became enemies; enemies became friends. Barbwire was unspooled, walls went up, and the Cold War descended.
Among many other things, this realignment drastically changed the historiography of the Second World War. For years, the western allies – especially Great Britain and America – celebrated their own contributions as preeminent, trumpeting the Battle of Britain and the D-Day landings in Normandy as the hinges of great events. Meanwhile, behind the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union was doing the exact same thing, constructing a version of the Great Patriotic War in which they did all the work, while conveniently forgetting the interlude where Hitler and Joseph Stalin embraced, connived, and split Europe between themselves.
With the end of the Cold War – and the opening of archives – came a revising of old narratives in the west. Even mainstream, popular historians tended to give the Soviet Union the lion’s share of the credit, without ever leavening that with a dollop of criticism. As this happened, the former Soviet Union, maintaining admirable message discipline, vigorously nodded its head in agreement. This resulted in bestselling authors such as Max Hastings bowing before the Red Army while openly mocking the armed forces of the west.
In Stalin’s War, Sean McMeekin attempts to provide a much-needed counterweight to this reflexive, uncritical acceptance of the Soviet Union’s role in World War II. Unfortunately, in reframing the USSR as the big-baddie, and the western allies as mendacious enablers – if not outright abettors – McMeekin has produced a shrill, 666-page screed that undercuts its own enormous research with slanted interpretations of the evidence, logically fallacious reasoning, and hindsight-based judgments that consistently refuse to acknowledge contemporary realities.
***
Before going any further, it might be helpful to describe what Stalin’s War is, by explaining what it is not.
First, it is not a general history of the Second World War. That much should be obvious. It focuses on the Soviet Union, especially its relationship with the United States and Great Britain.
Second, it is not a standard military or political history, either. While McMeekin proceeds chronologically, from 1917 to 1945, he is not interested in explaining what actually happened in an objective or unbiased manner. Instead, every occurrence is filtered through McMeekin’s Communist-hating worldview, so that even a sky-high look at the siege of Stalingrad devolves into an argument.
There were times when it seemed like McMeekin – a multilingual First World War expert I have enjoyed reading in the past – appears to vanish, replaced by the ghost of a young, Red-baiting Richard Nixon, or a hysterical Joe McCarthy.
***
Stalin’s War is divided into six sections, starting with Soviet foreign policy and ending with the failures at Yalta. For me, the second section, describing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its baleful consequences, is the most valuable.
Often underemphasized, or softened, or gilded, Stalin’s decision to join forces with Hitler is imperative in any critique of the Soviet Union’s wartime actions. As McMeekin discusses in depth, the USSR raced neck-and-neck with Hitler to gobble up as many sovereign nations as possible. The two regimes split Poland – with Stalin actually receiving a larger share – and then turned in different directions. While Hitler looked west, Stalin shored up the east, invaded Finland, then annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, swallowing these countries with barely a burp. Of course, in true Stalin style, tens of thousands of people were murdered, enslaved, or deported.
Beyond mere hypocritical opportunism, Stalin provided strategic cover for the Nazis. While Hitler likely would have invaded Poland regardless, gaining Stalin’s consent was hugely important to him, as it assured the safety of his eastern flank, while he looked over his shoulder at the western allies who had guaranteed Poland’s independence.
***
Having claimed to have won the war, it’s important to remember how the Soviets helped start it. Nevertheless, McMeekin is constantly undermining his positions with unforced errors, such as the reliance on extremely dubious evidence.
More damaging is his polemical ardor, which is poorly directed. The best example of this is his cartoonish portraitures of the leading figures.
Stalin – who McMeekin unsubtly refers to as the Vozhd – is all-knowing, all-seeing, and all-powerful, the nations of the world mere pawns in his hands. Did you think that Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 for their own imperialist aims? Wrong. Stalin manipulated them into doing it. Think that Franklin Roosevelt bucked public opinion to prepare for a war with Germany because Hitler threatened America’s vital interests? Wrong. Roosevelt was actually coopted by Stalin’s superspies. Think that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because the United States stood in the way of its Pacific ambitions? Wrong again. It was Stalin the whole time, the man behind the curtain. Sure, you might wonder why – if Stalin was such a damn genius – Germany ended up in Moscow’s suburbs. McMeekin doesn’t wonder, though.
In terms of caricatures, FDR is Stalin’s opposite. At best, a clueless old man; at worst, a Soviet asset. This portrayal does not rely on new evidence, but on insulting adjectives. Roosevelt never asks Stalin for anything; he “pleads.” He doesn’t try to form a relationship with his ally; he “flirts” with him.
McMeekin spends an entire chapter complaining about FDR’s 1943 call for “unconditional surrender,” seeing this as a major mistake that caused Germany to fight harder (as though they had been pulling their punches so far). As a World War I historian, McMeekin knows exactly why unconditional surrender was necessary, but he doesn’t care. Rather, he decides that FDR should have worked on a negotiated surrender. Leaving aside the issue of “negotiating” with Hitler, the mind boggles at what kind of terms could have been hammered out, given that Hitler had swallowed most of Europe, killed millions of people, and imprisoned and looted millions more.
Churchill gets off a little better. McMeekin faults him for vacillating, and for not recognizing that the USSR was the real enemy all along. In what might be the dumbest statement I’ve ever seen from a historian, McMeekin suggest that in 1940, when Great Britain was hanging on for its life against Hitler, Churchill should have declared war on the Soviet Union!
Just to recap: according to McMeekin, Stalin is the worst, FDR a close second, and Hitler a distant fourth.
***
McMeekin’s portrayal of Germany is troubling, to say the least. In his erratic epilogue, he even argues that the United States – despite having war declared on it – shouldn’t have been fighting Germany at all. Ignoring this morally questionable proposition, McMeekin blithely disregards the danger Nazism represented. When a man has a gun to your head, you don’t have time to worry about the guy behind him with a knife. You deal with the most critical thing first.
McMeekin doesn’t see it this way. He labels the actions taken by Churchill and FDR to defeat Germany, especially with regard to Eastern Europe, as “betrayals.” He thinks that somehow – perhaps by magic – these two leaders should have ended the war with Germany, while simultaneously keeping Stalin from occupying territory that he – for the most part – already occupied. Did Stalin achieve diplomatic coups at Teheran and Yalta? Yes, but Stalin mainly got what he wanted because he took it, and there was nothing that FDR or Churchill could’ve done to stop him, short of starting another war (a course that McMeekin undoubtedly would’ve supported).
***
Democracies have a huge disadvantage vis-à-vis totalitarian regimes.
Churchill and Roosevelt didn’t get to make five-year plans like Stalin. They were subject to elections, which continued throughout. Churchill and Roosevelt couldn’t tell wholesale lies to their people. They were subject to a free press, and vigorous analysis. Churchill and Roosevelt were subject to a least some ethical constraints. Stalin did what he wanted, how he wanted, without worrying about decency. Anyone who opposed him ended up with a bullet in the base of the skull.
I found it really strange that McMeekin ignored this, and kept pretending that Churchill and Roosevelt could simply have matched Stalin’s ruthlessness, without acknowledging all three men inhabited vastly different political, economic, and moral systems.
***
The negativist tone McMeekin embraces obscures the positive contributions of the western allies. McMeekin’s discussion of manpower distribution clearly shows the importance of the multiple fronts opened by Great Britain and America (roughly half of Germany’s military was engaged in either defending these fronts, or preparing for potential invasions elsewhere). He also establishes – with pure, objective numbers – the critical magnitude of Lend Lease aid to the Soviet Union. To be sure, McMeekin – being McMeekin – bemoans the fact that the Soviets took so much from the United States, without ever saying thank you, but it allowed the western allies to gain their objective at a fraction of the USSR’s death toll.
***
Every time I review a book on D-Day, someone, somewhere, writes to tell me that the Soviet Union actually “won” the war. The Second World War, though, was not a single conflict, but a series of interrelated ones.
So let’s break it down. The USSR definitely “won” the war against Poland, executing and deporting thousands, a crime that – had it occurred at any other time – would have proved an indelible reputational stain. It also defeated Finland and the Baltic States, in acts of aggression that mirrored Hitler’s. As to Japan, the Soviet Union did next to nothing. In point of fact, the Soviet Union – showing it knew how to pick friends – had a nonaggression pact with Japan, allowing Japan to rampage freely in China without worrying about the Manchurian border. Stalin eventually broke the treaty when it became convenient for him.
With regard to Germany, the Soviet Union definitely did most of the killing. But it would not have prevailed without the western allies. Great Britain and the United States opened three different fronts, tied down half the German military, engaged in a bombing campaign that literally destroyed the Luftwaffe, and provided the Soviet Union with everything from patents and raw materials, to tanks and Spam. Without this, the Soviet Union ends up suing for peace.
Aside from military conquests, Stalin’s War raises the question as to whether the Soviet Union won the peace. Certainly, it ended up controlling half of Europe. At the same time, the United States didn’t exactly devolve into a communist hellscape. Instead, America’s economy boomed, the country’s power reached stratospheric levels, and it had a brief moment on the mountaintop, with nothing over it but sky.
***
The only absolute victory achieved by the Soviet Union is in the realm of storytelling, painting itself as the virtuous defender of the Russian homeland against Nazi hordes. Its version is so compelling that the USSR’s premeditated invasions, mass murders, mass rapes, and mass deportations have largely been hand-waved by modern historians. Controversial actions taken by the western allies – such as the bombing of Dresden – have rightfully been discussed and deconstructed. But little has been said of the Katyn Forest.
The Second World War is nearly eighty-years finished, but the fight over its memory continues. To that end, there is a need for a clear-eyed evaluation, a dispassionate resetting of the scales. Regrettably, Stalin’s War is not the book to do it.
September 16, 2022
This is a bold and provocative book. McMeekin describes WW2 through a Soviet lens and argues that while Hitler is often viewed as the center of the action, it would be more appropriate to think of Stalin and the Soviet Union as the common thread running through the various conflicts. The Soviet Union ended up in a powerful position after the War, and McMeekin blasts FDR and Churchill for allowing this to happen.
Some of McMeekin’s claims were more persuasive than others. I think of his claims as falling into a few categories.
Category 1: Generally accepted, but sometimes underappreciated
These would be claims that aren’t that bold, as most historians would agree with them, but it was still worthwhile to be reminded of the details. In this Category I would put McMeekin’s discussion of how (I can’t think of a better way to say this concisely) “Stalin was evil”.
The details of the Soviet’s partnership with the Nazis to carve up Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe are described. So are the Soviets brutal treatment of the occupied territories. The Katyn massacre is described (I knew about this, but I was surprised to learn that FDR and Churchill ignored evidence of this, bought Stalin’s lies that this was a Nazi crime, and helped Stalin avoid international investigations of the massacre). Stalin’s treatment of his own country’s Prisoners-of-War as “traitors who deserve to die” is described. As were the terror battalions that would machine-gun down its own soldiers if they wavered to attack. And I haven’t even mentioned The Great Famine and The Great Purge.
On a smaller scale, but more directly relevant to the topic, were Stalin’s lies to their fellow Allies during the War and attempts to goad Japan to attack the US.
Overall, the detail brought on this subject was a helpful reminder and set the stage for the discussions of how many in the West gullably bought into Stalin’s lies.
Category 2: Bold claims that seem persuasive
McMeekin argues that FDR and Churchill (particularly FDR) decided that helping the Soviets defeat Germany on the eastern front was so critically important that they would do whatever it took to appease Stalin, no matter the cost or its distractions from other war priorities.
McMeekin makes a few criticisms of this approach. First, it was lousy Poker playing, as they should have realized that Stalin was in a more desperate position than the US and Britain was (particularly the US). Second, the US had other options on where to direct their money to support the War effort. And third, this strategy enabled the Soviet Union to have a strong position after the war, leaving millions in Eastern Europe and Asia subjugated to totalitarian regimes.
McMeekin also notes there were high level US government officials that were remarkably sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and there were some that were actual “Soviet Assets” that directly reported and answered to the Soviet Union.
I think at least a weak version of these claims is persuasive. It seems at the very least, the US should have taken a tougher line in negotiations with the Soviet Union. How tough of a line they should have taken depends on how much you buy into McMeekin’s arguments about how the US had other options on where to deploy their capital, and whether winning on the eastern front was as crucial as is commonly thought. Which brings me to Category 3…
Category 3: *Really* bold claims that I don’t know what to do with
Then there is Category 3, where there are some very bold claims that I found interesting to think about.
McMeekin argues that not only could the US have taken a tougher line in negotiations with Stalin, but they didn’t even have to negotiate with him at all. Instead, they could have declared themselves neutral in the Soviet Union’s fight against Germany. McMeekin is also critical of FDR’s stance that Germany must agree to “unconditional surrender” (a stance that Stalin demanded, wanting to leave Germany destroyed so he could pick up the pieces in Eastern Europe), arguing that they should have negotiated with the Nazis, or at least not have a public position of demanding unconditional surrender, as it might have encouraged other Germans to successfully remove Hitler.
Perhaps most shockingly, McMeekin argues that in 1940 Britain should have declared war on the Soviet Union (while they were fighting for their life against Germany). Wow.
I’ll just say I’m skeptical of these claims. I’d like to know what other historians would say.
Overall
While the Category 3 stuff was a little out there, there was enough Category 1 and Category 2 stuff that I think this book is worthwhile. And the Category 3 stuff was interesting, though I’ll defer to people more knowledgeable than me for any deeper assessment.
The book has something of a snarky and informal tone. I actually liked that. It kept me interested the whole way. I was certainly never bored. Others may be turned off by the tone.
Overall, I thought this was a great book that at the very least, brought some helpful reminders about the evils of the Soviet Union and some interesting thoughts on what the US and Britain could have done differently. It is possible that different actions might have left the West in a better position relative to the Soviet Union after the War, and perhaps saved millions of people from subjugation to totalitarian regimes.
Some of McMeekin’s claims were more persuasive than others. I think of his claims as falling into a few categories.
Category 1: Generally accepted, but sometimes underappreciated
These would be claims that aren’t that bold, as most historians would agree with them, but it was still worthwhile to be reminded of the details. In this Category I would put McMeekin’s discussion of how (I can’t think of a better way to say this concisely) “Stalin was evil”.
The details of the Soviet’s partnership with the Nazis to carve up Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe are described. So are the Soviets brutal treatment of the occupied territories. The Katyn massacre is described (I knew about this, but I was surprised to learn that FDR and Churchill ignored evidence of this, bought Stalin’s lies that this was a Nazi crime, and helped Stalin avoid international investigations of the massacre). Stalin’s treatment of his own country’s Prisoners-of-War as “traitors who deserve to die” is described. As were the terror battalions that would machine-gun down its own soldiers if they wavered to attack. And I haven’t even mentioned The Great Famine and The Great Purge.
On a smaller scale, but more directly relevant to the topic, were Stalin’s lies to their fellow Allies during the War and attempts to goad Japan to attack the US.
Overall, the detail brought on this subject was a helpful reminder and set the stage for the discussions of how many in the West gullably bought into Stalin’s lies.
Category 2: Bold claims that seem persuasive
McMeekin argues that FDR and Churchill (particularly FDR) decided that helping the Soviets defeat Germany on the eastern front was so critically important that they would do whatever it took to appease Stalin, no matter the cost or its distractions from other war priorities.
McMeekin makes a few criticisms of this approach. First, it was lousy Poker playing, as they should have realized that Stalin was in a more desperate position than the US and Britain was (particularly the US). Second, the US had other options on where to direct their money to support the War effort. And third, this strategy enabled the Soviet Union to have a strong position after the war, leaving millions in Eastern Europe and Asia subjugated to totalitarian regimes.
McMeekin also notes there were high level US government officials that were remarkably sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and there were some that were actual “Soviet Assets” that directly reported and answered to the Soviet Union.
I think at least a weak version of these claims is persuasive. It seems at the very least, the US should have taken a tougher line in negotiations with the Soviet Union. How tough of a line they should have taken depends on how much you buy into McMeekin’s arguments about how the US had other options on where to deploy their capital, and whether winning on the eastern front was as crucial as is commonly thought. Which brings me to Category 3…
Category 3: *Really* bold claims that I don’t know what to do with
Then there is Category 3, where there are some very bold claims that I found interesting to think about.
McMeekin argues that not only could the US have taken a tougher line in negotiations with Stalin, but they didn’t even have to negotiate with him at all. Instead, they could have declared themselves neutral in the Soviet Union’s fight against Germany. McMeekin is also critical of FDR’s stance that Germany must agree to “unconditional surrender” (a stance that Stalin demanded, wanting to leave Germany destroyed so he could pick up the pieces in Eastern Europe), arguing that they should have negotiated with the Nazis, or at least not have a public position of demanding unconditional surrender, as it might have encouraged other Germans to successfully remove Hitler.
Perhaps most shockingly, McMeekin argues that in 1940 Britain should have declared war on the Soviet Union (while they were fighting for their life against Germany). Wow.
I’ll just say I’m skeptical of these claims. I’d like to know what other historians would say.
Overall
While the Category 3 stuff was a little out there, there was enough Category 1 and Category 2 stuff that I think this book is worthwhile. And the Category 3 stuff was interesting, though I’ll defer to people more knowledgeable than me for any deeper assessment.
The book has something of a snarky and informal tone. I actually liked that. It kept me interested the whole way. I was certainly never bored. Others may be turned off by the tone.
Overall, I thought this was a great book that at the very least, brought some helpful reminders about the evils of the Soviet Union and some interesting thoughts on what the US and Britain could have done differently. It is possible that different actions might have left the West in a better position relative to the Soviet Union after the War, and perhaps saved millions of people from subjugation to totalitarian regimes.
March 31, 2021
It's ridiculous to see the hurrahs for the book. I've read more books on the WW2 origins than most people and have a large collection of books on the topic (I would recommend Bell, Taylor, Overy, Watt and Buchanan as best of the bunch). I can assert that no serious historians would attribute the WW2 origin to Stalin (he might has his share of blame for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, but that is just one of many events leading to the outbreak). The role of Stalin/Russia in the summer of 1939 has been well researched by Jabara Carley in his "1939: The Alliance That Never Was" - and he put more blame on the Britain for the failure of a British-France-Russia alliance which sure would stop the war.
December 6, 2021
Sean McMeekin is an American historian, focused on European history of the early 20th century with a speciality in Russia. In this book, McMeekin claims that there is more reason to call the second world war Stalin’s war than Hitler’s war. This is because if you look at the result, it is Stalin who emergers as the main beneficiary. After all, it was Stalin who managed to occupy parts of eastern Europe and his armies marching into central Europe and China’s Manchuria at its end.
McMeekin's portrayal of Stalin shows him as being much more powerful than is suggested by the contemporary other authors. It shows that Stalin, rather than being totally surprised by Hitler's invasion, was actually preparing for war against Germany, shown by the construction of 241 new airodromes near the German border. It was the massing of Russian forces at the borders, which contributed to the initial defeats. Also, the Russian-German treaty of 1939 gave Russia territorial gains, but also removed the buffer states between Russia and Germany.
Once invaded, the lend-lease programm kept Russia in the war. For me it was a revelation to read to how far this support was pushed by Roosevelt and Hopkins. Nothing was denied, free of cost and sent to Russia on Allied ships on the perilous route to Moermansk. The great detail this book gives to the actual goods provided, from planes, tanks to silver braid for Russian epaulets. In the meantime, exports to Russia were given a priority over England, who also had to pay for it.
But while attention is focused on Stalin, he is not the only leader whose actions are re-evaluated in the book. The role of Roosevelt and Churchill is also discussed. According to McMeeking, it was Churchill and particularly Roosevelt turned “the conflict into Stalin’s war”.
Viewed at a distance form three quarters of a century, it seems clear now that Churchill and Roosevelt became intoxicated with Stalin, out of the emotional shock of the Barbarossa invasion. Only to awaken with a painful hangover once Hitler's armies went down to defeat. Even Truman did need some time to realise with what kind of a man he was dealing with, but in the end did put his foot down in Asia, for which the people of South Korea have been thankfull ever since.
McMeekin's portrayal of Stalin shows him as being much more powerful than is suggested by the contemporary other authors. It shows that Stalin, rather than being totally surprised by Hitler's invasion, was actually preparing for war against Germany, shown by the construction of 241 new airodromes near the German border. It was the massing of Russian forces at the borders, which contributed to the initial defeats. Also, the Russian-German treaty of 1939 gave Russia territorial gains, but also removed the buffer states between Russia and Germany.
Once invaded, the lend-lease programm kept Russia in the war. For me it was a revelation to read to how far this support was pushed by Roosevelt and Hopkins. Nothing was denied, free of cost and sent to Russia on Allied ships on the perilous route to Moermansk. The great detail this book gives to the actual goods provided, from planes, tanks to silver braid for Russian epaulets. In the meantime, exports to Russia were given a priority over England, who also had to pay for it.
But while attention is focused on Stalin, he is not the only leader whose actions are re-evaluated in the book. The role of Roosevelt and Churchill is also discussed. According to McMeeking, it was Churchill and particularly Roosevelt turned “the conflict into Stalin’s war”.
Viewed at a distance form three quarters of a century, it seems clear now that Churchill and Roosevelt became intoxicated with Stalin, out of the emotional shock of the Barbarossa invasion. Only to awaken with a painful hangover once Hitler's armies went down to defeat. Even Truman did need some time to realise with what kind of a man he was dealing with, but in the end did put his foot down in Asia, for which the people of South Korea have been thankfull ever since.
May 21, 2021
Sean McMeekin has written a one volume history of WW2 from the perspective of Stalin and the Soviet Union. In doing so, he makes good use of newly available Soviet archives, as well as updated research on a variety of aspects of the war. The result is an engaging and sharply toned view of the war that differs from other approaches, which have focused on the US or Britain.
There is so much going on in the book that it is hard to usefully examine it as a whole. Soviet foreign policy in the 1920s and 1930s was fascinating on its own terms but in this book it highlights a clear headed Stalin’s view of how to position the USSR and the revolution given the accelerating conflicts and crises in Europe leading up to 1939. The Nazi-Soviet Pact has received considerable attention recently and this book continues that emphasis. What it clearly shows, howeve, is that Stalin had few illusions about Hitler and his eventual attach on the USSR. Rather than being blindsided, McMeekin shows that the Soviets were just not as talented as the Germans at mobile warfare across a broad front - their learning curve would be steep. It is hard to depict the Nazi-Soviet wars as being more grim than it has already been depicted. This is arguably the most horrible war in history where Soviet losses dwarfed those of other combatants.
What McMeekin’s book is superb at is its in-depth examination of the US lend-lease program to the Soviets. The argument is that the US literally “gave away the store” to Stalin so that Soviets troops and civilians could fight and dies versus the Wehrmacht until the US and Britain were ready to join the war. The account of this is staggering and persuasive about allied contributions in food and material supplies to the Soviet war effort, contributions that the Soviets barely recognized at all. The punchline of all of this is that US lend-lease giveaways were successful in the short-run, in that the Red Army survived, turned the tide against Hitler, and conquered Eastern Europe, albeit at an horrendous cost. In the longer term, however, Stalin’s success in his war was a loss in many ways to the other allies. Poland, the defense of whose sovereignty started WW2 in Europe, ended the war devastated and under the extended tyranny of the USSR. The desire for US world involvement after WW2 - counter to US isolation after WW1 - was fulfilled at the cost of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear terror and involved a costly war against Japan that could have been avoided but which helped Stalin - and was partially engineered by Stalin’s men in Washington (Operation Snow). So Stalin ended up the big winner and it did not need to happen.
This book’s argument involves an extensive discussion of the placement of Soviet agents and sympathizers high up in the ranks of FDR’s wartime administration - Harry Dexter White, for example. The book does not present Harry Hopkins in a sympathetic light either. In his treatment of Stalin versus FDR versus Churchill, Stalin comes across as evil, but strategically skilled and effective. Churchill is treated the same as he is in other biographies and there are few surprises. FDR comes across more as an arrogant but strangely inattentive leader of the free world who let the Soviets take advantage of the US. While McMeekin comes across as solidly anti-Communist (and has clearly done his homework), his view of Stalin’s control over Soviet strategy and his effective implementation of that strategy is superb. Particularly effective in the argument are the long lists of war materials, transport ships and vehicles, and food supplies that were shipped to the USSR at US taxpayer expense. Towards the end, this is compared with data on the extensive Soviet looting of Germany and Eastern Europe, which is presented in comparable detail with the added notice that the USSR had to pay the shipping expenses for the looted materials while US taxpayers payed for as much or more - and paid for the transportation costs as well.
Overall, the book is a must read for WW2 history enthusiasts. McMeekin is a superb historian and this volume follows his earlier work on WW1 and the Russian Revolution. It is a long book, but it was a long war. The chapters are fairly short and crisply written. If one has the time and interest, the book is well worth reading.
There is so much going on in the book that it is hard to usefully examine it as a whole. Soviet foreign policy in the 1920s and 1930s was fascinating on its own terms but in this book it highlights a clear headed Stalin’s view of how to position the USSR and the revolution given the accelerating conflicts and crises in Europe leading up to 1939. The Nazi-Soviet Pact has received considerable attention recently and this book continues that emphasis. What it clearly shows, howeve, is that Stalin had few illusions about Hitler and his eventual attach on the USSR. Rather than being blindsided, McMeekin shows that the Soviets were just not as talented as the Germans at mobile warfare across a broad front - their learning curve would be steep. It is hard to depict the Nazi-Soviet wars as being more grim than it has already been depicted. This is arguably the most horrible war in history where Soviet losses dwarfed those of other combatants.
What McMeekin’s book is superb at is its in-depth examination of the US lend-lease program to the Soviets. The argument is that the US literally “gave away the store” to Stalin so that Soviets troops and civilians could fight and dies versus the Wehrmacht until the US and Britain were ready to join the war. The account of this is staggering and persuasive about allied contributions in food and material supplies to the Soviet war effort, contributions that the Soviets barely recognized at all. The punchline of all of this is that US lend-lease giveaways were successful in the short-run, in that the Red Army survived, turned the tide against Hitler, and conquered Eastern Europe, albeit at an horrendous cost. In the longer term, however, Stalin’s success in his war was a loss in many ways to the other allies. Poland, the defense of whose sovereignty started WW2 in Europe, ended the war devastated and under the extended tyranny of the USSR. The desire for US world involvement after WW2 - counter to US isolation after WW1 - was fulfilled at the cost of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear terror and involved a costly war against Japan that could have been avoided but which helped Stalin - and was partially engineered by Stalin’s men in Washington (Operation Snow). So Stalin ended up the big winner and it did not need to happen.
This book’s argument involves an extensive discussion of the placement of Soviet agents and sympathizers high up in the ranks of FDR’s wartime administration - Harry Dexter White, for example. The book does not present Harry Hopkins in a sympathetic light either. In his treatment of Stalin versus FDR versus Churchill, Stalin comes across as evil, but strategically skilled and effective. Churchill is treated the same as he is in other biographies and there are few surprises. FDR comes across more as an arrogant but strangely inattentive leader of the free world who let the Soviets take advantage of the US. While McMeekin comes across as solidly anti-Communist (and has clearly done his homework), his view of Stalin’s control over Soviet strategy and his effective implementation of that strategy is superb. Particularly effective in the argument are the long lists of war materials, transport ships and vehicles, and food supplies that were shipped to the USSR at US taxpayer expense. Towards the end, this is compared with data on the extensive Soviet looting of Germany and Eastern Europe, which is presented in comparable detail with the added notice that the USSR had to pay the shipping expenses for the looted materials while US taxpayers payed for as much or more - and paid for the transportation costs as well.
Overall, the book is a must read for WW2 history enthusiasts. McMeekin is a superb historian and this volume follows his earlier work on WW1 and the Russian Revolution. It is a long book, but it was a long war. The chapters are fairly short and crisply written. If one has the time and interest, the book is well worth reading.
August 10, 2022
The Chess Grandmaster.
Stalin’s War by Sean Mckeekin is refreshing, thoughtful and ultimately spectacular. It is the inconvenient truth we have been waiting for. Let’s tackle these parts first: it’s well written, flows perfectly and is easy to understand. The man is a good writer.
Now onto the content: The premise of the book is not that Joseph Stalin caused the Second World War as I have seen from other reviewers, who clearly don’t understand the book or have a sadistic love for the callous dictator. It is to explain that only one man was at the top and in charge of their state throughout the whole of the Second World War, from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 into VJ Day in 1945. This was the Man of Steel, Stalin. From this war he benefited massively, more than any other.
McKeekin looks to explain how he did this, through diplomatic skill and opportunity he gave no quarter; he made use of the fractured and strained relationships of the weakened allies to simply take and not give. Franklin D Roosevelt was a dying man and Winston S Churchill was in a precarious position having given up the British Empire and essentially sold the country to the USA in order to finance a fight against Nazi Germany. There in the east, waiting, lurking in the shadows was an equally evil regime which was waiting to pounce, and it did.
From carving up, and taking far more Polish land than the Third Reich to bullying and invading sovereign Finland, the Soviets did not start the war on friendly terms with the West. In fact they were viewed with as much mistrust and contempt as Germany and for good reason. Millions of free peoples were violated, enslaved and murdered. Atrocities such as the execution of 20,000 polish officers, which was covered up comes to mind. However in 1941 when Operation Barbarossa launched, this all changed. Swinging the pendulum back in favour of the allies and bringing sympathy to the USSR. From here the USA, allies and Roosevelt sold their souls to the devil to defeat the wicked despot Hitler. From supplying aluminium and butter at the detriment of their own people to abandoning allies in Poland and Yugoslavia Stalin took and the allies gave. Churchill saw through this and tried to resist, famously arguing against the summarily execution of German officers in Tehran, to which Stalin claimed he was only joking. But in being tied financially to the USA he had to choose his people over others. The list goes on from American pilots who crash landed on Soviet soil being imprisoned to Stalin making a terminally I’ll man travel 14,000 miles through dangerous airspace in winter for a meeting in Crimea. But then they were dealing with one of the most exceptional people in history. He believed in the cause, hated the western capitalists and feared any influence whatsoever on his regime.
The book shows a history of the war, with this man at the forefront and to me this perspective is so important and relatively unknown. He was the ultimate chess player, master tactician playing everyone off each other and with a sprinkle of good fortune, came out on top. In 1945 as the crowds in America and Britain waved flags and celebrated, terror, misery and death continued under the Soviet wing. As Poland was abandoned, one is reminded that the UK went to war to protect it. In sorrow it was abandoned, with the only solace being that the holocaust was stopped.
Stalin’s War by Sean Mckeekin is refreshing, thoughtful and ultimately spectacular. It is the inconvenient truth we have been waiting for. Let’s tackle these parts first: it’s well written, flows perfectly and is easy to understand. The man is a good writer.
Now onto the content: The premise of the book is not that Joseph Stalin caused the Second World War as I have seen from other reviewers, who clearly don’t understand the book or have a sadistic love for the callous dictator. It is to explain that only one man was at the top and in charge of their state throughout the whole of the Second World War, from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 into VJ Day in 1945. This was the Man of Steel, Stalin. From this war he benefited massively, more than any other.
McKeekin looks to explain how he did this, through diplomatic skill and opportunity he gave no quarter; he made use of the fractured and strained relationships of the weakened allies to simply take and not give. Franklin D Roosevelt was a dying man and Winston S Churchill was in a precarious position having given up the British Empire and essentially sold the country to the USA in order to finance a fight against Nazi Germany. There in the east, waiting, lurking in the shadows was an equally evil regime which was waiting to pounce, and it did.
From carving up, and taking far more Polish land than the Third Reich to bullying and invading sovereign Finland, the Soviets did not start the war on friendly terms with the West. In fact they were viewed with as much mistrust and contempt as Germany and for good reason. Millions of free peoples were violated, enslaved and murdered. Atrocities such as the execution of 20,000 polish officers, which was covered up comes to mind. However in 1941 when Operation Barbarossa launched, this all changed. Swinging the pendulum back in favour of the allies and bringing sympathy to the USSR. From here the USA, allies and Roosevelt sold their souls to the devil to defeat the wicked despot Hitler. From supplying aluminium and butter at the detriment of their own people to abandoning allies in Poland and Yugoslavia Stalin took and the allies gave. Churchill saw through this and tried to resist, famously arguing against the summarily execution of German officers in Tehran, to which Stalin claimed he was only joking. But in being tied financially to the USA he had to choose his people over others. The list goes on from American pilots who crash landed on Soviet soil being imprisoned to Stalin making a terminally I’ll man travel 14,000 miles through dangerous airspace in winter for a meeting in Crimea. But then they were dealing with one of the most exceptional people in history. He believed in the cause, hated the western capitalists and feared any influence whatsoever on his regime.
The book shows a history of the war, with this man at the forefront and to me this perspective is so important and relatively unknown. He was the ultimate chess player, master tactician playing everyone off each other and with a sprinkle of good fortune, came out on top. In 1945 as the crowds in America and Britain waved flags and celebrated, terror, misery and death continued under the Soviet wing. As Poland was abandoned, one is reminded that the UK went to war to protect it. In sorrow it was abandoned, with the only solace being that the holocaust was stopped.
June 9, 2021
Sean McMeekin is an interesting historian and has written some fascinating books encouraging the rest of us to take a new look at things like the Russian Revolution or the Communist International. This door-stopper of a book is similarly ambitious — urging us to rethink of the Second World War as one that had only one victor: Josef Stalin.
Of course there are points to be made in favour of that argument, but McMeekin’s book seems far more of a polemic than a history. He has several villains (Harry Hopkins, FDR’s aide comes to mind) and hardly any heroes. There is an enormous amount of information about how the US armed Stalin at the expense of everyone else (the Chinese nationalists were in the end left to fend for themselves). McMeekin’s account is full of statistics about how many Dodge trucks arrived in Vladivostok, or how much butter and eggs the US contributed to the Soviet war effort. FDR comes off as a Soviet dupe, and Churchill fares little better. And the Germans — remember them? They get hardly a mention.
The book ends with McMeekin questioning whether the war needed to happen at all. He suggests possible deals the US could have done with Japan to prevent conflict, and builds a case against the doctrine of “unconditional surrender” that the US and the USSR imposed on Nazi Germany. He thinks US support for the USSR following the German invasion in June 1941 was a mistake and it would have served Western interests to allow the two sides to fight it out. (Of course with his crediting US aid as the only thing that propped up the Soviet regime, he does seem to prefer an inevitable Nazi victory on the eastern front to what actually happened.)
Though he acknowledges the barbarism of the Nazi regime (how could he not?) the level of detail is as nothing compared to McMeekin’s accounts of the sufferings (and they were genuine) of the peoples who came under Soviet rule by 1945. Offhand comments in the very final pages of the book about the loss of civil liberties in the US place the author dangerously close to the isolationist right wing of 1939-41 in the US, as does his constant reminders of how very awful FDR was.
I wish I could have liked this book more, but it is, despite all the footnotes and all the research, a superficial and very biased account of the war and I cannot recommend it.
Of course there are points to be made in favour of that argument, but McMeekin’s book seems far more of a polemic than a history. He has several villains (Harry Hopkins, FDR’s aide comes to mind) and hardly any heroes. There is an enormous amount of information about how the US armed Stalin at the expense of everyone else (the Chinese nationalists were in the end left to fend for themselves). McMeekin’s account is full of statistics about how many Dodge trucks arrived in Vladivostok, or how much butter and eggs the US contributed to the Soviet war effort. FDR comes off as a Soviet dupe, and Churchill fares little better. And the Germans — remember them? They get hardly a mention.
The book ends with McMeekin questioning whether the war needed to happen at all. He suggests possible deals the US could have done with Japan to prevent conflict, and builds a case against the doctrine of “unconditional surrender” that the US and the USSR imposed on Nazi Germany. He thinks US support for the USSR following the German invasion in June 1941 was a mistake and it would have served Western interests to allow the two sides to fight it out. (Of course with his crediting US aid as the only thing that propped up the Soviet regime, he does seem to prefer an inevitable Nazi victory on the eastern front to what actually happened.)
Though he acknowledges the barbarism of the Nazi regime (how could he not?) the level of detail is as nothing compared to McMeekin’s accounts of the sufferings (and they were genuine) of the peoples who came under Soviet rule by 1945. Offhand comments in the very final pages of the book about the loss of civil liberties in the US place the author dangerously close to the isolationist right wing of 1939-41 in the US, as does his constant reminders of how very awful FDR was.
I wish I could have liked this book more, but it is, despite all the footnotes and all the research, a superficial and very biased account of the war and I cannot recommend it.
June 19, 2021
My issues with this book are summed up quite succinctly on page 421 of Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History by Matthew White. I'm posting a long excerpt from that book so that, unless you also have an ax to grind against FDR, you can save yourself the trouble of reading this tome:
No aspect of World War II is without controversy, but some debates burn more energy than others... The big controversies in the English-speaking world challenge the Allies/good, Axis/bad stereotypes of official history, either by minimizing the sins of the Axis (the Holocaust, starting the war, for example) or maximizing the sins of the Allies (Stalinism, Dresden, for example). In fact, a significant minority openly suggests that the Western democracies fought on the wrong side...
In this case, revisionists seem to forget that the world went to war against Hitler because he was dangerous, not because he was evil. This is an important distinction in international relations. You can do whatever you want inside your own country, but when you start invading your neighbors, the rest of the world gets jumpy. No matter how brutal Stalin may have been to his own people, he was content to stay inside the borders of the Soviet Union. By the time Stalin began grabbing small countries for himself, the West was already committed to war with Hitler. The choice wasn't between fighting Hitler or Stalin. The choice was to fight Hitler or both of them...
Furthermore, the Soviets beat the Germans fair and square. They produced 96 percent of their own munitions and 66 percent of their own vehicles, while inflicting 80 per cent of all German fatalities in the war. (source) They had already turned the tide at Stalingrad at a time when Britain was stalemated and America was still mobilizing. It was a close call, and Western assistance tipped the balance, but the West needed Stalin more than Stalin needed the West. Without the Soviets, the Western allies would have had to face several million more Germans all by themselves. This gave Stalin a better negotiating position throughout the war. - June 2021
No aspect of World War II is without controversy, but some debates burn more energy than others... The big controversies in the English-speaking world challenge the Allies/good, Axis/bad stereotypes of official history, either by minimizing the sins of the Axis (the Holocaust, starting the war, for example) or maximizing the sins of the Allies (Stalinism, Dresden, for example). In fact, a significant minority openly suggests that the Western democracies fought on the wrong side...
In this case, revisionists seem to forget that the world went to war against Hitler because he was dangerous, not because he was evil. This is an important distinction in international relations. You can do whatever you want inside your own country, but when you start invading your neighbors, the rest of the world gets jumpy. No matter how brutal Stalin may have been to his own people, he was content to stay inside the borders of the Soviet Union. By the time Stalin began grabbing small countries for himself, the West was already committed to war with Hitler. The choice wasn't between fighting Hitler or Stalin. The choice was to fight Hitler or both of them...
Furthermore, the Soviets beat the Germans fair and square. They produced 96 percent of their own munitions and 66 percent of their own vehicles, while inflicting 80 per cent of all German fatalities in the war. (source) They had already turned the tide at Stalingrad at a time when Britain was stalemated and America was still mobilizing. It was a close call, and Western assistance tipped the balance, but the West needed Stalin more than Stalin needed the West. Without the Soviets, the Western allies would have had to face several million more Germans all by themselves. This gave Stalin a better negotiating position throughout the war. - June 2021
June 22, 2023
One of the few bad history books that I have read.
This book sometimes reads more like a polemic than history, and it comes dangerously close to being pro-Axis (such as describing the Hull Note as an “ultimatum”, which it was not, or barely mentioning Nazi crimes in comparison to how much he details Soviet crimes, which to his credit were numerous). One case is when he describes Soviet crimes against German POWs, but gives merely a few to German crimes against Soviet POWs, which were far more numerous and caused far more deaths (1.6 to 3 million Soviet POW deaths in comparison to 300,000 or so German POW deaths).
The book also has a constant motif of how much Lend-Lease helped the USSR, which is driven home in truly painstaking detail. There are exhaustive lists of how many supplies were sent to the USSR, which made for extremely boring reading. I get that he was trying to make a point, but it gets old after a while.
It also makes a few outright historical mistakes, such as ascribing the Soviet victory at Kursk to the Allied landings in Sicily and Italy, which is complete nonsense and is based on the questionable source of Manstein’s memoirs. It also makes a few minor mistakes in naming and occupation.
It does have a few good sides, in the sense that when it is isn’t polemicizing, it does make for enjoyable reading. Compared with McMeekin’s other works, though, this one is quite bad.
Two stars.
This book sometimes reads more like a polemic than history, and it comes dangerously close to being pro-Axis (such as describing the Hull Note as an “ultimatum”, which it was not, or barely mentioning Nazi crimes in comparison to how much he details Soviet crimes, which to his credit were numerous). One case is when he describes Soviet crimes against German POWs, but gives merely a few to German crimes against Soviet POWs, which were far more numerous and caused far more deaths (1.6 to 3 million Soviet POW deaths in comparison to 300,000 or so German POW deaths).
The book also has a constant motif of how much Lend-Lease helped the USSR, which is driven home in truly painstaking detail. There are exhaustive lists of how many supplies were sent to the USSR, which made for extremely boring reading. I get that he was trying to make a point, but it gets old after a while.
It also makes a few outright historical mistakes, such as ascribing the Soviet victory at Kursk to the Allied landings in Sicily and Italy, which is complete nonsense and is based on the questionable source of Manstein’s memoirs. It also makes a few minor mistakes in naming and occupation.
It does have a few good sides, in the sense that when it is isn’t polemicizing, it does make for enjoyable reading. Compared with McMeekin’s other works, though, this one is quite bad.
Two stars.
March 31, 2021
Looks like McMeekin is still upset that Adolf didn't get to conquer all of Poland in '39, which was no military barrier to a German attack on USSR. The German General Staff, Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, the head of the British military delegation to the August 1939 Anglo-French-Soviet military staff talks in Moscow, and the Deputy Chiefs of Staff of the British Armed Forces all agreed that Polish army would be quickly cut to pieces by a German attack, without immediate Soviet military assistance, which the Polish government would not even discuss accepting.
And it was it was, before the Red Army moved an inch.
And it was it was, before the Red Army moved an inch.
July 14, 2021
VERY problematic. I enjoyed it at the beginning. However, the amount of snark the author directs at "traditional" WW2 histories and historians made my eyebrows rise ever higher until, when I was about halfway through, I decided to look him up. It turns out that he's misused, misquoted, and miscited some of his most heavily relied upon sources (see https://insidestory.org.au/better-to-... for details), and although he has a lot of interesting things to say, he has lost all credibility as a historian in my view.
January 28, 2021
For those who think of World War II as that noble fight of good against evil, this thoroughly sourced book will be a rude awakening. McMeekin details the inspiration and practical tips that Stalin and Hitler got from each other, and also their many ways of collaborating and staying out of each others' way in the 1930s. Even Stalin's antisemitism rivals Hitler's. The allies thought they won by defeating Hitler, but meanwhile their fellow ally Stalin established a vast slave empire under their noses. Stalin was playing chess while everyone else was playing checkers. If you want to understand Putin's long-game, look no further than his patron-devil.
August 20, 2021
Basic formula: Point out tremendous amounts of tangential ENABLING effects (instead of DIRECT causes), then argue that this equates to causality.
Ex.: Sell a man a gun. He kills someone with it. Conclusion: You're the guilty party.
This is McMeekin's incoherent mess of an argument in a nutshell.
It's hard to make sense of this book. What possible motive could one have for this? The sad part is that the author clearly put tremendous (and not always misguided) effort into this – an 800+ pg. book based on heretofore unseen archival sources. This COULD have been interesting. It COULD have been an examination of the way Stalin's criminally brutal regime manipulated and INFLUENCED events.
But no.
Instead, he BLAMES Stalin (largely because the war materially benefited the USSR in the grand scheme of things, especially geopolitically). He also makes the simple (borderline dumb) connection that Stalin somehow caused Hitler’s behaviour.
Not only does he insist that Stalin bear the burden of the war, but he also implies that the Western powers should take the credit for Soviet successes. It’s certainly not much of a stretch to say he thinks this. This comes in the form of Lend-Lease, which is used practically as a Deus Ex Machina in this book. McMeekin is consistently dismissive of the sheer genius of Soviet tactics or engineering (the T-34 tank especially).
The Germans are an afterthought in this book. Hitler’s repeated aggressions or expansions are barely mentioned, or if they are, McMeekin simply pivots into talking about Stalin. This amounts to an odd sort of “whatabout-ism” that almost seems like intentional misinterpretation after a while.
There’s a dangerous hint that McMeekin might even be suggesting Hitler’s attack on the USSR was preventative (it is, however, a hint). McMeekin points out that Stalin even considered attacking the Reich in May 1941 (weeks before the German invasion). What McMeekin fails to appreciate is that Hitler had occupied most of Western, Central and Southern Europe by this point. Might it be obvious to an average person that there was a reasonable expectation of threat to the USSR based on this? Of course. But does McMeekin make this connection? Oddly, no.
McMeekin makes the very amateurish (and widely-recognized) sophomore error of teleological fallacy. This is also called “presentism” – the mistake of reading history backwards and assuming the inevitability of events. Under this conceptual regime, McMeekin effectively says that Stalin welcomed the invasion of the USSR in order to ultimately expand the state and its influence. This is patently stupid. It requires that Stalin be a prognosticator. I will remind everyone that the USSR came to within an inch of its life in WWII. This would have been a catastrophically stupid gamble for someone who’s supposedly deviously clever (like Stalin is, says McMeekin). So which is it? Is he a reckless gambler, or a master chess player?
McMeekin mentions a couple of speeches where Stalin expressed a desire to see the "two halves" of the capitalist world go to war (Germany vs. the Western powers). One of these sources has been widely debunked by scholars. The other, even if true, would only prove he WANTED this. How does this make Hitler act though? What happened to personal responsibility? Instead of that, McMeekin serves us conspiratorial deflections.
But the most unreflective claim the author makes is that the Allies should have let the Reich and the USSR annihilate each other instead of supporting the Soviets with aid. This, he maintains, would have been better since it might prevent 50 years of communism after the war. Let think about this reasoning. There's basically FOUR main scenarios here:
1) The Reich wins.
2) The Soviets win.
3) There is a years-long meatgrinder and many more millions die.
4) There is a stalemate allowing the Western Allies to swoop in and finish the Reich off.
If #1 happens, the death toll of the Holocaust isn't 12 million. It's probably 300 million (eventually). If #2 happens, the Soviets probably steamroll ALL of Europe, and then it's not "communism from Berlin to Beijing", but "Paris to Beijing". If #3 happens, the death toll goes up by like 30 or 40 million, if not more. And if #4 happens, the Allies are effectively committing genocide by non-intervention.
Remember that McMeekin's whole point is that 50 years of communism was a horrible thing from a HUMANITARIAN perspective. Oh, and if you think me blaming the Allies for the death toll is too much, remember that it makes sense by McMeekin's logic, since Stalin can somehow be blamed for the behavior of others. Why not the Allies then?
According to McMeekin's logic, someone dodging a bullet resulting in said bullet hitting some ELSE would also deserve the blame for the injury/murder. Similarly, finding a $20 bill would mean you somehow "set up the loss" since you benefited from it ultimately.
But this book does serve a valuable purpose precisely because of its many flaws. It’s a cautionary tale about letting personal ideological biases creep into your thinking. It also reminds us that no matter objectively evil someone is (Stalin), it does NOT mean you can pin anything on them. If you told me that Ted Bundy used to eat babies, I’d correct you. Not because of some sympathy for him, but because it’s FALSE.
We need more of this kind of thinking today.
Ex.: Sell a man a gun. He kills someone with it. Conclusion: You're the guilty party.
This is McMeekin's incoherent mess of an argument in a nutshell.
It's hard to make sense of this book. What possible motive could one have for this? The sad part is that the author clearly put tremendous (and not always misguided) effort into this – an 800+ pg. book based on heretofore unseen archival sources. This COULD have been interesting. It COULD have been an examination of the way Stalin's criminally brutal regime manipulated and INFLUENCED events.
But no.
Instead, he BLAMES Stalin (largely because the war materially benefited the USSR in the grand scheme of things, especially geopolitically). He also makes the simple (borderline dumb) connection that Stalin somehow caused Hitler’s behaviour.
Not only does he insist that Stalin bear the burden of the war, but he also implies that the Western powers should take the credit for Soviet successes. It’s certainly not much of a stretch to say he thinks this. This comes in the form of Lend-Lease, which is used practically as a Deus Ex Machina in this book. McMeekin is consistently dismissive of the sheer genius of Soviet tactics or engineering (the T-34 tank especially).
The Germans are an afterthought in this book. Hitler’s repeated aggressions or expansions are barely mentioned, or if they are, McMeekin simply pivots into talking about Stalin. This amounts to an odd sort of “whatabout-ism” that almost seems like intentional misinterpretation after a while.
There’s a dangerous hint that McMeekin might even be suggesting Hitler’s attack on the USSR was preventative (it is, however, a hint). McMeekin points out that Stalin even considered attacking the Reich in May 1941 (weeks before the German invasion). What McMeekin fails to appreciate is that Hitler had occupied most of Western, Central and Southern Europe by this point. Might it be obvious to an average person that there was a reasonable expectation of threat to the USSR based on this? Of course. But does McMeekin make this connection? Oddly, no.
McMeekin makes the very amateurish (and widely-recognized) sophomore error of teleological fallacy. This is also called “presentism” – the mistake of reading history backwards and assuming the inevitability of events. Under this conceptual regime, McMeekin effectively says that Stalin welcomed the invasion of the USSR in order to ultimately expand the state and its influence. This is patently stupid. It requires that Stalin be a prognosticator. I will remind everyone that the USSR came to within an inch of its life in WWII. This would have been a catastrophically stupid gamble for someone who’s supposedly deviously clever (like Stalin is, says McMeekin). So which is it? Is he a reckless gambler, or a master chess player?
McMeekin mentions a couple of speeches where Stalin expressed a desire to see the "two halves" of the capitalist world go to war (Germany vs. the Western powers). One of these sources has been widely debunked by scholars. The other, even if true, would only prove he WANTED this. How does this make Hitler act though? What happened to personal responsibility? Instead of that, McMeekin serves us conspiratorial deflections.
But the most unreflective claim the author makes is that the Allies should have let the Reich and the USSR annihilate each other instead of supporting the Soviets with aid. This, he maintains, would have been better since it might prevent 50 years of communism after the war. Let think about this reasoning. There's basically FOUR main scenarios here:
1) The Reich wins.
2) The Soviets win.
3) There is a years-long meatgrinder and many more millions die.
4) There is a stalemate allowing the Western Allies to swoop in and finish the Reich off.
If #1 happens, the death toll of the Holocaust isn't 12 million. It's probably 300 million (eventually). If #2 happens, the Soviets probably steamroll ALL of Europe, and then it's not "communism from Berlin to Beijing", but "Paris to Beijing". If #3 happens, the death toll goes up by like 30 or 40 million, if not more. And if #4 happens, the Allies are effectively committing genocide by non-intervention.
Remember that McMeekin's whole point is that 50 years of communism was a horrible thing from a HUMANITARIAN perspective. Oh, and if you think me blaming the Allies for the death toll is too much, remember that it makes sense by McMeekin's logic, since Stalin can somehow be blamed for the behavior of others. Why not the Allies then?
According to McMeekin's logic, someone dodging a bullet resulting in said bullet hitting some ELSE would also deserve the blame for the injury/murder. Similarly, finding a $20 bill would mean you somehow "set up the loss" since you benefited from it ultimately.
But this book does serve a valuable purpose precisely because of its many flaws. It’s a cautionary tale about letting personal ideological biases creep into your thinking. It also reminds us that no matter objectively evil someone is (Stalin), it does NOT mean you can pin anything on them. If you told me that Ted Bundy used to eat babies, I’d correct you. Not because of some sympathy for him, but because it’s FALSE.
We need more of this kind of thinking today.
November 28, 2020
This book was provided free by the publisher as a review copy.
In 2017 Professor Sean McMeekin published The Russian Revolution: A New History, and his new book is just as interesting, telling the story of World War II—or, more accurately, the world wars engineered by Iosif Stalin.
More than anything, Stalin's wars were about spreading the Terror to the rest of Europe.
The Spanish Civil War is often considered a trial run for the world war, and Sean McMeekin shows that having political control was more important than achieving military victory. Stalin's overall strategy was always to encourage the two capitalist blocs (Germany on one hand and France and Britain and their Allies on the other) to fight each other.
Stalin's goal wasn't winning, but prolonging.
Even in Asia, Stalin kept the Chinese Civil War going.
After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, on May 3, 1939, Stalin ordered Soviet Jews purged from the Foreign Ministry, apparently as an approach to Hitler.
Pictures of Gestapo officers shaking hands with the NKVD after the Great Terror sent chills down some people's spines.
McMeekin does stress the point that no war is inevitable however.
The United States might have stayed out of the war. Right up until Pearl Harbor, FDR was promising to keep America out of the war. He—or his successor—might have kept that promise.
Stalin was worried that if he seemed to the Allies to be getting on too well with Hitler, they might attack the Soviet Union. This became a distinct worry after Stalin invaded Finland and installed a puppet government. World public opinion was on the side of the Finns and would have supported military action against the Soviet Union.
Politruks—political commisars under the supervision of Stalin's henchman Lev Mekhlis of the Red Army Political Department, spent hours a day lecturing Soviet troops and distributing propaganda newspapers aimed at the Finnish speaking population. Control detachments threatened Soviet troops who retreated with execution.
Then Stalin rounded up Polish elites after blackmailing the Poles into allowing Soviet bases on their territory.
Stalin didn't care, but he appeared to much of the world an aggressor like Hitler. Mussolini almost declared war against the USSR because Stalin had attacked Finland. This would have caused a split between Nazi German and Fascist Italy.
Captured Soviet troops were shocked by the decency with which the Finns treated them (according to interviews with Russian-speaking British officers).
On February 22, 1940, there were secret talks between the Turks and the Allies. The possible target was oil in Baku.
On October 9—19, 1944, the conference in Moscow between Churchill and Stalin codenamed “Tolstoy” was famous for Churchill offtering Stalin a cynical division of the Balkins written on a napkin that Stalin seemed to accept, but it's difficult to know how serious Stalin took the offer.
Stalin had refused to travel very far to meet Roosevelt and Churchill. Sean McMeekin quotes Churchill that if they spent ten years looking for a place to hold a conference, they could find nowhere worse than Yalta to meet.
FDR and Churchill seemed to be trying to exceed Stalin in threatening violent treatment of Germans in the postwar period.
In McMeekin's opinion American officials like Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department, and Harry Hopkins, FDR's closest political advisor for most of his administration and chief Lend-Lease negotiator, were agents of influence who helped Stalin's cause.
McMeekin says the fates of Yugoslavia, Poland, and China were settled at Teheran. Stalin convinced FDR and Churchill to (1) allow him to seize German industry, (2) use enemy soldiers as slave laborers, and (3) take revenge against captured Soviets.
The simple fact was in the postwar the Allies let Stalin build a slave labor empire.
World War II is often considered the most violent conflict in history, and at the same time one of the few necessary wars. McMeekin comes to some uncomfortable conclusions.
If the point of the war was to save western Europe, that could have been achieved at less human cost in negotiations.
If the point was to save eastern Europe, it failed.
If the war in Asia was over Manchuria, the conclusion of that war just handed that territory to Stalin.
Sean McMeekin is sure that Stalin was the victor in Europe and Asia.
In 2017 Professor Sean McMeekin published The Russian Revolution: A New History, and his new book is just as interesting, telling the story of World War II—or, more accurately, the world wars engineered by Iosif Stalin.
More than anything, Stalin's wars were about spreading the Terror to the rest of Europe.
The Spanish Civil War is often considered a trial run for the world war, and Sean McMeekin shows that having political control was more important than achieving military victory. Stalin's overall strategy was always to encourage the two capitalist blocs (Germany on one hand and France and Britain and their Allies on the other) to fight each other.
Stalin's goal wasn't winning, but prolonging.
Even in Asia, Stalin kept the Chinese Civil War going.
After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, on May 3, 1939, Stalin ordered Soviet Jews purged from the Foreign Ministry, apparently as an approach to Hitler.
Pictures of Gestapo officers shaking hands with the NKVD after the Great Terror sent chills down some people's spines.
McMeekin does stress the point that no war is inevitable however.
The United States might have stayed out of the war. Right up until Pearl Harbor, FDR was promising to keep America out of the war. He—or his successor—might have kept that promise.
Stalin was worried that if he seemed to the Allies to be getting on too well with Hitler, they might attack the Soviet Union. This became a distinct worry after Stalin invaded Finland and installed a puppet government. World public opinion was on the side of the Finns and would have supported military action against the Soviet Union.
Politruks—political commisars under the supervision of Stalin's henchman Lev Mekhlis of the Red Army Political Department, spent hours a day lecturing Soviet troops and distributing propaganda newspapers aimed at the Finnish speaking population. Control detachments threatened Soviet troops who retreated with execution.
Then Stalin rounded up Polish elites after blackmailing the Poles into allowing Soviet bases on their territory.
Stalin didn't care, but he appeared to much of the world an aggressor like Hitler. Mussolini almost declared war against the USSR because Stalin had attacked Finland. This would have caused a split between Nazi German and Fascist Italy.
Captured Soviet troops were shocked by the decency with which the Finns treated them (according to interviews with Russian-speaking British officers).
On February 22, 1940, there were secret talks between the Turks and the Allies. The possible target was oil in Baku.
On October 9—19, 1944, the conference in Moscow between Churchill and Stalin codenamed “Tolstoy” was famous for Churchill offtering Stalin a cynical division of the Balkins written on a napkin that Stalin seemed to accept, but it's difficult to know how serious Stalin took the offer.
Stalin had refused to travel very far to meet Roosevelt and Churchill. Sean McMeekin quotes Churchill that if they spent ten years looking for a place to hold a conference, they could find nowhere worse than Yalta to meet.
FDR and Churchill seemed to be trying to exceed Stalin in threatening violent treatment of Germans in the postwar period.
In McMeekin's opinion American officials like Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department, and Harry Hopkins, FDR's closest political advisor for most of his administration and chief Lend-Lease negotiator, were agents of influence who helped Stalin's cause.
McMeekin says the fates of Yugoslavia, Poland, and China were settled at Teheran. Stalin convinced FDR and Churchill to (1) allow him to seize German industry, (2) use enemy soldiers as slave laborers, and (3) take revenge against captured Soviets.
The simple fact was in the postwar the Allies let Stalin build a slave labor empire.
World War II is often considered the most violent conflict in history, and at the same time one of the few necessary wars. McMeekin comes to some uncomfortable conclusions.
If the point of the war was to save western Europe, that could have been achieved at less human cost in negotiations.
If the point was to save eastern Europe, it failed.
If the war in Asia was over Manchuria, the conclusion of that war just handed that territory to Stalin.
Sean McMeekin is sure that Stalin was the victor in Europe and Asia.
April 17, 2021
This is also one of those rare books that I would give 6 stars if I could. Like Richard B. Frank’s Tower of Skulls it will totally change your perspective on World War 2.
If you thought Stalin and the Soviets were a bunch of lying, murderous, opportunistic bastards, this book will definitely confirm that.
But evil is not stupid and Stalin was a master manipulator and geo-strategist.
Read this book. Do it. Even if you think you know a lot about World War 2. It will make you go-“Ah. Now that (insert event) makes sense.”
If you thought Stalin and the Soviets were a bunch of lying, murderous, opportunistic bastards, this book will definitely confirm that.
But evil is not stupid and Stalin was a master manipulator and geo-strategist.
Read this book. Do it. Even if you think you know a lot about World War 2. It will make you go-“Ah. Now that (insert event) makes sense.”
November 5, 2021
We are not a serious society. Our ruling class are men of no substance, lacking all knowledge and incapable of competent action on any front. The masses, while they sense a great deal is very wrong, are distracted by propaganda and ephemera. We feel we can afford to be unserious, because all of us lead lives of unprecedented material comfort. Any lack is eased by speedy delivery of sedatives designed to mask and hold down chthonic spiritual despair. To be sure, we do not lack for heralds of the coming storm—but we, high and low, have forgotten what a storm looks like. Read this book and you will remember, and you will also know what it is to live in a serious society.
Sean McMeekin, the author of Stalin’s War, has made a career out of what are often called revisionist histories, all about the first half of the twentieth century, several about Russia. I was suitably impressed by his The Russian Revolution, but that, and this, book are not really revisionist histories. Rather, they are correctives to the disinformation that has been most English-language histories tied to Communism during the past hundred years, and they seem revisionist because they discuss the facts objectively. The philo-Communists who to this day operate the academic wing of our regime’s propaganda machine dislike this, so they complain McMeekin is revisionist, a turn of phrase that suggests inaccuracy without needing to demonstrate any inaccuracy.
The author chose the title because World War II, in his view and contrary to what we are endlessly told, was less Adolf Hitler’s war than Joseph Stalin’s war. McMeekin does not mean the commonplace that Stalin’s Russia absorbed the majority of the Allied side’s deaths of the war (in fact, he seems to suspect historians have exaggerated Soviet war deaths). Rather, he means that the war was desired by Stalin, as a direct result of his Marxist-Leninist principles, largely followed the course Stalin wanted and acted to achieve, and hugely benefitted Stalin, while benefitting nobody else at all. In other words, cui bono? Stalin, unfortunately for the entire world.
This is, no surprise, a copiously footnoted and documented book, including what McMeekin says is a large amount of new information. Interestingly, at several points McMeekin complains that after the fall of Soviet Communism, archives were opened which contained very valuable data that has since become unavailable. He also notes that several Russian military historians write under pseudonyms, “to avoid government scrutiny.” But he does not explain the government’s reason, which is a little odd. Maybe it’s just that Vladimir Putin prefers the heroic myth of the Great Patriotic War, and books like this, and the facts on which they are based, are inconvenient.
McMeekin goes through the stages of World War II, but he begins by going all the way back to 1917 and the years immediately following, when the Bolshevik regime set the invariant pattern for all its future interactions with the West. It combined duplicity with opportunism, always overlaid with the crucial goal of fomenting Communist revolution in the West, and in this effort was greatly aided by allies, some traitors, some mere fellow-travelers, who occupied crucial positions throughout the West. In fact, without massive aid from the West, mostly the fruit of turncoats or dupes in America and also in Britain, the Soviet Union would almost certainly not have been able to survive—not in World War II, and for that matter not later, though that is a topic for another book, and another day. The cast of characters changed from 1917 to 1945; the pattern did not.
Communist hopes for immediate world revolution dwindled in the 1920s, after the Poles defeated the Red Army and the Germans put down their traitors such as Rosa Luxembourg, but still, revolution always remained near to the hearts of both Soviet leadership and their innumerable allies in the West. By the end of the 1920s, Stalin had emerged victorious from the internal Soviet power struggle, exiling Leon Trotsky and using his skill at the boring work of bureaucratic power building to build a slick machine, grounded in terror and wholly ideological in focus. Thus, in 1928, Stalin (through the Comintern) inaugurated the Third Period, where global Communism was to return to the offensive. He demanded an uncompromising approach and direct action by the world’s Communists, and he got it. This was the period when Communists outside Russia refused to cooperate with other parties of the Left in any matter, loudly declaiming, for example, that socialists were merely “social fascists,” and worked tirelessly to advance the interests of the Soviet Union at the expense of their own country.
Meanwhile, at home, Stalin was furiously industrializing, while at the same time massacring kulaks, starving millions of Ukrainians, and filling the gulags with slave labor for his industrialization program. None of his industrialization would have been possible without immense Western help; American firms in particular eagerly designed and built many of Stalin’s important factories, most notably the entire new steel-producing city of Magnitogorsk, as well as crucial infrastructure such as power plants. (American expatriates working on these Soviet projects were so numerous they had their own English-language newspaper.) At this point, the Americans wouldn’t yet simply hand over military design secrets—so Stalin initiated a giant spy operation, with its biggest focus being United States aviation. All this made Stalin’s military power grow by leaps and bounds—his prime goal, because without military supremacy, Communist global domination could not be assured.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the United States still did not recognize the Soviet regime diplomatically. This meant, among other things, that Stalin could not borrow American money, and was certainly not getting direct aid. Thus all American private assistance was paid for in gold and by Stalin selling or trading stolen artwork and antiquities. Moreover, Soviet tensions with Japan were increasing rapidly—but this presented an opening, because American tensions with Japan were also increasing, providing an apparent common interest. When Franklin Roosevelt, who had always been friendly to Communism and Communists, took office in 1933, Stalin was elated. Although the American people were (and remained) strongly opposed to Communism, the gullible Roosevelt was easily convinced that normalizing relations with Stalin would boost the American economy, something more than usually crucial due to the Great Depression. As McMeekin points out, Roosevelt naively thought the problem was that it needed someone like him just to talk to the Russians to “straighten out this whole question,” and that the Russians weren’t buying American goods because of political objections, not because they had nothing with which to buy American goods.
Setting the model for his behavior for the next twelve years, Roosevelt immediately gave away the entire farm, and then some. He gladly recognized the Soviet Union, over the strong objections of the State Department, and refused to ask for anything from Stalin in return, such as repayment of existing debts, or ending Communist spying and subversion (by which America, and the American government, was riddled—including by Harry Dexter White, a Soviet agent who throughout Roosevelt’s presidency was the right-hand man of Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau). For this reason, and because he saw little wrong with Communism and a great deal wrong with National Socialism, Roosevelt’s administration adopted and retained a consistent pro-Soviet line, in both personnel (for example replacing the ambassador to Moscow, William Bullitt, who had a realistic appreciation of Soviet “deception and guile,” with a Soviet toady, Joseph Davies, who “saw unicorns”) and policy (as we will see).
Meanwhile, in 1935, Stalin adopted a new external doctrine, that of the Popular Front—where Communists allied with other parties of the Left, invariably with the intent of, and usually succeeding in, taking all power by force if able to win an election. In both Spain and France in 1936 this strategy was successful (although not long-term, stopped by Francisco Franco in Spain, and by the war in France). Stalin also pushed “collective security”—the idea that the nations of the West should cooperate to restrain Hitler, to Stalin’s benefit. The goal of all policies was, with zero exceptions, to further Communist triumph and domination; any particular announced policy would be ignored, modified, or rejected as necessary to that end. If there is a single historical fact that emerges clearly from the pages of this book, it is the total dishonesty and duplicity of all Soviet actions, something not taken into account by most diplomats and leaders of Western nations, whose credulousness and refusal to take into account past Soviet treachery encouraged even more bad behavior by Stalin.
One could look at it another way, however. Only Stalin acted consistently in a way to benefit what he saw as the interests of the Soviet Union, without any reference to, or thought for, the morality of his actions. Only power and practicality existed for him, filtered, to be sure, through Communist ideology, but that never placed any limit on taking advantage of the West. Roosevelt, and Churchill to a lesser extent, evinced the perpetual difficulty of the Anglosphere in dealing with Communism—even when not crippled by Soviet subversion, their governments approached dealings with Stalin through the prism of a personal relationship, acting in good faith with a strong moral overlay borrowed from the Christian obligations of the individual. You would think they should have learned early this was a mistake, and you would be right, but that’s what they did—even Ronald Reagan did, although he did it a lot less, and was rewarded by achieving his geostrategic goals.
If there is a villain in this book, it’s not Stalin, though McMeekin certainly has no love for him, but seems to regard Stalin’s ability to manipulate the Allies, never giving an inch or showing any reciprocity, mostly with a kind of detached horror. Rather, it is Roosevelt, with his satanic familiar Harry Hopkins, who, while probably not a Communist agent, acted in a way indistinguishable from one, consistently prioritizing Soviet interests over American ones. McMeekin quotes Roosevelt, “I just have a hunch that Stalin isn’t that kind of man. Harry [Hopkins] said he’s not and that he doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I can and ask for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” Most of the book is an explication of this theme.
As the 1930s drew to a close, though, Stalin spent a lot more time negotiating with Hitler than with Roosevelt. McMeekin details the steps leading up to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, as well as Stalin’s simultaneous negotiations with the British and the French. Stalin’s aim was to further a war between the Germans and the Western powers, the sooner the better; he believed this would be a grinding slugfest from which he could profit by picking up the pieces. Getting the party started by seizing much of Poland, as agreed upon with Hitler, was very agreeable to him. Less agreeable to him was the speed with which Hitler rolled up his half of Poland. Yet, before and after the invasion, Stalin punctiliously continued to fulfil promised enormous shipments of raw materials, most especially oil, to Hitler (for which he was paid cash), which enabled Hitler to advance his plans in the West, in the face of the British blockade.
Stalin promptly also invaded Poland (along with the Baltic states), and by 1941 had murdered around 500,000 Poles (and tens of thousands of Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians), which, as McMeekin points out, was “three or four times higher than the number of those killed by the Nazis”—although Hitler caught up later by killing Polish Jews. Stalin’s atrocities included the murder of the flower of Polish society in the Katyn Forest, but at no time did any Western government, not the British under Churchill and even less America under Roosevelt, criticize Stalin’s murderous ways, instead toadying to him in hopes he would help against Hitler. As McMeekin points out, by mid-1940 Stalin had invaded as many sovereign countries as Hitler (seven), with barely a whisper about it being raised by the American government.
Stalin did help against Hitler—at a very high price and on terms always radically favorable to him. Stalin gradually let his close relationship with Hitler deteriorate, and refused to join the Tripartite Pact, even when Hitler was at his zenith. Hitler resisted further Russian expansion at the expense of Rumania and Bulgaria; tensions rose. Stalin was confident; despite the debilities caused by the officer purges of the previous decade, the Red Army had far more tanks, artillery, planes, and other equipment than the Wehrmacht (including even five times as many submarines), and a three-to-one advantage in manpower, the result of Stalin’s aggressive buildup. Nor was this inferior equipment—much of it was based on designs stolen or bought from the Americans, including parts of the famous T-34 tank. What Stalin missed was that the Germans were far, far better at planning, logistics, and mobile war, and that German morale was far higher than Soviet.
Did Stalin always intend to attack Hitler, and Hitler just beat him to it? Or, as most historians have said, was Stalin surprised? The notable exponent of the former theory is the Russian historian Viktor Suvarov; McMeekin nods to him but does not endorse his theory, though at least to some degree he tends in that direction. Much of Stalin’s buildup in 1940 and early 1941 seemed designed for offense—such as the crash building of innumerable airfields directly behind the new Soviet borders gained in the preceding few years, and other infrastructure designed to allow easy movement past the front (all of which was ultimately made nugatory by its immediate capture by the Germans). This could, however, also be read as over-optimistic preparation for a counterattack, or as an attempt to deter aggression by showing strength. McMeekin does not come to a conclusion—but he most definitely comes to the conclusion that Stalin was not taken by surprise, and he did not suffer some type of mental breakdown when Hitler invaded, a later myth pushed by Stalin’s successors.
As is well known, the Germans smashed the Soviets, destroying nearly all of Stalin’s military equipment, and came very close to winning the war outright. But not close enough, and winter came, with Stalin staying in Moscow, pondering what to do. It was not that Stalin could not be a realist. He famously folded his cards when the Finns punched him repeatedly in the nose (if you count 200,000 dead Russians as a punch in the nose). It was that the Americans never gave him any reason to do other than he did, and what made his recovery possible was America.
In March, 1941, Congress had passed Lend-Lease, to allow the President to distribute material, from cobalt to tanks, to nations opposing Hitler. Until Hitler attacked Stalin, Roosevelt and his aides had been largely prevented by American public opinion, which unlike Roosevelt cared about Stalin’s murderous ways and saw little difference between Hitler and Stalin, from supplying Stalin as they wished. But the perception, made completely real by Hitler declaring war on the United States in December, that Hitler was now the aggressor, allowed Roosevelt’s coterie to open the floodgates—saving Stalin in the nick of time. Using endless shipments of raw materials, chemicals, tanks, and planes, delivered at great risk and cost by Americans to Arctic ports, Stalin managed to resist, then push back, Hitler.
Thus, the second half of this book is taken up with a nearly endless catalog of the astonishingly huge amounts of material given gratis to Stalin (while Britain was forced to pay through the nose for much less aid), often at the expense of American readiness; the constant super-aggressive demands of the Soviet Communists for more; the eager meeting of those demands by Roosevelt’s aides for whom the Soviet Union was at least as important as America; the constant sidelining of and lying to anyone who proposed limits on aid to Stalin, or any kind of payment, oversight, or quid pro quo; and how this aid prevented Stalin from losing the war in 1942 and enabled him to ultimately conquer half of Europe.
Much of this seems unbelievable. Soviet agents literally freely roamed America “requisitioning” whatever they wanted, including crucial components such as ball bearings, resulting in shortages for America. “Soviet purchasing agents had such influence in the Roosevelt administration that they functioned, for all intents and purposes, like members of the US government.” America transferred scores of entire factories to the Soviet Union, along with their intellectual property, even when those factories could not be brought online for some years, and obviously could only be useful to Stalin after the war. And much more along these lines. The usual argument in defense of these practices is that enabling the Russians to kill Germans meant fewer Americans would die. Maybe. But McMeekin points out that not only was the aid excessive, Stalin was never asked for, or gave, anything at all in return. Moreover, these shipments (always at solely American expense and risk) continued, and even increased, up until the very end of the war, when Stalin was rolling up Europe.
Regardless of the actual reasons for this one-sided giveaway, which were probably some combination of Soviet discipline . . . [Review completes as first comment.]
Sean McMeekin, the author of Stalin’s War, has made a career out of what are often called revisionist histories, all about the first half of the twentieth century, several about Russia. I was suitably impressed by his The Russian Revolution, but that, and this, book are not really revisionist histories. Rather, they are correctives to the disinformation that has been most English-language histories tied to Communism during the past hundred years, and they seem revisionist because they discuss the facts objectively. The philo-Communists who to this day operate the academic wing of our regime’s propaganda machine dislike this, so they complain McMeekin is revisionist, a turn of phrase that suggests inaccuracy without needing to demonstrate any inaccuracy.
The author chose the title because World War II, in his view and contrary to what we are endlessly told, was less Adolf Hitler’s war than Joseph Stalin’s war. McMeekin does not mean the commonplace that Stalin’s Russia absorbed the majority of the Allied side’s deaths of the war (in fact, he seems to suspect historians have exaggerated Soviet war deaths). Rather, he means that the war was desired by Stalin, as a direct result of his Marxist-Leninist principles, largely followed the course Stalin wanted and acted to achieve, and hugely benefitted Stalin, while benefitting nobody else at all. In other words, cui bono? Stalin, unfortunately for the entire world.
This is, no surprise, a copiously footnoted and documented book, including what McMeekin says is a large amount of new information. Interestingly, at several points McMeekin complains that after the fall of Soviet Communism, archives were opened which contained very valuable data that has since become unavailable. He also notes that several Russian military historians write under pseudonyms, “to avoid government scrutiny.” But he does not explain the government’s reason, which is a little odd. Maybe it’s just that Vladimir Putin prefers the heroic myth of the Great Patriotic War, and books like this, and the facts on which they are based, are inconvenient.
McMeekin goes through the stages of World War II, but he begins by going all the way back to 1917 and the years immediately following, when the Bolshevik regime set the invariant pattern for all its future interactions with the West. It combined duplicity with opportunism, always overlaid with the crucial goal of fomenting Communist revolution in the West, and in this effort was greatly aided by allies, some traitors, some mere fellow-travelers, who occupied crucial positions throughout the West. In fact, without massive aid from the West, mostly the fruit of turncoats or dupes in America and also in Britain, the Soviet Union would almost certainly not have been able to survive—not in World War II, and for that matter not later, though that is a topic for another book, and another day. The cast of characters changed from 1917 to 1945; the pattern did not.
Communist hopes for immediate world revolution dwindled in the 1920s, after the Poles defeated the Red Army and the Germans put down their traitors such as Rosa Luxembourg, but still, revolution always remained near to the hearts of both Soviet leadership and their innumerable allies in the West. By the end of the 1920s, Stalin had emerged victorious from the internal Soviet power struggle, exiling Leon Trotsky and using his skill at the boring work of bureaucratic power building to build a slick machine, grounded in terror and wholly ideological in focus. Thus, in 1928, Stalin (through the Comintern) inaugurated the Third Period, where global Communism was to return to the offensive. He demanded an uncompromising approach and direct action by the world’s Communists, and he got it. This was the period when Communists outside Russia refused to cooperate with other parties of the Left in any matter, loudly declaiming, for example, that socialists were merely “social fascists,” and worked tirelessly to advance the interests of the Soviet Union at the expense of their own country.
Meanwhile, at home, Stalin was furiously industrializing, while at the same time massacring kulaks, starving millions of Ukrainians, and filling the gulags with slave labor for his industrialization program. None of his industrialization would have been possible without immense Western help; American firms in particular eagerly designed and built many of Stalin’s important factories, most notably the entire new steel-producing city of Magnitogorsk, as well as crucial infrastructure such as power plants. (American expatriates working on these Soviet projects were so numerous they had their own English-language newspaper.) At this point, the Americans wouldn’t yet simply hand over military design secrets—so Stalin initiated a giant spy operation, with its biggest focus being United States aviation. All this made Stalin’s military power grow by leaps and bounds—his prime goal, because without military supremacy, Communist global domination could not be assured.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the United States still did not recognize the Soviet regime diplomatically. This meant, among other things, that Stalin could not borrow American money, and was certainly not getting direct aid. Thus all American private assistance was paid for in gold and by Stalin selling or trading stolen artwork and antiquities. Moreover, Soviet tensions with Japan were increasing rapidly—but this presented an opening, because American tensions with Japan were also increasing, providing an apparent common interest. When Franklin Roosevelt, who had always been friendly to Communism and Communists, took office in 1933, Stalin was elated. Although the American people were (and remained) strongly opposed to Communism, the gullible Roosevelt was easily convinced that normalizing relations with Stalin would boost the American economy, something more than usually crucial due to the Great Depression. As McMeekin points out, Roosevelt naively thought the problem was that it needed someone like him just to talk to the Russians to “straighten out this whole question,” and that the Russians weren’t buying American goods because of political objections, not because they had nothing with which to buy American goods.
Setting the model for his behavior for the next twelve years, Roosevelt immediately gave away the entire farm, and then some. He gladly recognized the Soviet Union, over the strong objections of the State Department, and refused to ask for anything from Stalin in return, such as repayment of existing debts, or ending Communist spying and subversion (by which America, and the American government, was riddled—including by Harry Dexter White, a Soviet agent who throughout Roosevelt’s presidency was the right-hand man of Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau). For this reason, and because he saw little wrong with Communism and a great deal wrong with National Socialism, Roosevelt’s administration adopted and retained a consistent pro-Soviet line, in both personnel (for example replacing the ambassador to Moscow, William Bullitt, who had a realistic appreciation of Soviet “deception and guile,” with a Soviet toady, Joseph Davies, who “saw unicorns”) and policy (as we will see).
Meanwhile, in 1935, Stalin adopted a new external doctrine, that of the Popular Front—where Communists allied with other parties of the Left, invariably with the intent of, and usually succeeding in, taking all power by force if able to win an election. In both Spain and France in 1936 this strategy was successful (although not long-term, stopped by Francisco Franco in Spain, and by the war in France). Stalin also pushed “collective security”—the idea that the nations of the West should cooperate to restrain Hitler, to Stalin’s benefit. The goal of all policies was, with zero exceptions, to further Communist triumph and domination; any particular announced policy would be ignored, modified, or rejected as necessary to that end. If there is a single historical fact that emerges clearly from the pages of this book, it is the total dishonesty and duplicity of all Soviet actions, something not taken into account by most diplomats and leaders of Western nations, whose credulousness and refusal to take into account past Soviet treachery encouraged even more bad behavior by Stalin.
One could look at it another way, however. Only Stalin acted consistently in a way to benefit what he saw as the interests of the Soviet Union, without any reference to, or thought for, the morality of his actions. Only power and practicality existed for him, filtered, to be sure, through Communist ideology, but that never placed any limit on taking advantage of the West. Roosevelt, and Churchill to a lesser extent, evinced the perpetual difficulty of the Anglosphere in dealing with Communism—even when not crippled by Soviet subversion, their governments approached dealings with Stalin through the prism of a personal relationship, acting in good faith with a strong moral overlay borrowed from the Christian obligations of the individual. You would think they should have learned early this was a mistake, and you would be right, but that’s what they did—even Ronald Reagan did, although he did it a lot less, and was rewarded by achieving his geostrategic goals.
If there is a villain in this book, it’s not Stalin, though McMeekin certainly has no love for him, but seems to regard Stalin’s ability to manipulate the Allies, never giving an inch or showing any reciprocity, mostly with a kind of detached horror. Rather, it is Roosevelt, with his satanic familiar Harry Hopkins, who, while probably not a Communist agent, acted in a way indistinguishable from one, consistently prioritizing Soviet interests over American ones. McMeekin quotes Roosevelt, “I just have a hunch that Stalin isn’t that kind of man. Harry [Hopkins] said he’s not and that he doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I can and ask for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” Most of the book is an explication of this theme.
As the 1930s drew to a close, though, Stalin spent a lot more time negotiating with Hitler than with Roosevelt. McMeekin details the steps leading up to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, as well as Stalin’s simultaneous negotiations with the British and the French. Stalin’s aim was to further a war between the Germans and the Western powers, the sooner the better; he believed this would be a grinding slugfest from which he could profit by picking up the pieces. Getting the party started by seizing much of Poland, as agreed upon with Hitler, was very agreeable to him. Less agreeable to him was the speed with which Hitler rolled up his half of Poland. Yet, before and after the invasion, Stalin punctiliously continued to fulfil promised enormous shipments of raw materials, most especially oil, to Hitler (for which he was paid cash), which enabled Hitler to advance his plans in the West, in the face of the British blockade.
Stalin promptly also invaded Poland (along with the Baltic states), and by 1941 had murdered around 500,000 Poles (and tens of thousands of Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians), which, as McMeekin points out, was “three or four times higher than the number of those killed by the Nazis”—although Hitler caught up later by killing Polish Jews. Stalin’s atrocities included the murder of the flower of Polish society in the Katyn Forest, but at no time did any Western government, not the British under Churchill and even less America under Roosevelt, criticize Stalin’s murderous ways, instead toadying to him in hopes he would help against Hitler. As McMeekin points out, by mid-1940 Stalin had invaded as many sovereign countries as Hitler (seven), with barely a whisper about it being raised by the American government.
Stalin did help against Hitler—at a very high price and on terms always radically favorable to him. Stalin gradually let his close relationship with Hitler deteriorate, and refused to join the Tripartite Pact, even when Hitler was at his zenith. Hitler resisted further Russian expansion at the expense of Rumania and Bulgaria; tensions rose. Stalin was confident; despite the debilities caused by the officer purges of the previous decade, the Red Army had far more tanks, artillery, planes, and other equipment than the Wehrmacht (including even five times as many submarines), and a three-to-one advantage in manpower, the result of Stalin’s aggressive buildup. Nor was this inferior equipment—much of it was based on designs stolen or bought from the Americans, including parts of the famous T-34 tank. What Stalin missed was that the Germans were far, far better at planning, logistics, and mobile war, and that German morale was far higher than Soviet.
Did Stalin always intend to attack Hitler, and Hitler just beat him to it? Or, as most historians have said, was Stalin surprised? The notable exponent of the former theory is the Russian historian Viktor Suvarov; McMeekin nods to him but does not endorse his theory, though at least to some degree he tends in that direction. Much of Stalin’s buildup in 1940 and early 1941 seemed designed for offense—such as the crash building of innumerable airfields directly behind the new Soviet borders gained in the preceding few years, and other infrastructure designed to allow easy movement past the front (all of which was ultimately made nugatory by its immediate capture by the Germans). This could, however, also be read as over-optimistic preparation for a counterattack, or as an attempt to deter aggression by showing strength. McMeekin does not come to a conclusion—but he most definitely comes to the conclusion that Stalin was not taken by surprise, and he did not suffer some type of mental breakdown when Hitler invaded, a later myth pushed by Stalin’s successors.
As is well known, the Germans smashed the Soviets, destroying nearly all of Stalin’s military equipment, and came very close to winning the war outright. But not close enough, and winter came, with Stalin staying in Moscow, pondering what to do. It was not that Stalin could not be a realist. He famously folded his cards when the Finns punched him repeatedly in the nose (if you count 200,000 dead Russians as a punch in the nose). It was that the Americans never gave him any reason to do other than he did, and what made his recovery possible was America.
In March, 1941, Congress had passed Lend-Lease, to allow the President to distribute material, from cobalt to tanks, to nations opposing Hitler. Until Hitler attacked Stalin, Roosevelt and his aides had been largely prevented by American public opinion, which unlike Roosevelt cared about Stalin’s murderous ways and saw little difference between Hitler and Stalin, from supplying Stalin as they wished. But the perception, made completely real by Hitler declaring war on the United States in December, that Hitler was now the aggressor, allowed Roosevelt’s coterie to open the floodgates—saving Stalin in the nick of time. Using endless shipments of raw materials, chemicals, tanks, and planes, delivered at great risk and cost by Americans to Arctic ports, Stalin managed to resist, then push back, Hitler.
Thus, the second half of this book is taken up with a nearly endless catalog of the astonishingly huge amounts of material given gratis to Stalin (while Britain was forced to pay through the nose for much less aid), often at the expense of American readiness; the constant super-aggressive demands of the Soviet Communists for more; the eager meeting of those demands by Roosevelt’s aides for whom the Soviet Union was at least as important as America; the constant sidelining of and lying to anyone who proposed limits on aid to Stalin, or any kind of payment, oversight, or quid pro quo; and how this aid prevented Stalin from losing the war in 1942 and enabled him to ultimately conquer half of Europe.
Much of this seems unbelievable. Soviet agents literally freely roamed America “requisitioning” whatever they wanted, including crucial components such as ball bearings, resulting in shortages for America. “Soviet purchasing agents had such influence in the Roosevelt administration that they functioned, for all intents and purposes, like members of the US government.” America transferred scores of entire factories to the Soviet Union, along with their intellectual property, even when those factories could not be brought online for some years, and obviously could only be useful to Stalin after the war. And much more along these lines. The usual argument in defense of these practices is that enabling the Russians to kill Germans meant fewer Americans would die. Maybe. But McMeekin points out that not only was the aid excessive, Stalin was never asked for, or gave, anything at all in return. Moreover, these shipments (always at solely American expense and risk) continued, and even increased, up until the very end of the war, when Stalin was rolling up Europe.
Regardless of the actual reasons for this one-sided giveaway, which were probably some combination of Soviet discipline . . . [Review completes as first comment.]
May 9, 2022
In “Stalin’s War,” Sean McMeekin gives a lengthy terse account of how Joseph Stalin used the Second World War to his benefit and, in the end, greatly profited from it with one of the largest empires ever to exist from the iron curtain in the middle of Europe to the 38th Parallel in Korea. In no sense does McMeekin place all the blame for the Second World War on Stalin. Nor does he in any way excuse or ignore the horrors of Hitler’s Holocaust. Nevertheless, this book has a singular focus – Stalin and his perverse use of the war to further the aims of the Soviet Empire and the degree to which the Brits and, most particularly, the Americans catered to Stalin’s whims as the war progressed. It is a fascinating read for those who wonder how the Soviets came to control much of Europe after war and were able to, for the first time, compete industrially with America.
The story, such as it is, opens several years before the actual war with Stalin expanding Soviet territory in the Far East and Stalin’s fervent hope that the great capitalist powers in the West would pummel each other. But the key was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Agression Pact with Nazi Germany where the two empires, the German and the Soviet, agreed not to go to war against each other and to split Poland in two. As the Nazis advanced from the West, the Soviet Red Army moved into Eastern Poland just as viciously and destroyed any hope of the Polish resistance succeeding, sending off Polish military officials en masse to gulags in Siberia. And, that was just the beginning, because as the Germans gobbled up the rest of Europe, the Soviets quickly conquered the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, made war on Finland (albeit unsuccessfully) and moved into Romania, splitting it with Germany and the German allies. Moreover, throughout the first two years of war, Germany could not have moved forward without the resources provided by the Soviets, including especially oil. Indeed, Stalin was so hell-bent on territorial conquest that even the British considered taking action against him at some points.
It was not until Operation Barbarossa and the German invasion of the Soviet Union that Stalin became an actual ally of the Western powers. And, even then, the clever fox that Stalin was, he used that to his benefit. In particular, the Lend-Lease Act that the U.S. enacted benefited the Soviets. Several chapters of McMeekin’s book are devoted to parsing out the numbers and extant of the Lend-Lease largesse, which kept the Soviet Union afloat when it was close to disaster. More significantly, the book details the extent to which the years from 1941 through the end of the war saw a shipment of goods and services from the U.S. to the Soviet Union such that the world had never seen before, including armaments, planes, tanks, and all manner of goods. The book details how much the Soviets were involved in the American factories, dutifully recording intellectual secrets and how milling plants were shipped in their whole to the Soviets. Whole air bases were practically devoted to shipping goods to the Soviets.
In McMeekin’s eyes, Roosevelt and Churchill were hoodwinked by “Uncle” Joe Stalin who gave up very little to obtain the use of the American industrial complex. Of particular note is how little persuasive power they had over Stalin as the war reached its conclusion in Europe and Stalin’s Red Army moved into Poland, Hungary, the Balkans, and what became East Germany. As part of that movement, the Red Army shipped everything that was not nailed down into the Soviet Union in a great orgy of pillaging and looting. Thus, whatever the Lend-Lease Act had not provided, the Soviets took from the Eastern European countries, setting the stage for the new industrial power of the Soviets that had barely registered before. The looting also consisted of millions of slave laborers from Germany and the other occupied countries shipped off to the gulags in the East.
Meanwhile, in the East, Stalin delayed aiding in the fight against Japan until the very end and, as detailed in the book, the Red Army, equipped by America’s Lend-Lease moved quickly into Korea, into Manchuria, and other small islands in the Far East, setting the stage for the coming into power of Mao and Communist China in just a few short years and the Korean War following that.
McMeekin notes that, in defeating Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire, the result was a 45-year iron curtain in Europe and the movement of Communists into China and Southeast Asia and the Cold War that divided the world for half a century.
Criticisms of this lengthy history find fault with McMeekin’s singular focus on the Soviet Union and his failure to focus on the evils of Nazi Germany and the fact that the fight against that evil took precedence. But, the focus of the book is how Stalin, through his machinations, helped bring about the war and how Stalin then used the war to his advantage to capture booty from America’s Lend-Lease and to pilfer and rape Eastern Europe. As read as such, it is quite enlightening as to how the world ended up as it did half a century later and how decisions made then still reverberate today. llow soon
The story, such as it is, opens several years before the actual war with Stalin expanding Soviet territory in the Far East and Stalin’s fervent hope that the great capitalist powers in the West would pummel each other. But the key was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Agression Pact with Nazi Germany where the two empires, the German and the Soviet, agreed not to go to war against each other and to split Poland in two. As the Nazis advanced from the West, the Soviet Red Army moved into Eastern Poland just as viciously and destroyed any hope of the Polish resistance succeeding, sending off Polish military officials en masse to gulags in Siberia. And, that was just the beginning, because as the Germans gobbled up the rest of Europe, the Soviets quickly conquered the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, made war on Finland (albeit unsuccessfully) and moved into Romania, splitting it with Germany and the German allies. Moreover, throughout the first two years of war, Germany could not have moved forward without the resources provided by the Soviets, including especially oil. Indeed, Stalin was so hell-bent on territorial conquest that even the British considered taking action against him at some points.
It was not until Operation Barbarossa and the German invasion of the Soviet Union that Stalin became an actual ally of the Western powers. And, even then, the clever fox that Stalin was, he used that to his benefit. In particular, the Lend-Lease Act that the U.S. enacted benefited the Soviets. Several chapters of McMeekin’s book are devoted to parsing out the numbers and extant of the Lend-Lease largesse, which kept the Soviet Union afloat when it was close to disaster. More significantly, the book details the extent to which the years from 1941 through the end of the war saw a shipment of goods and services from the U.S. to the Soviet Union such that the world had never seen before, including armaments, planes, tanks, and all manner of goods. The book details how much the Soviets were involved in the American factories, dutifully recording intellectual secrets and how milling plants were shipped in their whole to the Soviets. Whole air bases were practically devoted to shipping goods to the Soviets.
In McMeekin’s eyes, Roosevelt and Churchill were hoodwinked by “Uncle” Joe Stalin who gave up very little to obtain the use of the American industrial complex. Of particular note is how little persuasive power they had over Stalin as the war reached its conclusion in Europe and Stalin’s Red Army moved into Poland, Hungary, the Balkans, and what became East Germany. As part of that movement, the Red Army shipped everything that was not nailed down into the Soviet Union in a great orgy of pillaging and looting. Thus, whatever the Lend-Lease Act had not provided, the Soviets took from the Eastern European countries, setting the stage for the new industrial power of the Soviets that had barely registered before. The looting also consisted of millions of slave laborers from Germany and the other occupied countries shipped off to the gulags in the East.
Meanwhile, in the East, Stalin delayed aiding in the fight against Japan until the very end and, as detailed in the book, the Red Army, equipped by America’s Lend-Lease moved quickly into Korea, into Manchuria, and other small islands in the Far East, setting the stage for the coming into power of Mao and Communist China in just a few short years and the Korean War following that.
McMeekin notes that, in defeating Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire, the result was a 45-year iron curtain in Europe and the movement of Communists into China and Southeast Asia and the Cold War that divided the world for half a century.
Criticisms of this lengthy history find fault with McMeekin’s singular focus on the Soviet Union and his failure to focus on the evils of Nazi Germany and the fact that the fight against that evil took precedence. But, the focus of the book is how Stalin, through his machinations, helped bring about the war and how Stalin then used the war to his advantage to capture booty from America’s Lend-Lease and to pilfer and rape Eastern Europe. As read as such, it is quite enlightening as to how the world ended up as it did half a century later and how decisions made then still reverberate today. llow soon
October 7, 2021
A few months ago, I had the immense (dis)pleasure of reading Julia Lovell's Maoism: A Global History. At the time of finishing it, I believed firmly that it was one of the worst attempts at a history book that I'd ever read, and would ever attempt to read. Fortunately for Lovell, her rather turgid history of global Maoism is surpassed in stupidity, ignorance, and perversity by Sean McMeekin's "book."
This Is How You Don't Write History
Let's get one thing out of the way first. McMeekin's book claims to be a "new history" of WW2 that emphasizes the demands for war material and economic autarky that underpinned the fragile peace of the 1930s as war crept in. It also claims -- with great pride on the inside jacket of the book -- that "the war which emerged in Europe in September in 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler." This itself is an incredible claim to make, considering the tens of millions of Russians citizens and soldiers that died in the war, and yet it is one of the more tame ones made in the text itself. With the amount of times that McMeekin would interject into this already loose text with tidbits made with only the purpose of making faceless apparatchiks and Soviet bureaucrats into actual monsters, it is difficult to even follow the narrative flow of his text.
This is not helped by the fact that McMeekin's sourcing of his claims are horseshit. He sources claims from Robert Conquest and Timothy Snyder, particularly in an attempt to portray the 1932 famine in Ukraine in line with the Banderite narrative of the "Holodomor." Conquest's account of the famine could be very generously called "disregarded" by actual Sovietologists these days (of whom Snyder is not one of). Even dyed-in-the-wool anti-communist academics like Stephen Kotkin (author of the three-volume Stalin biography which I've been told is MUCH better than this) will tell you that it was not a deliberate genocide, but the unfortunate result of two levels of bureaucratic leadership pulling away from reality in different manners, unable to right the ship until it was too late. This does not stop McMeekin from plowing on without the slightest care in the world for simple facts like that -- this is, after all, a man who has only written four books about the Soviet Union at this stage, so I can only admire his sheer lack of care. It takes real talent to just ignore the academic discussions regarding these things, and McMeekin can only leave me dumbstruck with his sheer skill.
Beyond both Conquest and Snyder, however, McMeekin draws upon such notable figures like a Russian expatriate monarchist (and sometimes UKIP political candidate), and a bench full of devotedly conservative, free-market enterprise loving historians whose publication histories point towards each other like some ouroboros, except the snake is made from pure shit. McMeekin has a horrible habit of writing like a college freshman, with huge paragraphs wherein multiple claims are made which he then drops a single footnote for at the end of which rarely talk about what he is actually saying. Prize examples of this include his "sources" for "huge numbers of Soviet soldiers" defecting to the Germans after Barbarossa was launched (in spite, I might add, of how public Hitler's anti-Slavic rhetoric was). Perhaps McMeekin is confused about the differences between prisoners and defectors, but I'll never know.
Red Hitler Does the Red Fascism
One very overarching thing that dominates McMeekin's text is his insistence on calling Stalin "the Vozhd," which he helpfully translates for us as "the Leader." If you've suddenly started to hear a high-pitched whine somewhere, do not worry about it being tinnitus. It is merely the enormous dogwhistle that McMeekin is blowing directly into your ear canal. Not only is it a disgusting and enormously false parallel to draw between both Hitler/Stalin and fascism/communism, but it is borderline parodic. You would almost think it was a joke, but if it is one, McMeekin is operating on an entirely different level than the rest of us.
Aside from this absolutely transparent framing of Stalin here, we do of course have the classic red fascism argument where Stalin purposefully killed and deported millions just for... the evil of it I guess? McMeekin isn't really clear as to this, but again that doesn't stop him. He trots out the same tired arguments of communism killing more than fascism, "so why isn't it derided as much?" which is just laughable on its nose because it has an actual toddler's understanding of fascism. Stalin was not a paragon of virtue, that much is certain. But you don't have to be an ardent Stalinist to understand that there are clear ideological differences between fascism and communism, in that there is absolutely no component of communism theory that posits about the need for racial war for control, domination, and extermination between nations. This is so easy to ascertain from any communist political literature or philosophy that you would have to have some kind of underlying agenda to completely ignore some two centuries of programs, platforms, and policies in order to advance this narrative.
As I touched on earlier, McMeekin gives a lot of oxygen to the classic Banderite/Ukrainian nationalist mythos of the "Holodomor," something which they were working on the finer points of whilst they were murdering of the non-Ukrainians in the western part of the country. Then we have the classic stories of the poor Red Army conscripts, so terrified and stricken with malaise that they fear the Finns will shoot them when they are captured and that their families will be shot by the commissars back home. Constant mentions of "the blood soaked regime of Moscow," the aforementioned monstrous bureaucrats and Soviet apparatchiks who mow down pedestrians out of boredom from the seats of their cars while horrified American military attaches look on... You get the gist. Many of these are so lurid, so fanciful, that they become actually unbelievable, particularly given the sources for these claims. I know this is something that I keep harping on, but it is really quite something that McMeekin managed to push a book this loosely held together out to mass market.
In Summation a/k/a Wow I Wrote a Lot For This and I Don't Want To Anymore
This book is bad. Really bad. So bad that I struggled to get even to the halfway point, and am now shelving it as a DNF. If I could give this book no stars, I would do so in an instant. Hell, if I could give it negative stars, I would do so without hesitation. It is without merit, provides no "new history" that it's subheading would imply, and is more than anything else a colossus of rank anti-communism that veers worryingly class to Nazi-apologia territory. You don't have to be wistfully nostalgic for the Soviet Union to understand that McMeekin has a clear political agenda, and has embedded himself very firmly in the cottage industry of anti-Stalin, anti-Soviet, anti-Russian popular history which churns out books like these with a frantic pace. I can clearly and emphatically say, do not read this stupid, stupid book, and that staring into the corner of your ceiling for hours on end would be both more spiritually fulfilling and less of an exercise in tedium than this book has been.
This Is How You Don't Write History
Let's get one thing out of the way first. McMeekin's book claims to be a "new history" of WW2 that emphasizes the demands for war material and economic autarky that underpinned the fragile peace of the 1930s as war crept in. It also claims -- with great pride on the inside jacket of the book -- that "the war which emerged in Europe in September in 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler." This itself is an incredible claim to make, considering the tens of millions of Russians citizens and soldiers that died in the war, and yet it is one of the more tame ones made in the text itself. With the amount of times that McMeekin would interject into this already loose text with tidbits made with only the purpose of making faceless apparatchiks and Soviet bureaucrats into actual monsters, it is difficult to even follow the narrative flow of his text.
This is not helped by the fact that McMeekin's sourcing of his claims are horseshit. He sources claims from Robert Conquest and Timothy Snyder, particularly in an attempt to portray the 1932 famine in Ukraine in line with the Banderite narrative of the "Holodomor." Conquest's account of the famine could be very generously called "disregarded" by actual Sovietologists these days (of whom Snyder is not one of). Even dyed-in-the-wool anti-communist academics like Stephen Kotkin (author of the three-volume Stalin biography which I've been told is MUCH better than this) will tell you that it was not a deliberate genocide, but the unfortunate result of two levels of bureaucratic leadership pulling away from reality in different manners, unable to right the ship until it was too late. This does not stop McMeekin from plowing on without the slightest care in the world for simple facts like that -- this is, after all, a man who has only written four books about the Soviet Union at this stage, so I can only admire his sheer lack of care. It takes real talent to just ignore the academic discussions regarding these things, and McMeekin can only leave me dumbstruck with his sheer skill.
Beyond both Conquest and Snyder, however, McMeekin draws upon such notable figures like a Russian expatriate monarchist (and sometimes UKIP political candidate), and a bench full of devotedly conservative, free-market enterprise loving historians whose publication histories point towards each other like some ouroboros, except the snake is made from pure shit. McMeekin has a horrible habit of writing like a college freshman, with huge paragraphs wherein multiple claims are made which he then drops a single footnote for at the end of which rarely talk about what he is actually saying. Prize examples of this include his "sources" for "huge numbers of Soviet soldiers" defecting to the Germans after Barbarossa was launched (in spite, I might add, of how public Hitler's anti-Slavic rhetoric was). Perhaps McMeekin is confused about the differences between prisoners and defectors, but I'll never know.
Red Hitler Does the Red Fascism
One very overarching thing that dominates McMeekin's text is his insistence on calling Stalin "the Vozhd," which he helpfully translates for us as "the Leader." If you've suddenly started to hear a high-pitched whine somewhere, do not worry about it being tinnitus. It is merely the enormous dogwhistle that McMeekin is blowing directly into your ear canal. Not only is it a disgusting and enormously false parallel to draw between both Hitler/Stalin and fascism/communism, but it is borderline parodic. You would almost think it was a joke, but if it is one, McMeekin is operating on an entirely different level than the rest of us.
Aside from this absolutely transparent framing of Stalin here, we do of course have the classic red fascism argument where Stalin purposefully killed and deported millions just for... the evil of it I guess? McMeekin isn't really clear as to this, but again that doesn't stop him. He trots out the same tired arguments of communism killing more than fascism, "so why isn't it derided as much?" which is just laughable on its nose because it has an actual toddler's understanding of fascism. Stalin was not a paragon of virtue, that much is certain. But you don't have to be an ardent Stalinist to understand that there are clear ideological differences between fascism and communism, in that there is absolutely no component of communism theory that posits about the need for racial war for control, domination, and extermination between nations. This is so easy to ascertain from any communist political literature or philosophy that you would have to have some kind of underlying agenda to completely ignore some two centuries of programs, platforms, and policies in order to advance this narrative.
As I touched on earlier, McMeekin gives a lot of oxygen to the classic Banderite/Ukrainian nationalist mythos of the "Holodomor," something which they were working on the finer points of whilst they were murdering of the non-Ukrainians in the western part of the country. Then we have the classic stories of the poor Red Army conscripts, so terrified and stricken with malaise that they fear the Finns will shoot them when they are captured and that their families will be shot by the commissars back home. Constant mentions of "the blood soaked regime of Moscow," the aforementioned monstrous bureaucrats and Soviet apparatchiks who mow down pedestrians out of boredom from the seats of their cars while horrified American military attaches look on... You get the gist. Many of these are so lurid, so fanciful, that they become actually unbelievable, particularly given the sources for these claims. I know this is something that I keep harping on, but it is really quite something that McMeekin managed to push a book this loosely held together out to mass market.
In Summation a/k/a Wow I Wrote a Lot For This and I Don't Want To Anymore
This book is bad. Really bad. So bad that I struggled to get even to the halfway point, and am now shelving it as a DNF. If I could give this book no stars, I would do so in an instant. Hell, if I could give it negative stars, I would do so without hesitation. It is without merit, provides no "new history" that it's subheading would imply, and is more than anything else a colossus of rank anti-communism that veers worryingly class to Nazi-apologia territory. You don't have to be wistfully nostalgic for the Soviet Union to understand that McMeekin has a clear political agenda, and has embedded himself very firmly in the cottage industry of anti-Stalin, anti-Soviet, anti-Russian popular history which churns out books like these with a frantic pace. I can clearly and emphatically say, do not read this stupid, stupid book, and that staring into the corner of your ceiling for hours on end would be both more spiritually fulfilling and less of an exercise in tedium than this book has been.
November 14, 2021
Useful tip: when a historian uses as proof of his argument Stalin's speech from August 1939, it's a clear sign they're either incompetent, or create pure propaganda piece devoid of scientific objectivity. There is already a consensus among historians that the speech is a fake. Apart from appalling unprofessionalism, which manifests itself in multiple ways (questionable sources, manipulation with figures, typical anti-Soviet and anti-Stalin propaganda tropes - that we saw many times already, so nothing new under the sun), the alarming part is the narrative suggesting that the western leaders should have tried to resolve issues with Hitler via negotiation, not war. This, according to the author, would have left Europe better off than the peace treaties of 1945. Further, McMeekin suggests that in a similar fashion, a 'wiser' politics in the East, i.e. reaching consensus between Japan and the United States via negotiation, would have helped to avoid the rise of the communist China. So, the US could have avoided the present day tensions with China, had they been more tolerant and willing to negotiate with the Nazi and Fascist regimes. The final curtain.
For those who are interested in the history of WWII narrated by professional, conscientious historians, a good read would be works of Jason D. Mark, Robert Forczyk, and Alexey Isaev.
For those who are interested in the history of WWII narrated by professional, conscientious historians, a good read would be works of Jason D. Mark, Robert Forczyk, and Alexey Isaev.
November 1, 2021
When I lived in New York, I had a friend who was from Manchuria. He was very into obscure right wing friendly history and would endlessly hate on Roosevelt. To me this was odd, I had no particular opinion about this president. I knew he was involved in WW2, vaguely from watching American movies like Pearl Harbor. So when he ranted that Roosevelt was the worst American president, I didn't take it seriously.
After having read this book. I see that he knew a lot more about history than I did. It's difficult to imagine the combination of incompetence and infatuation with Stalin that lead to the disasters of WW2. It can't easily be summarized either but there are other glowing reviews of this book, so I don't need to try.
After having read this book. I see that he knew a lot more about history than I did. It's difficult to imagine the combination of incompetence and infatuation with Stalin that lead to the disasters of WW2. It can't easily be summarized either but there are other glowing reviews of this book, so I don't need to try.
March 17, 2023
When we think of WWII, we usually view Nazi Germany as the chief protagonist. Its invasion of Poland in 1939 is seen as the starting point of the war. Its subsequent invasions of France and the Low Countries in 1940 and the Soviet Union in 1941 are seen as escalatory milestones in the conflict. And, most notoriously, its perpetration of the Holocaust will forever mark it as the foremost villain not just in the history of the war, but arguably in human history. In this bracing revisionist history, Sean McMeekin turns this thesis on its head and argues that WWII was really Stalin's war: the Soviet Union, he claims, was the war's central driving force. It manipulated events to guarantee the outbreak of European war in 1939, and then conspired to draw the United States into the fighting once its scheme to embroil the Western powers in war almost catastrophically backfired with Germany's invasion in June 1941. If this seems rather paranoid and far-fetched, that's because it is.
The book can roughly be divided into two parts: the first half detailing Soviet duplicity in foreign policy from 1917 to 1941, highlighting the inconvenient fact that the Soviet Union was a de facto ally of Nazi Germany from September 1939 to June 22nd, 1941, and the second half describing Stalin's overwhelming reliance on Western (particularly US) aid to sustain his war effort and then advance into the heart of Europe.
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The Soviet Union, from its very birth in 1917, was a regime unlike any other: the world's first self-declared socialist government that placed itself at the vanguard of proletarian revolution and dedicated to the overthrow of the existing capitalist order. If divides between the capitalist powers could be exploited for the advancement of communism, all the better. As Stalin himself explained as early as 1925, "If war breaks out, we shall not be able to sit with folded arms. We will have to take action, but we shall be the last to do so. And we shall do so in order to throw the decisive weight on the scales, the weight that can turn the scales." For McMeekin, this ideological impulse was the driving force behind Soviet behavior right through the end of the WWII. It lay especially behind the Soviet decision to jettison a prospective anti-Nazi "Grand Alliance" with the Western powers in the summer of 1939 and instead cast its lot with the Nazis in the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, dividing Eastern Europe in spheres of influence between the two powers while effectively setting the countdown timer on European war. McMeekin is right to reframe this non-aggression pact as a de facto alliance, too. He notes that from September 1939 to June 1941, the USSR sent to Germany 1.75 million tons of wheat, a million tons of petroleum products, 23,000 tons of chrome, and 214,000 tons of phosphate and granted Germany access to Soviet arctic bases during its invasion of Norway in 1940.
And belying its claims of leading a global emancipatory project, the Soviets behaved like an imperialist bully in their "sphere of influence." Without directly saying so, he argues that Soviet behavior was scarcely better than the Nazis. He compiles a lengthy ledger of Soviet crimes: the infamous Katyn massacre of 25,000 Polish army officers in 1940, mass deportations of entire ethnic groups, unprovoked invasions of small neighbors, etc. McMeekin notes the remarkable fact that the Soviets during this period invaded as many countries as the Germans (six: Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania).
In this reframing, Stalin effectively used Germany (and Japan) as blunt tools to stoke war among the capitalist powers. The plan was working beautifully, until Hitler did exactly what he said he was going to do in Mein Kampf and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Now Stalin was desperate for help from the very capitalist powers he sought to destroy.
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Fortunately for Stalin, the two foremost leaders in the capitalist world, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, were happy to reciprocate. Students of WWII history will have already known about the generous supply of Western aid to the Soviets after Barbarossa, but McMeekin's cataloguing of this aid is a stark reminder of what a remarkable act of solidarity it was. As early as August 1941, when the US was still technically neutral in the conflict, Roosevelt tapped directly in US army stocks to provide the USSR with warplanes “of all types” (to be “diverted from Lend-Lease contracts for the British”), submachine guns, transport trucks, tanks, anti-tank guns, mortars, 90 mm guns, and field telegraph wire, along with locomotive and steam engines, electric furnaces, machine tools, searchlights, sound locators, and surgical and hospital supplies. Churchill, for his part, tapped directly into Britain's relatively sparse military inventory to provide the Russians with hundreds of warplanes and tanks. This bountiful aid made a crucial impact in December 1941 when the Soviets stopped the German advance outside the gates of Moscow: nearly one quarter of Soviet tanks and trucks were Western-supplied. It is worth noting that US aid to Russia was provided virtually free of charge, unlike lend-lease aid to Britain.
This material support escalated as the war dragged on. I might as well just directly quote McMeekin here: "From March 1942 on, virtually all gasoline-powered light tanks in the US and British supply pipeline were requisitioned for Stalin, helping to meet the protocol demand for 2,250 tanks. Lend-lease officials also gave Stalin priority in the shipment of trucks (36,865 delivered by June 30, 1942), jeeps (6,823), scout cars (400), and rubber floats (2,421). Foodstuffs—including grain, corn, dehydrated milk, butter, meat, and the soon-infamous canned meat product Spam (known to the Russian soldiers as tusonka pork)—were also sent in vast quantities: 167,995 tons by June 30, 1942. Fully 100 percent of telephone wire produced in the United States in January 1942, and 90 percent of that produced in the next few months, was requisitioned and sent to Stalin." During this same year, the US also shipped 2.5 million high-chrome stainless-steel balls to the Soviet Union, producing serious shortages in America. Throw in the additional 25,000 and 30,000 trucks and jeeps that had arrived by mid-November 1942, when the Soviets were preparing their counteroffensive to encircle German forces in Stalingrad—a mobile flanking maneuver which, according to Soviet sources, required the use of 27,000 (Western-supplied) trucks - and it's very clear that lend-lease aid helped deliver this monumental victory to the Soviets.
If this aid was necessary to stave off Soviet collapse (and, as the author argues, it did), then the strategic rationale for lend-lease considerably diminished after the turning of the tide on the Eastern front with the Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk. Yet, remarkably, lend-lease aid to Russia researched its zenith during the third protocol period of June 1943-June 1944, with more materiel provided to the Soviets than was even promised by the protocol committee. Entire factories and refineries were dismantled in the US and shipped to Russia, while industrial blueprints and other technical information was provided. Harry Hopkins, Lend-Lease administrator, even agreed to ship enriched uranium to the USSR, helping to kickstart the Soviet atomic program.
Incredibly, the Roosevelt administration even turned over entire air bases *in the US* to Soviet control. One base in Great Falls, Montana gave priority of modification, equipment and movement to Soviet planes. During this time, the Soviets were also granted permission by the US to fish for crab along the entire US Pacific coast, causing shortages in that region.
Nor was Western support to the Soviets just a matter of arms shipments. Debunking Soviet claims that the Western allies weren't doing enough to fight the Germans, by summer 1943, over 40% of German army divisions were deployed outside the Eastern front, a number that rose to nearly half even before the D-Day landings. Round-the-clock bombing raids of Germany by America and Britain hampered German arms production and drew away 88 mm guns for air defense that could have been used to destroy Soviet tanks.
And did the Soviets reciprocate this behavior with generosity on their end? Hardly. They spied on the US (Soviet military advisors were given virtual tour guides of top-secret US aviation factories) and detained downed American airmen in Russia as POWs. Most egregiously, Stalin callously stood by and watched the brutal suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, spurning US/British requests to coordinate airlift supplies to the Warsaw fighters.
What explains this enormous gift of US aid to Russia, well beyond even Soviet operational requirements? More than just realpolitik, as it turns out. McMeekin documents the thorough penetration of the US government by Soviet agents: no lesser figures than Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury, and the US military attaché in the US embassy in Moscow took their orders from Moscow. Harry Hopkins, if not a Soviet spy, was a genuine enthusiast for the Soviet cause. At Soviet request, he virtually purged the State Department of experienced (anti-) Soviet hands in 1943.
Replenished and refueled by US and British materiel, Stalin's forces rolled into Eastern Europe, where they proceeded to consolidate and loot the domains that came under their grasp. An estimated $1 trillion was stolen from East Germany during the Soviet occupation; 2 million German women were raped by Red Army soldiers. A war that began to defend the ostensible independence of Poland from foreign domination saw it fall under the suzerainty of another foreign power, where it remained under its orbit for another 45 years. Such were the fruits of Soviet "liberation."
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Unfortunately, for all his narrative verve and impressive fluency with these events, McMeekin is so dedicated to condemning the Soviets that he occasionally stumbles into counterfactual fantasy land and jumps to dubious conclusions. Among other zany ideas and interpretations:
1. States that Britain and France should have declared war on the Soviet Union after its invasion of Finland in November 1939, thus turning WWII, in the author’s words, into a principled war against totalitarianism. Never mind that, as events later turned out, the two Western powers couldn't even defeat Germany on its own; the idea of taking on the other continental goliath simultaneously is insane to me.
2. Argues that Churchill should have made peace with Hitler after the fall of France in June 1940, thus redirecting German ambitions eastward and letting the Soviets fend for themselves. The idea that the man who broke pact-after-pact and promise-after-promise could have been trusted to abide by a peace accord is laughable.
3. Tries to gingerly rehabilitate the old Icebreaker thesis that Stalin was planning on launching a first strike on Germany right before Barbarossa, unconvincingly. Heck, reading the sections that deal with the immediate run-up to the invasion, you get the impression that Hitler was a reasonable statesman pushed to the breaking point by intransigent Russians. Evidence that McMeekin uses to argue that Soviets might have been planning a first strike (moving divisions to frontline positions along the German-Soviet frontier) can just as easily be interpreted as defensive measures against a German attack. After all, Stalin had read Mein Kampf too.
4. Argues that Stalin was partly responsible for the Pearl Harbor attack, since a known Soviet agent drew up the demands of the brusque Hull note that convinced Japan to brake off negotiations and declare war on the US , never mind that the key demand, Japanese withdrawal from China, was a longstanding US principle, and that the crucial turning point in the deterioration of US/Japanese relations was the US oil embargo imposed upon Japan in July 1941.
5. Not-so-subtle hints that Harry Hopkins, top aide to FDR and key conduit to Churchill and Stalin, was a Soviet agent. Enthusiasm for the Soviet cause, which was widespread in the West given Germany's brutal invasion of it, hardly makes one a tankie.
6. Argues that the leak of the punitive (and in his opinion, Soviet-inspired) Morgenthau Plan to the press motivated Hitler to launch the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. His evidence for this is that Hitler made the decision to attack right after he learned about it.
7. Suggests in a footnote near the end of the book that the Soviets are grossly overstating their war losses. I've read many books on WWII, many from authors sharply critical of the Soviets, and this is the first time I've ever come across the notion that the Soviets are lying about war deaths.
He concludes by arguing that Stalin, after using Germany and Japan as blunt tools to provoke a world war, ended up reaping the benefits of the Allied victory by imposing communism on Eastern Europe and Northeast Asia, partly aided by Western dupes who let their overriding obsession with Germany blind them to the realities of Stalinist brutality. He comes awfully close to endorsing the old far-right thesis that WWII was an unnecessary war that made the world safe for Communism.
I don't think this argument is entirely wrong: WWII was less of the "good war" than glossy-eyed Western historians would have us believe, for reasons McMeekin painstakingly lays out in this book, but considering the diabolical nature of the Nazi regime, a regime that used its military might to exterminate people of an entire ethnicity (whatever one thinks of Communism, it is not an inherently genocidal ideology), I can't endorse any thesis that argues a direct moral equivalence between the two sides, even after fully acknowledging the evils of Stalin's regime. If a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Communist like Winston Churchill can understand this, surely Sean McMeekin and present-day conservatives can.
The book can roughly be divided into two parts: the first half detailing Soviet duplicity in foreign policy from 1917 to 1941, highlighting the inconvenient fact that the Soviet Union was a de facto ally of Nazi Germany from September 1939 to June 22nd, 1941, and the second half describing Stalin's overwhelming reliance on Western (particularly US) aid to sustain his war effort and then advance into the heart of Europe.
--------
The Soviet Union, from its very birth in 1917, was a regime unlike any other: the world's first self-declared socialist government that placed itself at the vanguard of proletarian revolution and dedicated to the overthrow of the existing capitalist order. If divides between the capitalist powers could be exploited for the advancement of communism, all the better. As Stalin himself explained as early as 1925, "If war breaks out, we shall not be able to sit with folded arms. We will have to take action, but we shall be the last to do so. And we shall do so in order to throw the decisive weight on the scales, the weight that can turn the scales." For McMeekin, this ideological impulse was the driving force behind Soviet behavior right through the end of the WWII. It lay especially behind the Soviet decision to jettison a prospective anti-Nazi "Grand Alliance" with the Western powers in the summer of 1939 and instead cast its lot with the Nazis in the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, dividing Eastern Europe in spheres of influence between the two powers while effectively setting the countdown timer on European war. McMeekin is right to reframe this non-aggression pact as a de facto alliance, too. He notes that from September 1939 to June 1941, the USSR sent to Germany 1.75 million tons of wheat, a million tons of petroleum products, 23,000 tons of chrome, and 214,000 tons of phosphate and granted Germany access to Soviet arctic bases during its invasion of Norway in 1940.
And belying its claims of leading a global emancipatory project, the Soviets behaved like an imperialist bully in their "sphere of influence." Without directly saying so, he argues that Soviet behavior was scarcely better than the Nazis. He compiles a lengthy ledger of Soviet crimes: the infamous Katyn massacre of 25,000 Polish army officers in 1940, mass deportations of entire ethnic groups, unprovoked invasions of small neighbors, etc. McMeekin notes the remarkable fact that the Soviets during this period invaded as many countries as the Germans (six: Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania).
In this reframing, Stalin effectively used Germany (and Japan) as blunt tools to stoke war among the capitalist powers. The plan was working beautifully, until Hitler did exactly what he said he was going to do in Mein Kampf and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Now Stalin was desperate for help from the very capitalist powers he sought to destroy.
--------
Fortunately for Stalin, the two foremost leaders in the capitalist world, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, were happy to reciprocate. Students of WWII history will have already known about the generous supply of Western aid to the Soviets after Barbarossa, but McMeekin's cataloguing of this aid is a stark reminder of what a remarkable act of solidarity it was. As early as August 1941, when the US was still technically neutral in the conflict, Roosevelt tapped directly in US army stocks to provide the USSR with warplanes “of all types” (to be “diverted from Lend-Lease contracts for the British”), submachine guns, transport trucks, tanks, anti-tank guns, mortars, 90 mm guns, and field telegraph wire, along with locomotive and steam engines, electric furnaces, machine tools, searchlights, sound locators, and surgical and hospital supplies. Churchill, for his part, tapped directly into Britain's relatively sparse military inventory to provide the Russians with hundreds of warplanes and tanks. This bountiful aid made a crucial impact in December 1941 when the Soviets stopped the German advance outside the gates of Moscow: nearly one quarter of Soviet tanks and trucks were Western-supplied. It is worth noting that US aid to Russia was provided virtually free of charge, unlike lend-lease aid to Britain.
This material support escalated as the war dragged on. I might as well just directly quote McMeekin here: "From March 1942 on, virtually all gasoline-powered light tanks in the US and British supply pipeline were requisitioned for Stalin, helping to meet the protocol demand for 2,250 tanks. Lend-lease officials also gave Stalin priority in the shipment of trucks (36,865 delivered by June 30, 1942), jeeps (6,823), scout cars (400), and rubber floats (2,421). Foodstuffs—including grain, corn, dehydrated milk, butter, meat, and the soon-infamous canned meat product Spam (known to the Russian soldiers as tusonka pork)—were also sent in vast quantities: 167,995 tons by June 30, 1942. Fully 100 percent of telephone wire produced in the United States in January 1942, and 90 percent of that produced in the next few months, was requisitioned and sent to Stalin." During this same year, the US also shipped 2.5 million high-chrome stainless-steel balls to the Soviet Union, producing serious shortages in America. Throw in the additional 25,000 and 30,000 trucks and jeeps that had arrived by mid-November 1942, when the Soviets were preparing their counteroffensive to encircle German forces in Stalingrad—a mobile flanking maneuver which, according to Soviet sources, required the use of 27,000 (Western-supplied) trucks - and it's very clear that lend-lease aid helped deliver this monumental victory to the Soviets.
If this aid was necessary to stave off Soviet collapse (and, as the author argues, it did), then the strategic rationale for lend-lease considerably diminished after the turning of the tide on the Eastern front with the Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk. Yet, remarkably, lend-lease aid to Russia researched its zenith during the third protocol period of June 1943-June 1944, with more materiel provided to the Soviets than was even promised by the protocol committee. Entire factories and refineries were dismantled in the US and shipped to Russia, while industrial blueprints and other technical information was provided. Harry Hopkins, Lend-Lease administrator, even agreed to ship enriched uranium to the USSR, helping to kickstart the Soviet atomic program.
Incredibly, the Roosevelt administration even turned over entire air bases *in the US* to Soviet control. One base in Great Falls, Montana gave priority of modification, equipment and movement to Soviet planes. During this time, the Soviets were also granted permission by the US to fish for crab along the entire US Pacific coast, causing shortages in that region.
Nor was Western support to the Soviets just a matter of arms shipments. Debunking Soviet claims that the Western allies weren't doing enough to fight the Germans, by summer 1943, over 40% of German army divisions were deployed outside the Eastern front, a number that rose to nearly half even before the D-Day landings. Round-the-clock bombing raids of Germany by America and Britain hampered German arms production and drew away 88 mm guns for air defense that could have been used to destroy Soviet tanks.
And did the Soviets reciprocate this behavior with generosity on their end? Hardly. They spied on the US (Soviet military advisors were given virtual tour guides of top-secret US aviation factories) and detained downed American airmen in Russia as POWs. Most egregiously, Stalin callously stood by and watched the brutal suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, spurning US/British requests to coordinate airlift supplies to the Warsaw fighters.
What explains this enormous gift of US aid to Russia, well beyond even Soviet operational requirements? More than just realpolitik, as it turns out. McMeekin documents the thorough penetration of the US government by Soviet agents: no lesser figures than Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury, and the US military attaché in the US embassy in Moscow took their orders from Moscow. Harry Hopkins, if not a Soviet spy, was a genuine enthusiast for the Soviet cause. At Soviet request, he virtually purged the State Department of experienced (anti-) Soviet hands in 1943.
Replenished and refueled by US and British materiel, Stalin's forces rolled into Eastern Europe, where they proceeded to consolidate and loot the domains that came under their grasp. An estimated $1 trillion was stolen from East Germany during the Soviet occupation; 2 million German women were raped by Red Army soldiers. A war that began to defend the ostensible independence of Poland from foreign domination saw it fall under the suzerainty of another foreign power, where it remained under its orbit for another 45 years. Such were the fruits of Soviet "liberation."
--------
Unfortunately, for all his narrative verve and impressive fluency with these events, McMeekin is so dedicated to condemning the Soviets that he occasionally stumbles into counterfactual fantasy land and jumps to dubious conclusions. Among other zany ideas and interpretations:
1. States that Britain and France should have declared war on the Soviet Union after its invasion of Finland in November 1939, thus turning WWII, in the author’s words, into a principled war against totalitarianism. Never mind that, as events later turned out, the two Western powers couldn't even defeat Germany on its own; the idea of taking on the other continental goliath simultaneously is insane to me.
2. Argues that Churchill should have made peace with Hitler after the fall of France in June 1940, thus redirecting German ambitions eastward and letting the Soviets fend for themselves. The idea that the man who broke pact-after-pact and promise-after-promise could have been trusted to abide by a peace accord is laughable.
3. Tries to gingerly rehabilitate the old Icebreaker thesis that Stalin was planning on launching a first strike on Germany right before Barbarossa, unconvincingly. Heck, reading the sections that deal with the immediate run-up to the invasion, you get the impression that Hitler was a reasonable statesman pushed to the breaking point by intransigent Russians. Evidence that McMeekin uses to argue that Soviets might have been planning a first strike (moving divisions to frontline positions along the German-Soviet frontier) can just as easily be interpreted as defensive measures against a German attack. After all, Stalin had read Mein Kampf too.
4. Argues that Stalin was partly responsible for the Pearl Harbor attack, since a known Soviet agent drew up the demands of the brusque Hull note that convinced Japan to brake off negotiations and declare war on the US , never mind that the key demand, Japanese withdrawal from China, was a longstanding US principle, and that the crucial turning point in the deterioration of US/Japanese relations was the US oil embargo imposed upon Japan in July 1941.
5. Not-so-subtle hints that Harry Hopkins, top aide to FDR and key conduit to Churchill and Stalin, was a Soviet agent. Enthusiasm for the Soviet cause, which was widespread in the West given Germany's brutal invasion of it, hardly makes one a tankie.
6. Argues that the leak of the punitive (and in his opinion, Soviet-inspired) Morgenthau Plan to the press motivated Hitler to launch the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. His evidence for this is that Hitler made the decision to attack right after he learned about it.
7. Suggests in a footnote near the end of the book that the Soviets are grossly overstating their war losses. I've read many books on WWII, many from authors sharply critical of the Soviets, and this is the first time I've ever come across the notion that the Soviets are lying about war deaths.
He concludes by arguing that Stalin, after using Germany and Japan as blunt tools to provoke a world war, ended up reaping the benefits of the Allied victory by imposing communism on Eastern Europe and Northeast Asia, partly aided by Western dupes who let their overriding obsession with Germany blind them to the realities of Stalinist brutality. He comes awfully close to endorsing the old far-right thesis that WWII was an unnecessary war that made the world safe for Communism.
I don't think this argument is entirely wrong: WWII was less of the "good war" than glossy-eyed Western historians would have us believe, for reasons McMeekin painstakingly lays out in this book, but considering the diabolical nature of the Nazi regime, a regime that used its military might to exterminate people of an entire ethnicity (whatever one thinks of Communism, it is not an inherently genocidal ideology), I can't endorse any thesis that argues a direct moral equivalence between the two sides, even after fully acknowledging the evils of Stalin's regime. If a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Communist like Winston Churchill can understand this, surely Sean McMeekin and present-day conservatives can.
Read
September 16, 2023As a twenty-something man of the right, I cringe when rightwing boomers disparage Stalin. Their inability to appreciate Stalin’s tenacity and political ruthlessness points to the essential problem with conservatism: it’s weak, unsure of itself, feminine, non-aggressive. Above all, it’s unable to realize its political objectives—unless its objectives are preserving leftist victories.
Contrast the milquetoast, ineffectual nature of the Republican Party with Stalin. He orchestrated show trails to purge his political enemies, liquidated any opposition, and sent the rest to the gulag. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is a testament to Stalin’s statesmanship. Statesmanship here is defined as the ability to wield power and silence opposition, both of which translate into an ability to effectuate the party’s political will, as well as the ability to architect a regime of terror for political enemies.
Stalin got the better of our paraplegic President, effectively forcing the US to industrialize the USSR, all the while conducting intensive and extensive espionage against the US. He had a Soviet mole (Henry Dexter White, Jewish) in the FDR admin that mastermind the failure of US-Japanese diplomatic relations, virtually ensuring that Japan would attack the US, which freed up Stalin from having to fight a two-front war against Japan and Germany.
This is precisely the political ruthlessness and mendacity that needs to invigorate the Republican Party given what’s at stake. White births were, for the first time, less than 50% of all births in 2020. In 2022, there were 3 million illegal boarder crossings, doubtless hastening the year 2045, the year when the US is projected to be a majority minority nation. We are watching our demographic erasure. Extrapolate forward the intensification of anti-white grievance, hostility, and DEI efforts 30 years. It’s not inconceivable that you get something akin to the re-africanization of South Africa. If we don’t want a “kill-the-Boer!” social justice agenda to be left for our kids to deal with, I suggest the right can learn much from Stalin.
Contrast the milquetoast, ineffectual nature of the Republican Party with Stalin. He orchestrated show trails to purge his political enemies, liquidated any opposition, and sent the rest to the gulag. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is a testament to Stalin’s statesmanship. Statesmanship here is defined as the ability to wield power and silence opposition, both of which translate into an ability to effectuate the party’s political will, as well as the ability to architect a regime of terror for political enemies.
Stalin got the better of our paraplegic President, effectively forcing the US to industrialize the USSR, all the while conducting intensive and extensive espionage against the US. He had a Soviet mole (Henry Dexter White, Jewish) in the FDR admin that mastermind the failure of US-Japanese diplomatic relations, virtually ensuring that Japan would attack the US, which freed up Stalin from having to fight a two-front war against Japan and Germany.
This is precisely the political ruthlessness and mendacity that needs to invigorate the Republican Party given what’s at stake. White births were, for the first time, less than 50% of all births in 2020. In 2022, there were 3 million illegal boarder crossings, doubtless hastening the year 2045, the year when the US is projected to be a majority minority nation. We are watching our demographic erasure. Extrapolate forward the intensification of anti-white grievance, hostility, and DEI efforts 30 years. It’s not inconceivable that you get something akin to the re-africanization of South Africa. If we don’t want a “kill-the-Boer!” social justice agenda to be left for our kids to deal with, I suggest the right can learn much from Stalin.
February 26, 2021
Sean McMeekin's Stalin's war is a lengthy but thoroughly fascinating revisionist analysis of the Russian dictator's role and responsibilities within the gigantic spiderweb of WWII.
It is unquestionable today that Josef Stalin was the lone actor who allowed Hitler to unleash his powerful military firepower upon Europe in 1939 after signing the Brest-Litovsk non-aggression pact, allaying the latter's fears of a possible war on two fronts. There is no doubt that Stalin was as much to blame as Hitler was for setting the house on fire.
But by early 1940, Josef seemed to have been taken unawares by the speed of the German successes and he started to doubt Russia's abilities to control the Teutonic firewall raging across the continent. Unfortunately he had only himself to blame. If Stalin hadn't purged the top Russian military ranks in the 30s, his armed forces would have been better prepared to deal with the catastrophic situation Hitler created. His actions before the war definitely weakened Russia's abilities to mount any sweeping operations against Germany worth writing home about. The tide only changed when the Germans were stupid enough to invade Russia with all the tragic consequences we all know so well...
It's only after the Hitlerian debacle in Russia that Stalin finally emerged as a powerful player to be reckoned with. He started to put forward his grand diplomatic vision for a postwar Soviet Union and its place among the winners. From the 1943 conference in Theran to Yalta & Postdam two years later, he never stop to put forward a bullying diplomatic approach that Roosevelt & Churchill had to eventually accept. It definitely secured an important place to the Soviet Union on the world stage after 1945 and paved the way towards the Cold War. Stalin won the day.
This book is a brilliant study about Russia during WWII and a well researched look at world diplomacy at the end of the conflict and the chaotic birth of a new world order. Muchas Gracias Mr. McMeekin for the wonderful hours I spent with your book👍👍
Many thanks to Netgalley and Basic Books for giving me the opportunity to read this wonderful book prior to its release date
It is unquestionable today that Josef Stalin was the lone actor who allowed Hitler to unleash his powerful military firepower upon Europe in 1939 after signing the Brest-Litovsk non-aggression pact, allaying the latter's fears of a possible war on two fronts. There is no doubt that Stalin was as much to blame as Hitler was for setting the house on fire.
But by early 1940, Josef seemed to have been taken unawares by the speed of the German successes and he started to doubt Russia's abilities to control the Teutonic firewall raging across the continent. Unfortunately he had only himself to blame. If Stalin hadn't purged the top Russian military ranks in the 30s, his armed forces would have been better prepared to deal with the catastrophic situation Hitler created. His actions before the war definitely weakened Russia's abilities to mount any sweeping operations against Germany worth writing home about. The tide only changed when the Germans were stupid enough to invade Russia with all the tragic consequences we all know so well...
It's only after the Hitlerian debacle in Russia that Stalin finally emerged as a powerful player to be reckoned with. He started to put forward his grand diplomatic vision for a postwar Soviet Union and its place among the winners. From the 1943 conference in Theran to Yalta & Postdam two years later, he never stop to put forward a bullying diplomatic approach that Roosevelt & Churchill had to eventually accept. It definitely secured an important place to the Soviet Union on the world stage after 1945 and paved the way towards the Cold War. Stalin won the day.
This book is a brilliant study about Russia during WWII and a well researched look at world diplomacy at the end of the conflict and the chaotic birth of a new world order. Muchas Gracias Mr. McMeekin for the wonderful hours I spent with your book👍👍
Many thanks to Netgalley and Basic Books for giving me the opportunity to read this wonderful book prior to its release date
February 17, 2024
“HOLY MOTHER OF GOD!!!”
This tremendously shocking book had me saying that to myself over and over and over again.
Back when I was a kid (in 1970s middle America), I was an avid student of all things World War II: The bombing campaign over Germany, the desert campaigns in Africa, island hopping in the Pacific, the naval war in the Pacific, the siege of Stalingrad, the submarine war in the North Atlantic, Barbarossa, Britain’s Finest Hour, D-Day, the Bulge, Patton, and on and on. My focus was on the fighting, and primarily involving American/UK vs. Germany or America vs. Japan. Of course, I knew that Russian losses were high and Hitler made a grave error in attacking the USSR, but the Germany vs. USSR war was always shrouded in mystery to me. For example, why Hitler attacked in the first place, and why Russia was so weak, to later become strong?
Well, it is a mystery no more. Hitler went after the Soviets before the Soviets could go after Germany, because, as shown in this book, Stalin/Russia was as land hungry as Hitler/Germany ever was. At the outset, Stalin crushed the Baltic States, squeezed Finland, and grabbed eastern Poland, eastern Romania, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. And the Russian army looted and pillaged like berserk marauders everywhere they invaded, which explains why the Russians were more feared than the Germans (see also War Diaries, 1939–1945/).
But that is not all. Far, far from it. And because they implicate the role of America and the fate of the world after WWII, these next points are what got me to muttering as I did.
And/but those are just the highlights. Also, we learn that the Russians were lousy soldiers and were outclassed by the German Army constantly, even on their own soil. And, despite sitting on a vast wonderland of excellent raw materials, Russian industry could not produce the materials they needed to save their lives. Supplies from America and Britain saved them. And, oh, it seems that the Russians lied and cheated and spread propaganda the whole way about everything, as if nothing mattered, and there was no tomorrow. (So … pretty much the same as today.)
This was a great, eye-opening read. Highly recommend.
Cap Out
This tremendously shocking book had me saying that to myself over and over and over again.
Back when I was a kid (in 1970s middle America), I was an avid student of all things World War II: The bombing campaign over Germany, the desert campaigns in Africa, island hopping in the Pacific, the naval war in the Pacific, the siege of Stalingrad, the submarine war in the North Atlantic, Barbarossa, Britain’s Finest Hour, D-Day, the Bulge, Patton, and on and on. My focus was on the fighting, and primarily involving American/UK vs. Germany or America vs. Japan. Of course, I knew that Russian losses were high and Hitler made a grave error in attacking the USSR, but the Germany vs. USSR war was always shrouded in mystery to me. For example, why Hitler attacked in the first place, and why Russia was so weak, to later become strong?
Well, it is a mystery no more. Hitler went after the Soviets before the Soviets could go after Germany, because, as shown in this book, Stalin/Russia was as land hungry as Hitler/Germany ever was. At the outset, Stalin crushed the Baltic States, squeezed Finland, and grabbed eastern Poland, eastern Romania, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. And the Russian army looted and pillaged like berserk marauders everywhere they invaded, which explains why the Russians were more feared than the Germans (see also War Diaries, 1939–1945/).
But that is not all. Far, far from it. And because they implicate the role of America and the fate of the world after WWII, these next points are what got me to muttering as I did.
And/but those are just the highlights. Also, we learn that the Russians were lousy soldiers and were outclassed by the German Army constantly, even on their own soil. And, despite sitting on a vast wonderland of excellent raw materials, Russian industry could not produce the materials they needed to save their lives. Supplies from America and Britain saved them. And, oh, it seems that the Russians lied and cheated and spread propaganda the whole way about everything, as if nothing mattered, and there was no tomorrow. (So … pretty much the same as today.)
This was a great, eye-opening read. Highly recommend.
Cap Out
November 26, 2021
An interesting polemical argument, but not one that I am inclined to endorse. This is one of those books that is fascinating to read, largely because you want to toss it at the wall every few minutes. I cannot in good conscience say that I enjoyed this book, but if you want a relatively lengthy bout of entertainment, this will do. I think this book is rather a matter of personal opinion rather than history.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary copy. All opinions are my own.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary copy. All opinions are my own.
October 7, 2021
Awful, very boring. Made ww2 into an oversimplified zero sum game between Hitler and Stalin. Actually quoted widely discredited, self serving third reich generals as sources! Waste of time, nothing new, like reading a Nazi memoir from the 70’s.
December 2, 2021
https://sarahsdeepdives.blogspot.com/...
I have read this book twice, and I’ve put off reviewing it both times until now. The reason for the delay isn’t that grand. It’s nothing that will impress you. This is just one of those books I don’t quite know how to review. One big reason for that is because, with all things history, Stalin is one of my obsessions. The guy was just so… Stalin. So much of history hinged on him, and he was such a huge player on the global stage, but for various reasons, we don’t hear a whole lot about him in the west.
I think, at this point, I’ve read at least fifteen Stalin biographies, and countless books about his various purges, and other pivotal things that took place while he was in power. I mean, when I say the guy fascinates me, I mean it. I don’t admire him, but I find the dynamics of his particular brand of power absolutely captivating.
So when I saw this book, I knew I had to read it. World War II is also interesting to me, probably right below Stalin on my personal interest level chart, but it’s hard to get any really good accounts of the Eastern Front of World War II. In school, we learned all about what happened in England and France, but it wasn’t until I was older, doing my own nonfiction reading in my free time, that I learned about the true meat and potatoes of World War II. The power struggle between Stalin and Hitler, the fact that the real heart of that particular part of the global conflict was in neither France nor England, but in the Eastern European borderlands where a war of ideology was waged between nationalists and communists.
Stalin’s War is one of those rare books that scratched an intellectual itch as nothing else has. A lot is going on in this book, but the Soviet policies in the 1920s and 1930s were fascinating, and really helped me understand how and why Stalin felt he needed to position himself on the global stage in a certain way in response to some of the European conflicts and changes happening nearby, leading up to 1939. It gave a bit of context for the Nazi-Soviet pact, which has always had a lot of attention because it was so unexpected. However, this book, with all its context and information, does show that Stalin wasn’t, perhaps, as hoodwinked and surprised by Hitler as popular belief might have it. According to this book, Stalin wasn’t surprised by Hitler acting against the pact. Rather than being blindsided, McMeekin argues that Stalin knew Hitler would invade eventually, and he prepared for that very thing to happen, but the Soviet army, for all its size, was just not nearly as good at mobile warfare as the Nazis.
This book, in some ways, was a rude awakening. There were a lot of things I didn’t know before reading it that was detailed here. For example, how Stalin and Hitler learned from each other in the 1930s, even occasionally collaborating and carefully staying out of each other’s ways. Stalin’s antisemitism nearly rivaled Hitler’s, and some of his baser policies and actions in that regard are covered as well. Stalin’s various propaganda campaigns are covered here, as well as their purpose. Stalin’s puppet governments in Finland, his gambit with Poland, and various other important political moments are detailed, as well as Churchill and Stalin’s conference when Churchill offered Stalin a good chunk of the Balkans, and the Yalta conference, and many other important political moments.
The United States and allied involvement in World War II is covered quite extensively, and McMeekin doesn’t paint everyone in the best light, though I quickly learned I enjoyed having the veneer polished off some of these larger-than-life historical figures. How a lot of the things that happened during World War II ended up playing out after the dust settled, including some policy decisions across the board that lead to the Cold War was absolutely fascinating. History is not a vacuum, and I really appreciated McMeekin’s ability to connect the dots and show just how the dominos fell. The author comes across as strictly anti-communist, but he has done his research, and he has a very balanced way of presenting historical figures and events in a light that feels both justified and not overly favorable or cruel. Balance, perhaps, is one thing a lot of books on this particular topic, featuring these particular men, lacks, and I think McMeekin did an amazing job here.
Mostly what I took away from reading this book was how much Stalin was doing without anyone noticing, or if they noticed, they sort of whistled and turned their back on him in an “Oh, don’t look at Stalin, just let him do his thing” kind of way. There was just so much going on in Stalin’s political office that is never really covered by many of the popular World War II books. From setting up puppet governments to allying himself with the right people and then using those alliances to his gains, to the lying and the falsifying information, to the manipulations, the gambles, and more. Stalin was playing the long game. He was at the center of all of it, and due to various political and propaganda reasons, we just don’t see that much of this side of the war in the West.
If nothing else, this book underscored my belief that Stalin was perhaps one of the most powerful, adept manipulators in modern history. The guy just knew how to work people.
McMeekin comes to a few very interesting, and I’d say controversial conclusions. First, he determines that World War II was probably one of the few historical wars that were absolutely justified and had to happen. That, I think, is inarguable. Secondly, however, he determines the results of the war weren’t exactly as clear-cut as we seem to think they are. If the war was fought to save Eastern Europe, it failed. If the war in Asia was over Manchuria, Stalin ended up gaining territory. If the war was to save Western Europe, it could have likely been achieved with negotiations and a lower death toll. In the end, no matter how you cut it, for at least a while, Stalin was the man behind the curtain, manipulating events, and ultimately, McMeekin argues, he came out the victor.
I have read this book twice, and I’ve put off reviewing it both times until now. The reason for the delay isn’t that grand. It’s nothing that will impress you. This is just one of those books I don’t quite know how to review. One big reason for that is because, with all things history, Stalin is one of my obsessions. The guy was just so… Stalin. So much of history hinged on him, and he was such a huge player on the global stage, but for various reasons, we don’t hear a whole lot about him in the west.
I think, at this point, I’ve read at least fifteen Stalin biographies, and countless books about his various purges, and other pivotal things that took place while he was in power. I mean, when I say the guy fascinates me, I mean it. I don’t admire him, but I find the dynamics of his particular brand of power absolutely captivating.
So when I saw this book, I knew I had to read it. World War II is also interesting to me, probably right below Stalin on my personal interest level chart, but it’s hard to get any really good accounts of the Eastern Front of World War II. In school, we learned all about what happened in England and France, but it wasn’t until I was older, doing my own nonfiction reading in my free time, that I learned about the true meat and potatoes of World War II. The power struggle between Stalin and Hitler, the fact that the real heart of that particular part of the global conflict was in neither France nor England, but in the Eastern European borderlands where a war of ideology was waged between nationalists and communists.
Stalin’s War is one of those rare books that scratched an intellectual itch as nothing else has. A lot is going on in this book, but the Soviet policies in the 1920s and 1930s were fascinating, and really helped me understand how and why Stalin felt he needed to position himself on the global stage in a certain way in response to some of the European conflicts and changes happening nearby, leading up to 1939. It gave a bit of context for the Nazi-Soviet pact, which has always had a lot of attention because it was so unexpected. However, this book, with all its context and information, does show that Stalin wasn’t, perhaps, as hoodwinked and surprised by Hitler as popular belief might have it. According to this book, Stalin wasn’t surprised by Hitler acting against the pact. Rather than being blindsided, McMeekin argues that Stalin knew Hitler would invade eventually, and he prepared for that very thing to happen, but the Soviet army, for all its size, was just not nearly as good at mobile warfare as the Nazis.
This book, in some ways, was a rude awakening. There were a lot of things I didn’t know before reading it that was detailed here. For example, how Stalin and Hitler learned from each other in the 1930s, even occasionally collaborating and carefully staying out of each other’s ways. Stalin’s antisemitism nearly rivaled Hitler’s, and some of his baser policies and actions in that regard are covered as well. Stalin’s various propaganda campaigns are covered here, as well as their purpose. Stalin’s puppet governments in Finland, his gambit with Poland, and various other important political moments are detailed, as well as Churchill and Stalin’s conference when Churchill offered Stalin a good chunk of the Balkans, and the Yalta conference, and many other important political moments.
The United States and allied involvement in World War II is covered quite extensively, and McMeekin doesn’t paint everyone in the best light, though I quickly learned I enjoyed having the veneer polished off some of these larger-than-life historical figures. How a lot of the things that happened during World War II ended up playing out after the dust settled, including some policy decisions across the board that lead to the Cold War was absolutely fascinating. History is not a vacuum, and I really appreciated McMeekin’s ability to connect the dots and show just how the dominos fell. The author comes across as strictly anti-communist, but he has done his research, and he has a very balanced way of presenting historical figures and events in a light that feels both justified and not overly favorable or cruel. Balance, perhaps, is one thing a lot of books on this particular topic, featuring these particular men, lacks, and I think McMeekin did an amazing job here.
Mostly what I took away from reading this book was how much Stalin was doing without anyone noticing, or if they noticed, they sort of whistled and turned their back on him in an “Oh, don’t look at Stalin, just let him do his thing” kind of way. There was just so much going on in Stalin’s political office that is never really covered by many of the popular World War II books. From setting up puppet governments to allying himself with the right people and then using those alliances to his gains, to the lying and the falsifying information, to the manipulations, the gambles, and more. Stalin was playing the long game. He was at the center of all of it, and due to various political and propaganda reasons, we just don’t see that much of this side of the war in the West.
If nothing else, this book underscored my belief that Stalin was perhaps one of the most powerful, adept manipulators in modern history. The guy just knew how to work people.
McMeekin comes to a few very interesting, and I’d say controversial conclusions. First, he determines that World War II was probably one of the few historical wars that were absolutely justified and had to happen. That, I think, is inarguable. Secondly, however, he determines the results of the war weren’t exactly as clear-cut as we seem to think they are. If the war was fought to save Eastern Europe, it failed. If the war in Asia was over Manchuria, Stalin ended up gaining territory. If the war was to save Western Europe, it could have likely been achieved with negotiations and a lower death toll. In the end, no matter how you cut it, for at least a while, Stalin was the man behind the curtain, manipulating events, and ultimately, McMeekin argues, he came out the victor.
October 4, 2021
Title is exactly correct, if "new" means "fake." At a minimum, aren't historians supposed to at least mention (and refute) alternative interpretations? If you're going to paint Roosevelt as a naive dupe, Churchill as a master betrayer of all he claimed to value, and Stalin as an amazing cryptic crossword, you short change the reader by NOT at least genuflecting to alternative explanations for their behavior. What did they think they were doing?
April 30, 2024
I devoured this book. It is a must read, even if I don't think the Soviets were quite as big a winners considering the devastation. Maybe it was not a pyrrhic victory but the price was astoundingly high. And Stalin, while he certainly was an orthodox Leninist, he appears more here as a master of realpolitik who played Churchill for a dupe and used FDR as a kind of useful idiot. There are certainly some lapses in the research. However, perhaps the best part of the book is crafting a new view and narrative that is away from the one we typically get of Japan, Italy, and particularly Germany ramping up tensions and grabbing land until France and Britain take a stand. The narrative always had problems and McMeekin blows that up.
December 7, 2022
This book is an eye opener and I'm happy to have heard it. Easy 5 stars.
It gets into excruciating detail about how feckless Roosevelt and Churchill were when dealing with Stalin. Bending over backwards while giving him unconditional support. At best they were naive, at worst complicit in some of his crimes. Disastrous foreign policy decisions ensured that even if the war was won, the peace would be lost in central/eastern Europe and parts of Asia. This book is an excellent resource.
It gets into excruciating detail about how feckless Roosevelt and Churchill were when dealing with Stalin. Bending over backwards while giving him unconditional support. At best they were naive, at worst complicit in some of his crimes. Disastrous foreign policy decisions ensured that even if the war was won, the peace would be lost in central/eastern Europe and parts of Asia. This book is an excellent resource.
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