A prize-winning historian reveals how Stalin—not Hitler—was the animating force of World War II in this major new history.
World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events.
A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin’s War is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the current world order..
This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism.
Stalin’s war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiel from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army.
McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain’s self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand.
So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary.
Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler.
Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east.
The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war.
That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin.
His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war.
But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended.
A prize-winning historian reveals how Stalin—not Hitler—was the animating force of World War II in this major new history.
World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events
