Also might provide a forced and impromptu reason, or facetious moonshot, for why Russia struggles so haplessly against Ukraine, compared to rolling along at the end of WWII. No gravy train of aid and weapons from America.
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https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-revie...alins-war/
EXCERPTS: Veteran historian McMeekin states bluntly that while Hitler wanted war, Stalin wanted it more. A loyal Marxist, he had no doubt that capitalist nations—among which he included Nazi Germany—were doomed. According to the author, throughout the 1930s, as war became more likely, Stalin worked to ensure that it would leave his enemies exhausted and ripe for revolution.
The 1939 nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany seemed a dazzling coup for both nations, but Stalin got greedy. Piggybacking on Hitler’s early victories, he snatched as much territory as Nazi Germany. As a result, several hundred miles of buffer between the Soviet Union and Germany disappeared, making Hitler’s 1941 surprise attack possible.
[...] McMeekin ... shows less sympathy than most to Stalin’s insults and demands for aid from the Allies and none whatsoever for Soviet representatives vacuuming up America’s patents, technology, and services. The author maintains that Nazism vanished in 1945, but “the Soviet legacy lives on in the Communist governments of China, North Korea, and Vietnam, countries on which Hitler’s short-lived Reich left not even a shadow.”
He adds that Allied efforts to cultivate Stalin before Hitler’s invasion failed, and the massive American support afterward was entirely selfish.
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https://www.historynet.com/stalins-war-book-review/
EXCERPT: Stalin’s denunciation of Allied leaders for not immediately flinging their troops against the Wehrmacht was not unreasonable. Just as reasonable, our military—perhaps Britain’s more than that of the United States—refused to invade Europe until fully prepared, a process that took three years.
Some historians fume at Stalin’s ingratitude at our massive aid, though it was designed to keep Russia fighting and not simple charity. He ignored Allied outrage as he annexed his army’s conquests, but this demonstrated no more intelligence than his prewar decisions. The Eastern European satellites, which proved unnecessary buffers against a resurgent Germany, were an expensive drain on Stalin’s clunky command economy.
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/a...-world-war
EXCERPTS: The revisionist take starts with the title. McMeekin claims that there is more reason to call the second world war Stalin’s war than Hitler’s. Why is that? One explanation is that when you look at the war from the perspective of its end rather than its beginning, it is Stalin who emerges as the main beneficiary. [...] Stalin, with his troops occupying parts of eastern Europe and fighting the Japanese in Mongolia at the beginning of the war, and his armies marching into central Europe and China’s Manchuria at its end, is a more convincing world figure than Hitler.
[...] McMeekin’s portrayal of Stalin as the pre-eminent figure of the war does not come without cost. The Soviet dictator emerges as much more powerful than is suggested by his dismal diplomatic and military performance in the early stages of the war or by his inability to negotiate any geopolitical preferences with the western allies at Yalta beyond the territories already occupied by the Red Army first in 1939-40 and then in 1944-45. The image of Stalin as consistently dominant in the war is achieved by projecting the power he acquired at the end of the conflict back into the war years as a whole.
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https://japan-forward.com/book-review-st...-mcmeekin/
McMeekin’s volume suggests in a sense that Marshal Stalin did win the war in Europe, through cold-bloodedness and treachery. Ruthlessness alone, however, did not win the war—Stalin got all the weapons and gear he needed for his army to fight ーand then someー from Roosevelt, leaving scraps for the British and American militaries to fight over.
With American-made weapons, the Red Army chased the Germans out of Russia and plowed through Eastern and Central Europe, not stopping until it devoured Berlin. At the end of the war, Americans in Europe in effect found themselves in a face-off against an army of their own creation.
How did the Soviets, following the opening of Operation Barbarossa ー cut off from critical German industrial imports and with significant losses to their own industrial, mineral, and agricultural resourcesー manage to eventually topple the “fascist Germans”? McMeekin points out — repeatedly — that Red Army fortunes were based entirely on American largess.
What did they get from Roosevelt? Ammunition, individual and crew-served weapons, uniforms, boots, tanks, trucks, ships, airplanes, food (including Spam), scarce strategic minerals, and even whole factories.
Soviet agents, both openly and covertly, traipsed through American industries and acquired American technical and manufacturing know-how, including America’s nuclear weapons project.
An elaborate supply system set up by the British and Americans, at significant cost and effort, continuously fed the Soviet war machine.
Roosevelt acquiesced to every one of Stalin’s demands, bypassing his own cabinet and Congressional oversight, and ignoring advice from advisors who were leery of Soviet intentions.
[...] it was President Roosevelt who invited Stalin to tear off pieces of Japan in exchange for a vague promise. The Soviets were, furthermore, armed with American-built weapons when they occupied the Northern Territories. It is the height of historical irony that the most deadly of Japan’s neighbors today, North Korea and Communist China, are products of America’s slavish devotion to Stalin.
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https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books...-1.4551057
EXCERPTS: Sean McMeekin’s contention that the second World War was more Stalin’s war than Hitler’s has a long and dubious pedigree reaching back to the war-revolution conspiracy theory of the interwar years. According to this myth, Stalin plotted to precipitate a new world war in order to foment global revolution.
In truth, there was nothing Stalin feared more than a major war. While the first World War had enabled the Russian Revolution, that was followed by foreign military interventions which came close to strangling Bolshevism at birth. Stalin’s nightmare scenario was the revival of that anti-communist coalition. War did offer opportunities – and Stalin certainly took advantage of them – but war also posed an existential danger to the Soviet state.
So sparse is the evidence for the war-revolution hypothesis that McMeekin resorts to citing a blatant forgery: a document purporting to report on a speech Stalin supposedly made in August 1939 in which he spoke about the Sovietisation of Europe as a result of the war he intended to provoke. The document in question initially appeared in the French press shortly after the outbreak of war and was plainly propaganda designed to discredit Stalin at a time when he was collaborating with Hitler.
A legitimate piece of evidence cited by McMeekin are the private remarks made by Stalin in September 1939: “A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries. We see nothing wrong in their having a good fight and weakening each other. We can manoeuvre, pit one side against the other to set them fighting each other as fiercely as possible.”
But McMeekin lets his readers down by not quoting what Stalin also said: “We preferred agreements with the so-called democratic countries and therefore conducted negotiations. But the English and French wanted us for farmhands and at no cost.”
What these remarks actually show is that having failed to form an anti-Hitler coalition with Britain and France, Stalin instead opted for neutrality and the Nazi-Soviet pact, intended to further protect Russia from the consequences of war.
[...] This book will certainly enhance Prof McMeekin’s reputation as an ideologically-driven conservative historian. His fantastical speculation that standing up to Stalin would have produced a better outcome than standing up to Hitler may appeal to those who share his fervent anti-communism. More impartial readers will recoil from the book’s distortion of the complex and multi-faceted history of the second World War.
May 16, 2022 08:31 AM
(This post was last modified: May 16, 2022 08:34 AM by Kornee.)
