Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953This breakthrough book provides a detailed reconstruction of Stalin's leadership from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 to his death in 1953. Making use of a wealth of new material from Russian archives, Geoffrey Roberts challenges a long list of standard perceptions of Stalin: his qualities as a leader; his relationships with his own generals and with other great world leaders; his foreign policy; and his role in instigating the Cold War. While frankly exploring the full extent of Stalin's brutalities and their impact on the Soviet people, Roberts also uncovers evidence leading to the stunning conclusion that Stalin was both the greatest military leader of the twentieth century and a remarkable politician who sought to avoid the Cold War and establish a long-term detente with the capitalist world. By means of an integrated military, political, and diplomatic narrative, the author draws a sustained and compelling personal portrait of the Soviet leader. The resulting picture is fascinating and contradictory, and it will inevitably change the way we understand Stalin and his place in history. Roberts depicts a despot who helped save the world for democracy, a personal charmer who disciplined mercilessly, a utopian ideologue who could be a practical realist, and a warlord who undertook the role of architect of post-war peace. |
From inside the book
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... According to cult mythology Stalin was not just the great helmsman of the Soviet state, the political genius who had led his country to victory in war and to superpower status in peace, but the 'father of the peoples'.3 He was, the ...
... According to this view the main reason for the initial Soviet defeats was that the Red Army was deployed for attack, not defence. The Soviet military were not so much caught napping as caught in the middle of preparations for their own ...
... according to Stalin, was the target of imperialist intrigue because it was a threatening, alternative social system to capitalism that had to be subverted by espionage, sabotage and murderous conspiracies directed against its communist ...
... According to one estimate, up to a fifth of those arrested and a third of those executed during the Yezhovshchina were members of such ethnic minorities.65 According to another estimate 800,000 non-Russians were deported to Soviet ...
... According to Stalin, the policy of non-intervention means conniving at aggression, giving free rein to war ... The policy of non-intervention reveals an eagerness, a desire, not to hinder the aggressors in their nefarious work: not to ...
Contents
Stalin and his Generals | |
Stalin Churchill and Roosevelt | |
Stalins Year of Victories | |
Stalins Aims in Germany and Eastern Europe | |
Stalin Truman and the End of the Second World | |
Stalin and the Origins of the Cold | |
The Domestic Context of Stalins Postwar Foreign Policy | |
Stalin Embattled | |
Stalin in the Court of History | |
Select Bibliography | 1957 |
Index | 1975 |