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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... continued to be criticised in the postKhrushchev era, but negative assessments were balanced by a positive appraisal of his achievements, particularly his role in the socialist industrialisation of the USSR.7 In the late 1980s a new ...
... continued to believe that war could and would be delayed until 1942. It was this miscalculation that led him to restrain Soviet military mobilisation until the very last minute. Only when Hitler's armies were flooding across Soviet ...
... continued until the outbreak of war with Germany later that year. Stalin's purge of the armed forces was not an isolated phenomenon. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the head of the Leningrad Communist Party, in December 1934 ...
... continued his ethnopolitical cleansing of borderland populations. After the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, 400,000 ethnic Poles were arrested, deported and/or executed; among those shot were 20,000 Polish POWs – victims of ...
... continued coexistence and co-operation. The reason for Stalin's public moderation and reticence was, quite simply, that he did not want a cold war with the west and hoped for continued negotiations with Britain and the.
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 |