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
Results 1-5 of 58
... occupation of the Baltic States in summer 1940 led to the deportation of several hundred thousand Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. After the outbreak of the Soviet–German war in June 1941 Stalin's ethnic cleansing reached new ...
... occupation regime in Japan, the control of atomic energy – most worrying for Stalin were developments on the ideological front. During the war the Soviet Union, the Red Army and Stalin's leadership had received exemplary and laudatory ...
... occupation zones. Stalin's fears that the western zones of Germany would become the mainstay of an anti-Soviet bloc prompted him to provoke the first great crisis of the cold war – the Berlin airlift of 1948–1949. Berlin had been ...
... occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and were prompted by the German threat to Poland, Romania and other East European states. In April the Soviets proposed a full-blown triple alliance between Britain, France and the USSR – a ...
... occupation of these territories in September 1939 the Politburo ordered an election campaign under the slogans of the establishment of Soviet power and the reunification of the eastern and western regions of Belorussia and the Ukraine ...
Contents
Stalin versus Hitler | |
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 |