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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... regime in the 1940s. The result is the present book – a detailed and sustained study of Stalin's military and political leadership in the final and most important phase of his life and career. Baldly stated, my conclusions are threefold ...
... regime. But this book is not a catalogue of Stalin's crimes. Its goal is greater understanding of Stalin. As my colleague Mark Harrison has argued, we can undertake that task without fear of moral hazard and having achieved greater ...
... regime had defenders as well as detractors, particularly among those who argued that he had played an indispensable role in defeating the Nazis' attempt to impose their racist empire on Russia and Europe. By the early twenty-first ...
... regime offered new evidence and perspectives. Particularly valuable was the contribution of Soviet military memoirs.16 After 1956 these memoirs had been mainly devoted to embellishing and elaborating Khrushchev's critique of Stalin's ...
... such efforts from the population. There is a sense in which the Stalin cult was necessary to the Soviet war effort... revelations of the brutality of the wartime regime should not blind us to the fact that Stalin's grip on 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 |