Worse than Hitler? How Stalin orchestrated World War II.
Adolf Hitler looms largest in the pantheon of evildoers. As Sean McMeekin notes in his massive and indispensable new book 鈥淪talin鈥檚 War: A New History of World War II,鈥� 鈥淗itler still haunts our nightmares as an all-purpose bogeyman, with remembrance of the horrors he unleashed uniting us in denunciation of Fascism, anti-Semitism, racism, and the other evils of Nazism.鈥澛營n the West, Hitler and the Nazis occupy the farthest reaches of聽human depravity: You鈥檙e bad, you鈥檙e really bad, and then, finally, you鈥檙e Hitler.聽
As McMeekin points out, the farther East the focus shifts, the more Joseph Stalin and Soviet Russia dominate the picture. McMeekin is absolutely right when he writes that the Allied victory in World War II brought only more pain 鈥� in the form of conquest and civil war 鈥� in Eastern Europe and northern Asia. In those areas, Stalin鈥檚 鈥減ostwar wars鈥� netted millions of new forced laborers for Soviet industries from Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, Romania, Ukraine, and Hungary 鈥� plus, after 1945, nearly a million Japanese, Mongolians, and Koreans. 鈥淭hus began,鈥� McMeekin writes, 鈥渁 renewed period of Soviet terror, fed by increasing paranoia about Jews and other pro-Western cosmopolitans, that would last until Stalin鈥檚 death in 1953.鈥澛�
By any accounting, the number of innocent people Stalin caused to be murdered, particularly in the decade after the war, dwarfs that of Hitler鈥檚 victims, military or civilian. And as so many books have done before it, 鈥淪talin鈥檚 War鈥� makes abundantly clear that the dictator was, if anything, even more coldly reptilian than Hitler. Stalin's duplicity and rapacity were exercised on a scale not seen in the world since Genghis Khan, and yet for an entire generation subsisting on Western-produced wartime propaganda, he was stern-but-kindly 鈥淯ncle Joe,鈥� sending millions of his people to the fight.
If any vestige of this propaganda still exists, 鈥淪talin鈥檚 War鈥� should see it soundly off the stage. There are new books every year that promise 鈥渁 new history鈥� of such a well-studied subject as World War II, but McMeekin actually delivers on that promise. The war, he asserts, had a protagonist whose armies fought in both Asia and Europe on an epic scale that spanned the whole Eurasian continent, who participated in the conquest of the Axis powers and enormously enlarged his own empire in the process. 鈥淚n all these ways,鈥� he writes, 鈥渋t was not Hitler鈥檚, but Stalin鈥檚 war.鈥澛�
The inclusion of the key battlegrounds of Asia lends an added element of heft to McMeekin鈥檚 thesis. The author鈥檚 extensive use of Soviet archives (the book has 100 pages of often wonderfully discursive endnotes) informs a darkly fascinating look at Stalin鈥檚 dealings with Chiang Kai-shek鈥檚 government in China, leading to the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance signed in August of 1945 and encompassing the West鈥檚 increased awareness of Soviet atrocities in Manchuria. Stalin鈥檚 machinations in the Far East 鈥� largely hidden from his titular allies U.S. President Harry Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill 鈥� lay bare an agenda entirely characterized by tyranny and conquest, an agenda in which fighting Hitler was a means to gain territory and plunder, a wolf fighting a wolf not for a world free of wolves but for unimpeded preying on the sheep.
The anger animating 鈥淪talin鈥檚 War鈥� is about Western complicity: Once the Soviet Union seemed to join the Allied cause, there was scarcely anything Stalin could ask of those allies that would be denied him. As McMeekin writes, in the last 14 months of the Pacific war the Soviets received more than 4 million long (metric) tons of war mat茅riel for Stalin鈥檚 Far Eastern armies, including 870,000 long tons of petroleum 鈥� roughly equal to the entire amount shipped to Russia for help in fighting the Nazis.聽
And as McMeekin notes, Stalin鈥檚 nature was clear all along. 鈥淚f there were any lingering doubts in London and Washington about Stalin鈥檚 intentions for the soon-to-be-conquered peoples of Europe,鈥� McMeekin writes, 鈥渢hese should have been dispelled by his behavior as the Red Army, riding on the trucks and rubber tires of lend-lease, powered into formerly (and soon again) occupied Poland in the second half of 1944.鈥澛�
At the end of the war, Churchill instructed his chiefs of staff to prepare a plan for attacking Soviet forces in Eastern Europe (his generals called it 鈥淥peration Unthinkable鈥�), but of course nothing like it was ever done. Instead, Stalin was allowed almost total victory in a war he had largely engineered for his own benefit. Sean McMeekin has done a fantastic job telling that war鈥檚 story.聽
