![]() That Stalin butchered and enslaved millions for cracked ideological reasons, or to subdue his oscillating paranoias, are hardly revisionist insights nor is the serious reader ignorant of the Soviet invasion of Finland (1939), or the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which dismembered Eastern Europe into Soviet and Nazi “spheres of influence,” to be consolidated through wars of aggression. The premises McMeekin uses to defend these striking conclusions are quite pedestrian. He makes three core contentions in his combative and well-written Stalin’s War: that Stalin was at least as responsible for the outbreak of war as was Hitler that the relative burden shouldered by the Red Army during the war has been exaggerated by historians who overlook the critical sacrifice of America through its Lend-Lease shipments of foodstuffs and armaments to the Soviet Union and that the evils of the Soviet Union were equivalent to those of Nazism. But the revisionist historian Sean McMeekin seeks to diminish it. This narrative is distinguished among nationalistic myths in that many historians regard it as substantially true. Not only did the soldiers of the Red Army overpower an uncommonly depraved enemy, but they withstood historic sufferings (approximately 30 million casualties) to do so, while their incidental Anglo-American Allies played a relatively marginal role in the fighting and dying. To most of them, the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) is not only a matter of psychological interest (in that their own family members fought, suffered, and died in that struggle), but a moral achievement. ![]() The peoples of the Russian Federation-despite the imperishable cynicism that so many express on matters political-still take a romantic pride in the role their families and nation played in vanquishing Nazism. Stalin’s War: A New History of WWII, by Sean McMeekin (Basic Books: 2021), 864 pages. ![]()
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