Historian Sean McMeekin’s Stalin’s War is a riveting, revisionist history of World War 2, drawing on previously-classified Soviet archives. It’s Stalin- rather than Hitler-centric and takes some of the luster off the Big Three.
McMeekin makes a persuasive case the Soviet Union won WW2, takes the lionized Churchill down a peg, and reveals FDR’s conduct as cringeworthy.
Stalin was cut from a different cloth. He bifocally and ruthlessly pursued current and post-war objectives. Russia under the cloak of the USSR finished the war a superpower and was the only major belligerent that gained territory and vassal states. And, the Soviets amassed enormous industrial assets and technology from US Lend-Lease gifts and by looting occupied lands. While the Soviet Union suffered horrendous losses, Stalin, hailed as the Vozhd (leader), who’d murdered millions of his own countrymen and conquered subjects, didn’t lose a wink of sleep over it.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain observed the Soviets didn’t share Western values, were “afraid of Germany and Japan, and would be delighted to see other people fight them.” Stalin said it was in the USSR’s interests that “war breaks out between the Reich and the capitalist Anglo-French bloc,” noting “everything should be done so that (the war) drags out as long as possible with the goal of weakening both sides.”
Stalin’s philosophy of weakening countries viewed as foes, prey, or situational and temporary allies, informed his policies.
Under the 1939 Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact, Europe’s two great evil-doers Hitler and Stalin agreed to carve up Eastern Europe. The Vozhd thought it would entice the Führer to attack Poland and provoke war with Britain and France.
Lenin’s successor got his wish.
Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany on the principle that it had invaded Poland. But after letting the Wehrmacht devastate Poland’s armed forces, jackal-like, the Red Army rushed in to seize more than half the country. Stalin was no less guilty of ending Poland’s sovereignty than the Führer. The Vozhd promptly shipped thousands of Poles off to camps, many for execution. He harbored a visceral hatred for the Poles which McMeekin speculates stemmed from their besting the Red Army in the 1919-20 Russo-Polish War. By June, 1941 the Soviets had murdered 500,000 in occupied Poland. Neither Britain nor France, however, declared war on the USSR.
After Poland’s fall, Stalin garrisoned, and later occupied, the Baltic States. In June, 1940 the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Romanian Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. By August 300,000 Romanians had been shipped off to the Gulag.
Before the Führer attacked the USSR, the Vozhd’s armies had seized territory from or swallowed whole Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, and Manchuria.
McMeekin notes Hitler refused Stalin’s demands for more territorial concessions from still independent countries between the jaws of the totalitarian rivals, while the US and UK acceded to his enslaving Eastern Europe.
After the Soviets invaded Finland in November, 1939, Britain considered bombing the Baku oil fields to deny Hitler’s and Stalin’s war machines oil. There’s an eerie parallel between 21st-century Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s attempt to conquer Ukraine, and the Vozhd’s invasion of Finland.
McMeekin comments wistfully that “the Finnish cause had the potential to transform the so-far desultory and hypocritical British-French resistance to Hitler alone into a principled war against armed aggression by both totalitarian regimes,” with the possibility of pulling Italy, Spain, and Japan in, with US support.
It was not to be.
Stalin overestimated the Anglo-French bloc’s armed forces and underestimated the Germans’ military prowess and elan. While the French army had more mobilized soldiers, tanks – many qualitatively superior, and artillery, Hitler’s generals steamrollered it in six weeks. Two days before France’s surrender Mussolini opportunistically declared war on France and Britain. That changed the calculus. Standing alone, Britain wasn’t in a position to take on the two great totalitarian powers and Fascist Italy.
Of Europe’s two great 20th-century monsters, Stalin was the more calculating, cautious, intellectual, and, ultimately, the more consequential. He and his malign protégées killed and subjugated far more people than Hitler.
The USSR’s enslavement of Eastern Europe lasted 46 years after the stake was driven into the heart of Hitlerism. With Putin’s panzers rolling over Ukraine, Eastern Europe is again at risk. In contrast, today Germany is a pacifistic – for its allies too pacifistic, democratic member of the West.
Stalin’s ambitions were global.
In the Far East when Imperial Japan gained ground against the Nationalist Chinese, he intervened to balance the contest, looking to put Mao in the pole position after the war. In 1939 in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol the Red Army bloodied the Japanese Kwantung Army, effectively ending its plans to invade Siberia.
In April, 1941 the Vozhd persuaded Tokyo to sign the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, and encouraged it to strike south against Britain and America. Influenced by Soviet agents like Harry Dexter White, the US pushed Japan toward war, a war which might not otherwise have been inevitable. He was far from the only Soviet agent and sympathizer influencing Anglo-American policies to Stalin’s benefit.
Before WW2 FDR sought improved relations with the Vozhd. In 1936 he replaced his Moscow ambassador and Stalin realist William Bullit with “a Soviet sympathizer” Joseph Davies. At Davies’ urging FDR purged the State Department’s Eastern European affairs division of hard-nosed Soviet experts.
The alliance of convenience between Nazi Germany and the Communist USSR was never going to last. The question was always who would strike first. In June, 1941 the Führer launched Operation Barbarossa. While the USSR had vastly more soldiers, and tanks, artillery, and aircraft, many qualitatively superior, the Wehrmacht blitzkrieg advanced rapidly on a broad front, inflicting massively-disproportionate casualties, captured millions of Red Army soldiers, and, but for winter and Western aid might have finished Stalin that year.
The Vozhd had assumed his eventual war would be with the weakened the victor of the struggle between Nazi Germany and the Anglo-French bloc.
McMeekin describes Churchill and FDR as intoxicated with Stalin. Roosevelt’s intoxication was more acute. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Churchill’s relief overcame his hostility to Bolshevism. FDR courted Stalin, adopting a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil mindset toward him, and denying him nothing. The Vozhd relentlessly pressed Roosevelt for and received ever-increasing aid, treated him roughly, and refused his meek requests.
After Pearl Harbor the US declared war on Japan. To Churchill’s and Stalin’s delight, the Führer promptly declared war on the sleeping giant America, notwithstanding that Japan refused to wage war on the USSR, with which he was engaged in a war of annihilation. It is inconceivable the Vozhd would have made such a rash monumental strategic blunder.
In Eastern Europe and China, the Vozhd supported his proxies, with the Red Army, arms, and by undermining Anglo-American support for competing anti-Communist anti-Axis forces.
Influenced by Soviet-sympathizing advisers and agents Churchill betrayed Serb royalist Draza Mihailovic and the Chetniks, who’d organized the initial resistance to the German occupation, for Stalin’s man Tito. Churchill and FDR pulled the rug out from under Stanislaw Mikolajczyk and the London Poles. Other than worrying about upsetting millions of Polish-American voters, Roosevelt was willing to feed Poland into the maw of Stalinism. Heroic Poles fought the Nazis and Soviets – the Soviets during and for several years after WW2. Poland lost a greater percent of its population than any other country, only to be crushed under the Bolshevik boot of oppression.
FDR hagiography paints him as the president who saved America from the Great Depression and the free world from Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy.
Burton Folsom Jr in New Deal or Raw Deal, Amity Shlaes in the Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, and Jim Powell in FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression persuasively contend contrary to popular history, that he prolonged and deepened the Great Depression.
McMeekin draws back the curtain on FDR the war leader. His feckless and fawning treatment of Stalin and decisions cost millions of lives, resulted in hundreds of millions of people being enslaved by Stalin, and ushered in the Cold War.
Anglo-American aid to Stalin was never conditioned on behavior. The Soviets were a cobelligerent only because of a shared enemy, not shared values or post-war objectives. Stalin’s naked imperial aggressions, atrocities, and interning US airmen as POWs, were clarion warnings.
The time to condition aid to Stalin to ensure a better post-war world was early, in 1942 or 1943, at the latest in 1944, always bearing in mind he was completely untrustworthy.
With Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Henry Kissinger’s quip about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq’s war with the Islamic Republic of Iran, it’s too bad they both can’t lose, is apropos. Then Senator Harry Truman expressed that sentiment on the Senate floor in 1941.
Hitler lost WW2. Perhaps there was no scenario where Stalin too would have lost WW2. However, he didn’t have to win. He didn’t have to be permitted to enslave Eastern Europe and install Communist regimes in China and North Korea.
While threatening to deny aid to Churchill if he didn’t bend the knee on policy, FDR refused to condition aid to Stalin.
He childishly, stubbornly, and against the advice of his military advisors and allies, demanded unconditional surrender. McMeekin speculates this may have been driven by an impulsive desire to prove his bona fides to the Vozhd.
From 1943 senior German military officers made multiple approaches to the West to negotiate surrendering. Allied victory was inevitable, but a negotiated surrender, which let Anglo-American armies advance to the Eastern Front, would have saved lives, as well as giving liberal Western-oriented governments a chance up to the Soviet border. FDR, however, rejected all peace entreaties. Allied and Axis soldiers and civilians died needlessly.
During this period Stalin approached Hitler about a separate peace, which the Führer rejected.
In contrast with the noble principles embodied by the Atlantic Charter, FDR stubbornly demanded the punitive Morgenthau Plan and executing captured Germany soldiers, which stiffened Germany resistance in the West, which was in nobody’s interest but Stalin’s.
FDR turned a blind eye to Stalin’s butchery, greenlighted his subjugation of Poland, and waxed about an independent “Sovietized” India.
Roosevelt also rejected proposals to put Anglo-American troops as far east as possible, to save as much of Eastern Europe and the Balkans as possible from Stalin’s tender mercies.
While FDR professed affection for the Nationalist Chinese, he prioritized sending tanks, trucks, jeeps, artillery, guns, aircraft, oil, whole factories, and even uranium, to Stalin. The Vozhd wanted the Chiang’s army, which tied down the bulk of Japan’s army, bled so it would be easy pickings for Mao’s Communists. Stalin always and everywhere aimed to maximize the Soviets’ post-war position and power. Roosevelt seemed to give it nary a thought. Churchill saw Britain as dependent on FDR and Stalin. His idée fixe was to sustain the Grand Alliance against Hitler.
Even after VE Day accommodating Stalin continued. Under morally-repugnant “Operation Keelhaul” Anglo-American troops handed over 2.3 million “Soviet subjects,” to Stalin, knowingly sending them to almost-certain deaths.
One can only wonder how differently WW2 might have played out with a different leader in the White House. If America had been led by a hard-nosed strategic president thinking to win the war(s) on terms most adv
Stalin’s War is a compelling read and offers invaluable and timeless lessons on bringing moral clarity and realism to statecraft and war.
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The best book I have read on the Second World War.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 28, 2024