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I suppose my guilty pleasure is books on Stalinist era of the Soviet Union, real life horror on a staggering scale. There was no shortage of mass-murdering supreme leaders in the 20th century (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others on a less wide scale), and it may not even be fair to say that Stalin was the worst of them all. And the fact that all of them received massive support for their crimes, makes it more understandable how a bald-faced liar like Trump can get much support from people he throws a political bone or two towards. They don't all have to be gullible people. Surely many of Stalin's henchmen knew they were playing an extremely dangerous game with a cruel, unstable man who had people killed at the drop of a hat. Many of them paid with their own lives, after destroying the lives of others around them.
Stalin's War by Sean McMeekin, really is less about Stalin, the war and the Soviet Union, than the author's distress about how leaders in the West played into Stalin's hands. I haven't seen such invective against Americans vis-à-vis the Soviets since I was a small child in the era of Tailgunner Joe McCarthy. These days we have a much more clear picture of Stalin's crimes, and McMeekin does seem to have cleared up the details of the infamous massacre of Polish officers at Khatin in the early stages of World War II. McMeekin has every right to feel outrage at the facts on the Soviet side, and that much was done to hide the communists' crimes during World War II in Britain and the U.S. However, McMeekin does show a distinct lack of understanding of the very subject he's written about.
McMeekin doesn't pretend he's actually written a history of the war, and he shows with some technical mistakes in the text that he clearly isn't qualified to write such a history. Instead his book is almost entirely one about how Westerners fed into Stalin's thirst for power. In the sense that it is a warning for people in democratic nations to keep tabs on what their politicians are doing in their name, it's quite effective.
However, much of McMeekin source material came from the Soviet records, and clearly McMeekin didn't approach those records as carefully as he should have. After World War Two historians were amazed at the bluntly accurate records found in Germany of practically everything that happened during Hitler's rule. Then historians drooled for decades over what they might find if the Soviet records ever opened up. Then the Soviet records did open and most of that generation of historians seemed to have let out a unanimous disappointed "Oh!" and then worked with what scraps they could find. You see, Hitler's henchmen were not scared for their lives, Hitler happily believed that whatever he did would be revered for a thousand years to come, so he never stopped his people from writing down the truth about what was happening. Stalin's henchmen were always scared for their lives in the period McMeekin covers and the "secret" Soviet government records are full of the same lying garbage that Soviet public periodicals had. In my era as a student of Russian we learned to read Soviet publications with a critical eve. Among the masses of garbage there was also some startling information, both from what was and what wasn't said. Clearly McMeekin understands this as far as what the Soviets said about themselves. But it's fairly clear he wasn't so picky about what the Soviets said about foreign relations. So his 800 plus page book on how specifically the West helped Stalin isn't as well thought out as it could be. It's not a new revelation on the era, just one person's opinion that tends to overstate and overinterpret the facts that generally have been known for a long time.
Stalin's War by Sean McMeekin, really is less about Stalin, the war and the Soviet Union, than the author's distress about how leaders in the West played into Stalin's hands. I haven't seen such invective against Americans vis-à-vis the Soviets since I was a small child in the era of Tailgunner Joe McCarthy. These days we have a much more clear picture of Stalin's crimes, and McMeekin does seem to have cleared up the details of the infamous massacre of Polish officers at Khatin in the early stages of World War II. McMeekin has every right to feel outrage at the facts on the Soviet side, and that much was done to hide the communists' crimes during World War II in Britain and the U.S. However, McMeekin does show a distinct lack of understanding of the very subject he's written about.
McMeekin doesn't pretend he's actually written a history of the war, and he shows with some technical mistakes in the text that he clearly isn't qualified to write such a history. Instead his book is almost entirely one about how Westerners fed into Stalin's thirst for power. In the sense that it is a warning for people in democratic nations to keep tabs on what their politicians are doing in their name, it's quite effective.
However, much of McMeekin source material came from the Soviet records, and clearly McMeekin didn't approach those records as carefully as he should have. After World War Two historians were amazed at the bluntly accurate records found in Germany of practically everything that happened during Hitler's rule. Then historians drooled for decades over what they might find if the Soviet records ever opened up. Then the Soviet records did open and most of that generation of historians seemed to have let out a unanimous disappointed "Oh!" and then worked with what scraps they could find. You see, Hitler's henchmen were not scared for their lives, Hitler happily believed that whatever he did would be revered for a thousand years to come, so he never stopped his people from writing down the truth about what was happening. Stalin's henchmen were always scared for their lives in the period McMeekin covers and the "secret" Soviet government records are full of the same lying garbage that Soviet public periodicals had. In my era as a student of Russian we learned to read Soviet publications with a critical eve. Among the masses of garbage there was also some startling information, both from what was and what wasn't said. Clearly McMeekin understands this as far as what the Soviets said about themselves. But it's fairly clear he wasn't so picky about what the Soviets said about foreign relations. So his 800 plus page book on how specifically the West helped Stalin isn't as well thought out as it could be. It's not a new revelation on the era, just one person's opinion that tends to overstate and overinterpret the facts that generally have been known for a long time.