For most people living in Western democracies, the Second World War has always been “Hitler’s war,” a conflict between good and evil that ended with the destruction of one of the most murderous dictatorships in history. But this popular reading of the war is misleading, writes Sean McMeekin, a history professor at Bard College, in his provocative new book, Stalin’s War. McMeekin argues that the West’s obsession with Hitler has long obscured the central role played by the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin. The established narrative, moreover, conveniently downplays the enormous price paid by the Western Allies for entering into an alliance with the Soviet Union.
McMeekin does not deny that Adolf Hitler started the war in Europe, but he maintains that it was a war that Stalin wanted and ultimately won. Although the inhabitants of the Soviet Union suffered horribly, Moscow emerged from the war as one of the world’s two superpowers. More convincingly, perhaps, McMeekin argues that Hitler’s centrality to the war wanes the further east one travels from Berlin to Beijing. If we take the war seriously as a global conflict, it becomes clear that the Nazis had little or no role to play in Asia, where the course toward confrontation began with the Japanese incursion into Manchuria in 1931, nearly two years before Hitler came to power. Stalin, unlike Hitler, was involved in the European and Asian theaters of war, and his victory over the Nazis allowed Moscow to dominate Eastern-Central Europe, while the victory of Mao Zedong in the Chinese civil war meant that by 1949, much of Eurasia was under communist control.
This change of perspective allows for a fresh look at a conflict that seems overly familiar from the constant barrage of books and documentaries about Britain’s “finest hour” and the Allied landings in Normandy. Although the Eastern front has not been ignored in previous histories of the period, McMeekin places it front and center. In his reading, the Western leaders, notably Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, failed to thwart Stalin’s imperial ambitions in Central and Eastern Europe and, at a time when the Allied victory was already in sight, unnecessarily boosted the Soviet Union’s military capacity through a trillion-dollar lend-lease program that aided Stalin while securing little from him in return. Thanks in part to the moral stakes of the campaign to defeat Hitler, McMeekin argues, subsequent historians have failed to interrogate these mistakes. “The roseate glow of the ‘good war,’” he writes, “has saved its victorious statesmen from the scrutiny applied to their World War I counterparts who led the men into the trenches.”
Retrospectively, it may indeed seem naive that the British and American leaders appeared to support Stalin, a man known for his determination and utter ruthlessness, unconditionally. Stalin had risen to his position of absolute power from humble beginnings. Born Iosif Jughashvili to a socially underprivileged family from the provincial Georgian backwater of Gori, Stalin had adopted his more dramatic nom de guerre, which means “man of steel,” during his early career as a revolutionary activist and bank robber. The First World War changed his fortunes, creating the space for the Bolsheviks to come to power in late 1917 and for Stalin’s party career to take off.
Deeply suspicious of anyone who was ambitious or talented, Stalin would conduct personal meetings in which he made a brief opening statement before aggressively listening to what people had to say and watching how they said it. On Oct. 19, 1941, for example, high-ranking members of the Soviet leadership, including the much-feared head of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria, had planned to convince Stalin to abandon Moscow in the face of quickly advancing German troops. Stalin, however, had already made up his mind and simply asked the assembled group: “Are we going to defend Moscow?” According to V.S. Pronin, president of the Moscow Soviet, everyone, including Beria, instantly fell in line and answered with faint enthusiasm: “We will defend Moscow!” Any other response, he recalled, would have had terrible consequences.
One of McMeekin’s most controversial arguments is that Stalin bore as much (if not more) responsibility for the war in the East as Hitler. He contends that Stalin, far from foolishly trusting Hitler, was in fact actively planning to wage war on Nazi Germany from early 1941 onward, even though their two countries were nominally allies following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. The evidence McMeekin puts forward as proof of this claim is somewhat slim. It includes a senior military report from early 1941 urging Stalin to preempt a likely German attack, the memoirs of a Soviet defector from the 1970s, and a statement by Stalin at the end of a drunken evening in the Kremlin in May 1940 to the effect that his armed forces were now going to become more offensive.
Such evidence, however, must be weighed against the historical realities of the early stages of Operation Barbarossa, when the Wehrmacht ripped through an ill-prepared and clearly surprised Red Army, taking hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers prisoner within the first days of the campaign. As one German soldier, Albert Schneider, recalled: “Prisoners of war were coming towards us in their underpants, in nightshirts … we had managed to surprise them.” Schneider was one of thousands of eyewitnesses whose testimony supports the impression that Stalin was not expecting the Germans to attack so soon, even if he considered a war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to be inevitable at some stage. And shortly before the German invasion, Stalin had weakened his own military by purging many of its more experienced officers, an unlikely thing for him to do if he seriously believed that war was imminent.
The second controversial argument put forward in McMeekin’s book relates to the question of what the Western Allies could have done to thwart Stalin’s plans for Europe and Asia. Churchill, he argues, could have taken advantage of Russia’s military setbacks during the Winter War against Finland in 1939-40 to form an “anti-Bolshevik” alliance with, among others, Francisco Franco’s Spain, Miklos Horthy’s Hungary, and Benito Mussolini’s Italy. He could have also come to an arrangement with Hitler in 1940 that would have allowed the British to keep their empire while Germany and the Soviet Union fought it out in the East. But what would have been the long-term advantage of this? McMeekin appears to suggest that the world could have been spared the Cold War because even a victorious Stalin would have been too weak from battling the Wehrmacht to pursue any global ambitions. However, Hitler may have emerged victorious if the Soviets had not received support from the West. His victory would have led to the deaths of even more people inhabiting the vast spaces between Berlin and Moscow. And there is every reason to believe that Hitler would not have stopped at a victory in the East. If Nazi Germany had won, democracy in Europe would have been dead, and all remaining ethnic diversity would have been replaced with a radical racial New Order.
McMeekin also suggests that Roosevelt and Churchill should have opened a second front in Europe sooner in order to prevent Stalin from taking control of Eastern Europe. If they were unwilling to risk high casualties by opening such a second front in Italy, the Balkans, or France (which they eventually did in 1944), at the very least, they should have cut back substantially on any financial or material aid to the Soviet Union once it became clear that the Nazis were losing the war. Whether or not the Western Allies could have liberated Central Europe before the Soviet armies got there has been the subject of heated debates among historians for decades. It certainly would have been costly in terms of lives, perhaps too costly to enjoy public support in Britain or the United States.
Some of McMeekin’s arguments are more convincing than others, but the general point that he makes in his impressively researched and well-written book is certainly valid: We have for too long portrayed the Second World War as a Manichean conflict between good and evil while downplaying the West’s collaboration with a criminal Stalinist regime that would go on to deprive millions of Eastern Europeans of their freedom between 1945 and 1990. By putting Stalin at the center of his analysis, McMeekin arguably runs the risk of unduly downplaying Hitler’s role in the war. But his book powerfully reminds us that there was a lot more to World War II than the heroic “good versus evil” story we get from conventional Anglo-American histories and cultural artifacts, from Casablanca to Saving Private Ryan.
Robert Gerwarth is a professor of modern history at University College Dublin. His most recent book, November 1918: The German Revolution, was published by Oxford University Press.
