REVIEW: Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-War@h-net.msu.edu (July 2007)

Geoffrey Roberts. _Stalin's Wars:  From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953_. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006. xxii + 468 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, chronology. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-300-11204-1

Reviewed for H-War by Jonathan M. House, Department of Military History, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College

The Generalissimo

The Soviet Union performed the lion's share of the efforts that defeated Nazi Germany in World War II.  Arguably, therefore, the single person most responsible for the Allied victory was Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, the Soviet dictator.  For decades, however, Cold War politics and then
revisionism caused historians to emphasize Stalin's ruthlessness and paranoia, while downplaying his contribution to the war effort.  Just as most Germans blamed Adolf Hitler for all their defeats, so Soviet leaders from Nikita Khrushchev onward tended to depict Stalin as a bungling butcher
who was saved by the undoubted self-sacrifice of the Soviet peoples.

Geoffrey Roberts, a history professor in Cork, Ireland, has undertaken a systematic review of the dictator's role in both World War II and the ensuing Cold War.  In an unusual form of revisionism, Roberts concludes that the contemporaneous view of Stalin as a great war leader was largely
justified.  Without minimizing Stalin's mistakes or his paranoia, the author concludes that the dictator was a key factor in the Soviet victory: "Without him the efforts of the [Communist] party, the people, the armed forces and their generals would have been considerably less effective" ...

Comments

[Thomas Jackson]

Stalin as a great war leader? Looking at the butcher's bill the USSR paid and the number of citizens who actively served the Germans had Stalin been a wee bit greater we'd all be speaking German now.