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

by Geoffrey Roberts

This breakthrough book provides a detailed reconstruction of Stalin’s leadership from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 to his death in 1953. Making use of a wealth of new material from Russian archives, Geoffrey Roberts challenges a long list of standard perceptions of his qualities as a leader; his relationships with his own generals and with other great world leaders; his foreign policy; and his role in instigating the Cold War. While frankly exploring the full extent of Stalin’s brutalities and their impact on the Soviet people, Roberts also uncovers evidence leading to the stunning conclusion that Stalin was both the greatest military leader of the twentieth century and a remarkable politician who sought to avoid the Cold War and establish a long-term detente with the capitalist world.
By means of an integrated military, political, and diplomatic narrative, the author draws a sustained and compelling personal portrait of the Soviet leader. The resulting picture is fascinating and contradictory, and it will inevitably change the way we understand Stalin and his place in history. Roberts depicts a despot who helped save the world for democracy, a personal charmer who disciplined mercilessly, a utopian ideologue who could be a practical realist, and a warlord who undertook the role of architect of post-war peace.

Genres: History, Soviet Union, Nonfiction, Russia, Politics, World War II, Military History

496 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2007

About the author

Geoffrey Roberts was born in Deptford, south London in 1952. A pupil of Addey and Stanhope Grammar School, he left aged 16 and started his working life as a clerk with the Greater London Council. In the 1970s, he was an International Relations undergraduate at North Staffordshire Polytechnic and postgraduate research student at the London School of Economics. In the 1980s, he worked in the Education Department of NALGO, the public sector trade union. He returned to academic life in the 1990s following the publication of his acclaimed first book The Unholy Alliance: Stalin’s Pact with Hitler, 1989.

Roberts is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and teaches History and International Relations at University College Cork, Ireland. He has won many academic awards and prizes, including a Fulbright Scholarship to Harvard University and a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellowship. He is a regular commentator on history and current affairs for British and Irish newspapers and a contributor to the History News Service, which syndicates articles to American media outlets. He has many radio and TV appearances to his credit and has acted as an historical consultant for documentary series such as Simon Berthon's highly praised Warlords, broadcast in 2005.

Reviews

[Jayden gonzalez · Rating 4 out of 5]

tha nk you for telling the truth geoffrey roberts. "I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy." good prediction joseph . . . the wind is beginning to pick up!!!

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wikipedia blurb

Roberts has come under criticism from Andrew Bacevich, who claims in a review in The National Interest that Roberts is overly sympathetic towards Stalin, taking the word of the Soviet leadership uncritically in his writings, thus presenting a biased view and significantly undermining the usefulness of his scholarship.

According to Jonathan Haslam, Roberts relies too heavily on edited Soviet archival documents and goes too far in his conclusions, therefore making his accounts somewhat one sided and by no means telling a full story.

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The National Interest
[article by Roberts]

Andrew J. Bacevich generously praises my book, Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953, as "in many respects a model of scholarship" and as "revisionism of high order" (The National Interest, September/October 2007). But my "depiction of Stalin as a great statesman and man of peace" seems to have three problems: a misinterpretation of the nature of the Grand Alliance; a misunderstanding of the nature of statecraft; and an abdication of the moral obligations of historians.

.....

The origins of the Cold War constitute a long and complex story, but my version bears no resemblance to Bacevich's depiction of Stalin's peaceful intentions being thwarted by the British and Americans. In fact, my argument is that Stalin's pursuit of postwar ideological ambitions undermined his efforts to secure a peacetime Grand Alliance. Stalin's failings as a peacemaker are central to my analysis of the Cold War's origins. My conclusion is that the Cold War could have been averted, but only by the combined efforts of all the erstwhile allies.

Bacevich suggests that my misunderstanding of the nature of statecraft leads me to place Stalin in "the pantheon of great statesmen." Actually, I do no such thing because I do not see Stalin as a great statesman. Yet I do see Stalin as a great warlord who played a critical and indispensable role in defeating the Nazis during World War II. The case for such a conclusion is presented in my book's detailed narrative of Stalin's war leadership based on the latest evidence from the Russian archives. In telling this story I criticize the mythology about Stalin's war record generated by the Cold War and by the de-Stalinization campaign in the USSR. The story is told largely from Stalin's perspective and that has led some readers-Bacevich included-to confuse comprehension with justification and historical empathy with political sympathy. Of course, my book also includes many positive judgments about Stalin, but embedded in my narrative are many criticisms of his war leadership. It seems that Bacevich can't see beyond the positives and grasp that the book is the beginning of a new critique of Stalin's war leadership-a more robust critique that measures up to the evidence.

....

I stand by that argument and see my moral obligation as a historian to tell the truth, even if that means painting a complex picture of a past that does not fit easily into a Manichean universe in which there is only good and evil.

Bacevich worries that my kind of history opens the door to a pernicious revisionism in which not just Stalin but Mao and even Hitler are rehabilitated. I do not support the rehabilitation of Mao, Hitler or Stalin, but Bacevich's preferred tactic of simply condemning "evil" will not stop those who would wish otherwise. Only the historical truth can protect us from the distortion of the past in the pursuit of contemporary political purposes. Surely, that is a lesson of history that we can all agree on.

[rmw 1776 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent revisionist presentation of the so-called "Cold War" which the pro-US Stalin never desired. Stalin even kept campaigning for a continuation of the Big Three collaboration well after the West had begun its Cold War shenanigans. Further, Roberts' book is extremely well-researched and documented for those who care to explore this fascinating subject further.

[Mark Singer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thorough and incisive look into Stalin's leadership of the Soviet Union from the outbreak of World War II in 1939 up until his death in 1953. Stalin was both pragmatist and ideologue, and Roberts goes into detail about both his successes as a wartime leader and failure as a peacemaker.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed and even handed but a bit of a slog

[Severi Saaristo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some points that Geoffrey Roberts makes in his book, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953.

1. Stalin was a very effective and highly successful war leader. He made mistakes and pursued brutal policies however without his leadership the war against Nazi Germany would probably have been lost. Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt – they were all replaceable as warlords, but not Stalin. In the context of the horrific war on the Eastern Front, Stalin was indispensable to the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Many other historians agree with this assessment like Christopher Bellamy and Mark Harrison.

2. Stalin worked hard to make the Grand Alliance a success and wanted to see it continue after the war. While his policies contributed to the outbreak of the cold war, his intentions were otherwise, and he strove in the late 1940s and early 1950s to revive détente with the west. For example, in April 1947 Stalin gave an interview to Republican politician Harold Stassen. He pointed out to Stassen that despite the differences in their economic systems The USSR and the US had cooperated during the war and there was no reason why they could not continue to do so in peacetime. He pointed out that he and Roosevelt had never called each other ’totalitarian’ or ’monopoly capitalists’. ’I am not a propagandist’, said Stalin, ’I am a man of business.’

3. Stalin’s postwar domestic regime was different to the Soviet system of the prewar years. It was less repressive, more nationalistic, and not so dependent on Stalin’s will for its everyday functioning. It was a system in transition to the more relaxed social and political order of post Stalin times. The process of ‘destalinisation’ began while Stalin was still alive, although the cult of his personality reigned supreme in the Soviet Union until the day he died.
”in 1945 Stalin amnestied a million ordinary criminals as part of the victory celebrations. Political prisoners were excluded from this amnesty but the postwar trend was towards a significant decline in arrests for alleged counter-revolutionary crimes. In 1946 the number convicted of political offences was 123,194; in 1952 it was just 28,800. In 1946 there were 2,896 political executions and 1,612 in 1952.”

As a Finnish person I was interested in Roberts' understanding of the Winter War and Stalin's USSR's relations with Finland.
Roberts writes: "The ‘Winter War’ with Finland was not of Stalin’s choosing. He would have preferred a negotiated solution to the border and security issues that sparked the conflict. But when political negotiations with Finland broke down he had no hesitation in authorising military action. The road to war began on 5 October 1939 when the Soviet Union invited Finland to send a delegation to Moscow to discuss a Soviet–Finnish mutual assistance pact. In Moscow the Finnish delegation was presented not only with demands for a pact but with demands for the concession or leasing of a number of islands in the Gulf of Finland for the construction of Soviet naval fortifications. Most importantly, Stalin wanted to shift north-west-wards the Soviet–Finnish border, which was only 20 miles from Leningrad. In return the Finns were offered territorial compensation in Soviet Karelia in the far north.
In preparation for the negotiations the Soviet Foreign Ministry formulated a series of maximum and minimum demands. Among the maximum Soviet demands were military bases in Finland, ceding of the nickel-mining area of Petsamo in northern Finland, and veto rights over Finnish military fortifications in the Baltic. The Finnish delegation, however, was prepared to make few, if any, concessions and the Soviets retreated to their minimum territorial demands, even dropping the proposed Soviet–Finnish mutual assistance pact. Negotiations dragged on throughout October but achieved no positive result. Indeed, in mid-October the Finns mobilised their army and, anticipating a war, arrested a number of Finnish communists."

Roberts writes elsewhere: ”Finland allied itself with Nazi Germany during the second world war not to prevent Soviet conquest but to win back territories lost to the USSR as a result of the winter war of 1939-40. The peace treaty that ended the war in March 1940 left Finnish independence intact. It was the reckless act of joining the Nazi attack on the USSR that endangered Finland’s national existence and cost tens of thousands of lives. In 1944-45 the Red Army could have occupied Finland with impunity, but Stalin chose not to, mainly because Finnish leaders admitted their error and pledged neutrality and friendship with the Soviet Union. “Finlandisation”, as it was called, enabled Finland to remain free of Soviet domination and communist takeover.”

As for Germany, during WWII Stalin advocated strongly that Germany should be dismembered after the war, but according to Roberts, he dropped this policy when the British and Americans began dragging their feet over it, settling for demilitarisation, disarmament, denazification and democratisation of Germany. Of course later on Stalin embraced the perspective of a united but peace-loving and democratic Germany, including his one last effort in 1952 to secure an agreement to neutralise and pacify Germany, even at the cost of sacrificing communist-controlled East Germany (the famous ”Stalin note”). It was Stalin who wanted a united Germany that would have western style democratic elections, and the Americans and British who wanted Germany politically and economically divided to retain control over the western zones of occupation.

I would highly recommend this book. As military and diplomatic history of Stalin era USSR, it is quite accurate. Roberts argues that "the contemporaneous perception of Stalin’s war leadership was closer to the truth of the matter than many of the layers of historical interpretation that followed."
For Roberts "Stalin was the dictator who defeated Hitler and helped save the world for democracy."

I would recommend to those who are interested in Stalin era Soviet Union to also read Domenico Losurdo's excellent book, Stalin: the History and Critique of a Black Legend.

Geoffrey Roberts's latest book, Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books is also good and worth a read. Roberts is also a political commentator on contemporary political affairs. I recommend reading his article, ‘Now or Never’: The Immediate Origins of Putin’s Preventative War on Ukraine which was published in Journal of Military and Strategic Studies. https://jmss.org/article/view/76584

Roberts' conversation with former CIA analyst Ray McGovern is worth watching:
https://raymcgovern.com/2023/10/06/uk...

His debate with Peter Lavelle & George Szamuely is also worth watching: https://youtu.be/raD2tLj_WTc?si=0gMcH...