Stalin's War

Stalin's War: A New History of World War II by Sean McMeekin, 666 pages

Sean McMeekin's provocative thesis in Stalin's War is that it is Stalin, not Hitler, who should be regarded as the central figure of World War II.  In proposing it, he is defying decades of Western historiography which has centered the war on Hitler's showdown with the French and British empires, as well as the Russian perspective in which the USSR is portrayed as the victim of Western perfidy and German aggression.  In McMeekin's persuasive retelling, neither the European nor the Pacific wars would have happened absent Stalin's active encouragement, and even Barbarossa was just as much a consequence of Stalin's ambitions in Central Europe as Hitler's.  Even more importantly, Stalin received from the war more than he could ever have hoped for, not only a mostly free hand in Central Europe and East Asia, but immense subsidies from US taxpayers to help build the Soviet military-industrial base.

The book is necessarily long and repetitive, yet McMeekin writes in a way that saves it from becoming ponderous.  Some may find the seemingly endless catalogues of lend-lease material supplied to an ungrateful mass murderer tiresome, but this is more than compensated for by the foregrounding of information which will be new even to those generally well-informed about the Second World War.