Litwin
Diamond Member
How Stalin orchestrated World War II.
...a protagonist whose armies fought in both Asia and Europe on an epic scale that spanned the whole Eurasian continent, who participated in the conquest of the Axis powers and enormously enlarged his own empire in the process. “In all these ways,” he writes, “it was not Hitler’s, but Stalin’s war.” ...
Joseph Stalin and Soviet Russia dominate the picture. McMeekin is absolutely right when he writes that the Allied victory in World War II brought only more pain – in the form of conquest and civil war – in Eastern Europe and northern Asia. In those areas, Stalin’s “postwar wars” netted millions of new forced laborers for Soviet industries from Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, Romania, Ukraine, and Hungary – plus, after 1945, nearly a million Japanese, Mongolians, and Koreans. “Thus began,” McMeekin writes, “a renewed period of Soviet terror, fed by increasing paranoia about Jews and other pro-Western cosmopolitans, that would last until Stalin’s death in 1953.”
By any accounting, the number of innocent people Stalin caused to be murdered, particularly in the decade after the war, dwarfs that of Hitler’s victims, military or civilian. And as so many books have done before it, “Stalin’s War” makes abundantly clear that the dictator was, if anything, even more coldly reptilian than Hitler. Stalin's duplicity and rapacity were exercised on a scale not seen in the world since Genghis Khan, and yet for an entire generation subsisting on Western-produced wartime propaganda, he was stern-but-kindly “Uncle Joe,” sending millions of his people to the fight....
“these should have been dispelled by his behavior as the Red Army, riding on the trucks and rubber tires of lend-lease, powered into formerly (and soon again) occupied Poland in the second half of 1944.”
At the end of the war, Churchill instructed his chiefs of staff to prepare a plan for attacking Soviet forces in Eastern Europe (his generals called it “Operation Unthinkable”), but of course nothing like it was ever done. Instead, Stalin was allowed almost total victory in a war he had largely engineered for his own benefit. Sean McMeekin has done a fantastic job telling that war’s story.
www.csmonitor.com
Finally....., I want to get this book , anyone here wants to buy it as X-mass present for me ?
...a protagonist whose armies fought in both Asia and Europe on an epic scale that spanned the whole Eurasian continent, who participated in the conquest of the Axis powers and enormously enlarged his own empire in the process. “In all these ways,” he writes, “it was not Hitler’s, but Stalin’s war.” ...
Joseph Stalin and Soviet Russia dominate the picture. McMeekin is absolutely right when he writes that the Allied victory in World War II brought only more pain – in the form of conquest and civil war – in Eastern Europe and northern Asia. In those areas, Stalin’s “postwar wars” netted millions of new forced laborers for Soviet industries from Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, Romania, Ukraine, and Hungary – plus, after 1945, nearly a million Japanese, Mongolians, and Koreans. “Thus began,” McMeekin writes, “a renewed period of Soviet terror, fed by increasing paranoia about Jews and other pro-Western cosmopolitans, that would last until Stalin’s death in 1953.”
By any accounting, the number of innocent people Stalin caused to be murdered, particularly in the decade after the war, dwarfs that of Hitler’s victims, military or civilian. And as so many books have done before it, “Stalin’s War” makes abundantly clear that the dictator was, if anything, even more coldly reptilian than Hitler. Stalin's duplicity and rapacity were exercised on a scale not seen in the world since Genghis Khan, and yet for an entire generation subsisting on Western-produced wartime propaganda, he was stern-but-kindly “Uncle Joe,” sending millions of his people to the fight....
“these should have been dispelled by his behavior as the Red Army, riding on the trucks and rubber tires of lend-lease, powered into formerly (and soon again) occupied Poland in the second half of 1944.”
At the end of the war, Churchill instructed his chiefs of staff to prepare a plan for attacking Soviet forces in Eastern Europe (his generals called it “Operation Unthinkable”), but of course nothing like it was ever done. Instead, Stalin was allowed almost total victory in a war he had largely engineered for his own benefit. Sean McMeekin has done a fantastic job telling that war’s story.
Worse than Hitler? How Stalin orchestrated World War II.
Adolf Hitler is seen as the primary agent of terror in World War II. “Stalin’s War” argues that his crimes were dwarfed by those of Joseph Stalin.
www.csmonitor.com
Finally....., I want to get this book , anyone here wants to buy it as X-mass present for me ?
