La guerra de Stalin

World War II lives on in the popular imagination as the heroic struggle between good and evil, with the villainous Hitler driving the war. But he was not in power when the conflict broke out in Asia, and he had died before it ended. His army did not fight in multiple arenas, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any spoils of war. The main role was played by Josef Stalin. World War II was not Hitler's war; It was Stalin's war. Drawing on ambitious new research from Soviet, European, and American archives, Stalin's War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by shifting its epicenter eastward. Hitler's genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war that erupted in September 1939 was not what Hitler wanted, but Stalin's. From this perspective we can understand that the conflict in the Pacific from 1941 to 1945 fulfilled Stalin's objective of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the Anglo-Saxon capitalist powers. McMeekin reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was bailed out by the self-destructive movements in the United States and England, which blindly accepted all Soviet demands. Stalin's war machine, as McMeekin shows us, depended substantially on American material: from combat planes, tanks, trucks, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition and explosives, to technological means and food products that sustained the Red Army. This unrequited American generosity allowed Stalin's armies to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Peking, for Communism. A groundbreaking reappraisal of World War II, Stalin's War is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the current world order.