Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953Yale University Press, 2006 M01 1 - 468 pages 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 Stalin: 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. |
From inside the book
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... that illuminated my path.5 In Moscow the two main archives I worked in were those of the Foreign Ministry and the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History, where the communist party archives for the Stalin era are housed. I.
From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953 Geoffrey Roberts. communist party archives for the Stalin era are housed. I also spent a lot of time reading Soviet newspapers in the Moscow State Public Historical Library. I would like to thank the ...
... Communist coup in Czechoslovakia Beginning of Berlin blockade Yugoslavia expelled from the Cominform Vyshinskii ... communist party Stalin's last public statement welcomes the idea of negotiations with the new Eisenhower administration ...
... party leaders queued up to eulogise their dead boss in reverential tones ... communist principles and depicted Stalin as a despot who had executed his ... communist party but within a few months a resolution of the party's central ...
... communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who encouraged critical discussion of ... party and state archives which revealed for the first time the details of ... party and state officials purged during hunts for 'enemies of the people'; ethnic ...
Contents
Stalin and his Generals | |
Stalin Churchill and Roosevelt | |
Stalins Year of Victories | |
Stalins Aims in Germany and Eastern Europe | |
Stalin Truman and the End of the Second World | |
Stalin and the Origins of the Cold | |
The Domestic Context of Stalins Postwar Foreign Policy | |
Stalin Embattled | |
Stalin in the Court of History | |
Select Bibliography | 1957 |
Index | 1975 |