Man of steel, re-forged.

• Author: Bacevich, Andrew J.
• Position: Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953 - Book review

Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War; 1939-1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 496 pp., $35.00.

STALIN'S WARS by Geoffrey Roberts, a professor of history at University College Cork, is in many respects a model of scholarship. It draws on an impressive array of Russian, British and American archives as well as a large number of published documents and secondary sources. It is impeccably organized. The author writes with clarity, and authority. He advances a sharply defined and well-supported argument about an important topic, challenging the conventional wisdom and offering a thoroughly substantiated alternative. His canvas is large, but his brushstrokes are precise and vigorous. Stalin's Wars is revisionism of a high order.

In brief, the story, that Roberts tells goes like this: Josef Stalin, uncontested leader of the Soviet Union from 1927 until his death in 1953, deserves to be remembered as a great statesman--indeed, as the greatest of the age. Although Stalin made his share of mistakes, especially in the early phases of World War II, he learned from those mistakes and thereby grew in wisdom and stature. Among allied chieftains, he alone was irreplaceable. He, not Churchill and not Roosevelt, was the true architect of victory, "the dictator who defeated Hitler and helped save the world for democracy."

Furthermore, once Germany went down to defeat--with British and American leaders immediately turning on the Soviet Union--Stalin strove valiantly to sustain Allied unity. Time and again he exerted himself to avert the confrontation that became the Cold War. Even after his efforts failed, "He strove in the late 1940s and early 1950s to revive detente with the west." In British and American eyes, Stalin became the embodiment of the totalitarian ideologue and warmonger. This was a misperception. To the very end, "Stalin continued to struggle for the lasting peace that he saw as his legacy." In denying Stalin the reconciliation for which he devoutly worked, Western governments succeeded only in inflicting grave injury on the Soviet people. The East-West rivalry thrust upon Stalin nipped in the bud his postwar efforts to nurture within the Soviet Union a "more relaxed social and political order."

Roberts neither denies nor conceals the cruelty and ruthlessness that marked the Stalinist era. He freely admits that Stalin was "responsible for the deaths of millions of his own citizens." He concedes that in the 1930s Stalin presided over the Great Terror in which "millions were arrested and hundreds of thousands were shot." He notes that Stalin directed "a process of ethnic cleansing involving the arrest, deportation and execution of hundreds of thousands of people living in border areas" of the Soviet Union. He holds Stalin accountable for the Katyn Forest massacre of 1940, involving the liquidation of 20,000 Polish officers and government officials. Although speculating that "Stalin must have bitterly regretted the subsequent embarrassment and complications" when the events at Katyn Forest became known, Roberts makes it clear that the Soviet leader employed mass murder as an instrument of policy--and did so without compunction.

Still, Roberts...