New book: Albert Weeks, ASSURED VICTORY: HOW 'STALIN THE GREAT' WON THE WAR BUT LOST THE PEACE
From Al Weeks | Feb. 9, 2011 | JRL 2011-29-40 | Home
From: "Al Weeks" <AWeeks11@comcast.net>
Subject: New book: Albert Weeks, ASSURED VICTORY: HOW 'STALIN THE GREAT' WON THE WAR BUT LOST THE PEACE
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2011
The title, Assured Victory, refers to the fact that Stalin's pre-1941 defense buildup of the USSR (beginning apace in the mid-1930s together with his stern disciplinary measures toward the population, his purges within the party and government leadership in order to ensure absolute loyalty to the supreme Leader) ultimately helped gird the USSR and the Soviet peoples for the war that Hitler had long planned against Soviet Russia. The Germans aimed to acquire Russia's natural resources and its crucial geostrategic position in Eurasia.
Assured Victory canvasses not only Western literature on Stalin's prewar, wartime and postwar leadership. The book also critiques current post-2004 Russian histories on these questions. Several of the Russian history texts, which are used by students In secondary schools and in universities in the RF, are critiqued--two of which were published 2010. On the cover of these textbooks are reproduced portraits of Stalin, Brezhnev, and Prime Minister Putin.
Stalin appears to have been bluffing when he pursued an appeasement line with Hitler in spring 1941. This was during the weeks immediately preceding the German attack on the USSR. Stalin knew the Red Army (RKKA) could not stop the German Army juggernaut, about whose power and vast deployments along the western Soviet frontier Stalin was perfectly cognizant. For defeating the Axis, the Soviet leader therefore counted on Allied material (and moral-political) support from America, Britain, and their other allies. Stalin made this clear in his remarkable address of July 3, 1941, just after the Wehrmacht's onslaught. The speech reflected the fact that the Soviet dictator was aware of the unpreparedness of the RKKA to meet the Hitler's experienced, war-hardened forces. For some time, he had determined that the Soviet Union must be seen as the "victim of aggression" (by the German invasion) in order to win valuable Western aid and to consolidate an East-West war-fighting alliance. This maneuver was one of
Stalin's great achievements.
Stalin's efforts, his draconic measures, his leadership in the war (which Marshal Zhukov praised after Stalin's death) assured the Soviet victory in the east. The USSR was put on the global geopolitical map as an influential nation-state.
Without this victory on the Eastern Front, there would be no contemporary Russia. Hitler had called for Russia's total destruction.. Had it not been for the Soviet defense against the Wehrmacht and its allies on the Eastern Front and Stalin's astute conduct of relations with militaristic Japan (in 1941), a global victory for the Axis might well have been the consequence.
Following the war, Stalin made the error of assuming the worst about the West's intentions and policies. He restored the anti-West, anti-capitalist line of traditional Soviet ideology that had been more or less suspended during the war years,. The consequences of Stalin's "paranoid," reactionary policies were an expensive arms race; pro tem, forcible satellitization of eastern Europe; and the dictator's harsh domestic policies that in turn led to isolation of the USSR as a virtual pariah state during the Cold War.. Finally, Stalin's over-extended. bankrupt "Soviet empire" collapsed altogether.
Yet after 1945, Stalin had had other, more progressive options. But he did not exploit them. The good feeling between the East and West thus evaporated
[This book is recommended to readers by internationally-known Red Army specialists and authors, David Glantz and Jacob Kipp.]
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