STALINISM AT WAR

AN IN-DEPTH EXAMINATION OF HOW THE BRUTAL STALINIST SYSTEM WAS VICTORIOUS IN RUSSIA’S DARKEST HOUR

Author: Mark Edele Publisher: Bloomsbury Price: £25 Released: 23 September

Mass murderer, saviour of the fatherland, merciless tyrant, war hero -- there can be little doubt that Joseph Stalin ranks as the most controversial political figure of the 20th century. As late as 1950, at the height of the Cold War, even the USA’S Columbia Encyclopedia spoke of the “public worship” bestowed on this retiring figure of “conciliatory aloofness”, a champion of peace in the run up to the Second World War.

Mark Edele offers a fascinating account of the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1949, focusing on the key role played by Stalin in propelling the Allies to victory over Germany and Japan. Stalin’s forces faced the largest number of German troops and killed more of them than any of the Allies, albeit at a cost of 27 million war-related deaths, or about 12 per cent of the Soviet Union’s pre-war population. “In Europe,” the author states, “the war was essentially won by the Red Army.” In relating his tale, Edele looks at a wide range of topics such as the history of international politics and military operations, along with the culture and society of the wartime years. The result is an anthology of war experience combined with the historian’s bird’s eye view of larger social, economic, cultural and governmental structures.

Stalin did not keep a diary or leave memoirs, hence the author relies on the views of those who knew him, as well as the traces he left in the archives. Edele unites the military, economic and political history of the Soviet Union in a narrative that is at once engaging and authoritative. It is a sobering reality, he maintains, that the victory of the Stalinist system was celebrated in a war cult which became one of the major pillars of the late USSR social and cultural order. Thanks to Stalin, it commemorated not just the war, but also the ruler and his regime.