# Stalin's War

## Metadata
- Author: [[Sean McMeekin]]
- Full Title: Stalin's War
- Category: #books
## Highlights
- Viewed from Beijing, Pyongyang, Hanoi, Moscow, Budapest, or Bucharest, the conflict we call World War II was not Hitler’s war at all. It did not begin in September 1939 and end in May 1945, with victory parades and flowers and kisses for the victors. In Eastern Europe, the war lasted until 1989, in the form of Soviet military occupation. On the Korean Peninsula, in China and Taiwan, questions arising from the conflict remain unresolved. ([Location 127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08F4ZL3JG&location=127))
- Still, if we do wish to find a common thread linking the on-and-off global wars lasting from 1931 to 1945, it would make far more sense to choose someone who was alive and in power during the whole thing, whose armies fought in both Asia and Europe on a regular (if not uninterrupted) basis for the entire period, whose empire spanned the Eurasian continent that furnished the theater for most of the fighting and nearly all of the casualties, whose territory was coveted by the two main Axis aggressors, and who succeeded in defeating them both and massively enlarging his empire in the process—emerging, by any objective evaluation, as the victor inheriting the spoils of war, if at a price in Soviet lives (nearly thirty million) so high as to be unfathomable today. In all these ways, it was not Hitler’s, but Stalin’s, war. ([Location 136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08F4ZL3JG&location=136))
- Stalin’s dialectical view of Soviet foreign policy—in which metastasizing conflict between warring capitalist factions would enable Communism to advance to new triumphs—was firmly rooted in Marxism-Leninism, based on the precedent of Russia’s own experience in the First World War, and clearly and consistently stated on many occasions, both verbally and in print. To understand Stalin’s approach to the world does not require fancy ideological footwork or special insight, but simply to read his words and evaluate his actions in light of them. ([Location 159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08F4ZL3JG&location=159))
- Eastern-front aficionados may be surprised that Hitler does not invade the USSR until Chapter 17, but they will learn more about what Stalin was up to in the years before this invasion wrought a public-relations miracle, turning Stalin from Hitler’s fellow aggressor into the Uncle Joe of Roosevelt-administration fantasy, whose manifold crimes and armed invasions of seven neighboring countries between 1939 and 1941 were conveniently forgotten once it appeared that the Soviet armies could serve as a battering ram to destroy the German Wehrmacht. ([Location 184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08F4ZL3JG&location=184))
- What I have tried to do in these pages, rather, is to reexamine the conflict as a whole in light of newly available Russian documents covering the war in Europe and Asia and material seldom examined by Western historians in Poland and the Balkans. Even better-trodden archives in Germany, France, Britain, and the United States yield surprising revelations when one asks new questions. ([Location 194](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08F4ZL3JG&location=194))