Stalin's War
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Remove from wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Adding to library failed
Please try again
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
£0.00 for first 30 days
LIMITED TIME OFFER
Get 3 months for £0.99/mo
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.
Stalin's War
Narrated by:
Kevin Stillwell
Buy Now for £16.99
-
Narrated by:
-
Kevin Stillwell
-
By:
-
Sean McMeekin
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
In this remarkable, ground-breaking new book Sean McMeekin marks a generational shift in our view of Stalin as an ally in the Second World War. Stalin's only difference from Hitler, he argues, was that he was a successful murderous predator. With Hitler dead and the Third Reich in ruins, Stalin created an immense new Communist empire. Among his holdings were Czechoslovakia and Poland, the fates of which had first set the West against the Nazis and, of course, China and North Korea, the ramifications of which we still live with today.
Until Barbarossa wrought a public relations miracle, turning him into a plucky ally of the West, Stalin had murdered millions, subverted every norm of international behaviour, invaded as many countries as Hitler had, and taken great swathes of territory he would continue to keep. In the larger sense the global conflict grew out of not only German and Japanese aggression but Stalin's manoeuvrings, orchestrated to provoke wars of attrition between the capitalist powers in Europe and in Asia. Throughout the war Stalin chose to do only what would benefit his own regime, not even aiding in the effort against Japan until the conflict's last weeks. Above all, Stalin's War uncovers the shocking details of how the US government (to the detriment of itself and its other allies) fuelled Stalin's war machine, blindly agreeing to every Soviet demand, right down to agents supplying details of the atomic bomb.
'Gripping, authoritative, accessible and always bracingly revisionist' Simon Sebag Montefiore
'McMeekin's approach in Stalin's War is both original and refreshing, written as it is with a wonderful clarity' Antony Beevor
© Sean McMeekin 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021
Listeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
A terrific read ... McMeekin is a superb writer. There isn't a boring page in the book. His breadth of approach, taking in events from Manchuria to Greece, as well as the main fronts, is refreshing ... When he is angry McMeekin can be magnificent. (David Aaronovitch)
Gripping, authoritative, accessible and always bracingly revisionist. (Simon Sebag Montefiore)
McMeekin's approach in Stalin's War is both original and refreshing and the book is written with a wonderful clarity. (Antony Beevor)
Impressive, well researched and very well written ... McMeekin invites the reader to look at the history of the war from a vantage point rarely taken and appreciate the many tragedies and sad ironies of the grand alliance as it took shape and functioned during the war ... A new look at the conflict, which poses new questions and provides new and often unexpected answers to the old ones. (Serhii Plokhy)
An accomplished, fearless and enthusiastic "Myth-buster", McMeekin hunts out the mistaken explanations of the past ... The story of the war itself is well told and impressive in its scope, ranging as it does from the domestic politics of small states such as Yugoslavia and Finland to the global context ... McMeekin is right that we have for too long cast the second world war as the good one. His book will make us re-evaluate the war and its consequences. (Margaret MacMillan)
A sweeping reassessment of World War II seeking to "illuminate critical matters long obscured by the obsessively German-centric literature" on the subject ... Yet another winner for McMeekin ... Brilliantly contrarian history.
McMeekin draws from recently opened Soviet archives to shed light on Stalin's dark reasoning and shady tactics ... Packed with incisive character sketches and illuminating analyses of military and diplomatic maneuvers, this is a skillful and persuasive reframing of the causes, developments, and repercussions of WWII.
Brilliantly inquisitive ... This book makes the case that Adolf Hitler was within a whisker of winning the Second World War and failed to do so only because President Roosevelt came to the rescue of Joseph Stalin, Hitler's nemesis. (David Pryce-Jones)
This book is a mammoth achievement in every sense. (Michael Brendan Dougherty, author of My Father Left Me Ireland)
Sean McMeekin's new book fills a massive gap in the historiography of World War II. Based on exhaustive researches in Russian and other archives, his examination of Stalin's foreign policy explores fresh avenues and explodes many myths, perhaps most significant being that of unwittingly exaggerated emphasis on 'Hitler's war'. He shows conclusively that the two tyrants were equally responsible, both for the outbreak of war and the appalling slaughter which ensued. (Nikolai Tolstoy)
Now onto the content: The premise of the book is not that Joseph Stalin caused the Second World War as I have seen from other reviewers, who clearly don’t understand the book or have a sadistic love for the callous dictator. It is to explain that only one man was at the top and in charge of their state throughout the whole of the Second World War, from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 into VJ Day in 1945. This was the Man of Steel, Stalin. From this war he benefited massively, more than any other.
McKeekin looks to explain how he did this, through diplomatic skill and opportunity he gave no quarter; he made use of the fractured and strained relationships of the weakened allies to simply take and not give. Franklin D Roosevelt was a dying man and Winston S Churchill was in a precarious position having given up the British Empire and essentially sold the country to the USA in order to finance a fight against Nazi Germany. There in the east, waiting, lurking in the shadows was an equally evil regime which was waiting to pounce, and it did.
From carving up, and taking far more Polish land than the Third Reich to bullying and invading sovereign Finland, the Soviets did not start the war on friendly terms with the West. In fact they were viewed with as much mistrust and contempt as Germany and for good reason. Millions of free peoples were violated, enslaved and murdered. Atrocities such as the execution of 20,000 polish officers, which was covered up comes to mind. However in 1941 when Operation Barbarossa launched, this all changed. Swinging the pendulum back in favour of the allies and bringing sympathy to the USSR. From here the USA, allies and Roosevelt sold their souls to the devil to defeat the wicked despot Hitler. From supplying aluminium and butter at the detriment of their own people to abandoning allies in Poland and Yugoslavia Stalin took and the allies gave. Churchill saw through this and tried to resist, famously arguing against the summarily execution of German officers in Tehran, to which Stalin claimed he was only joking. But in being tied financially to the USA he had to choose his people over others. The list goes on from American pilots who crash landed on Soviet soil being imprisoned to Stalin making a terminally I’ll man travel 14,000 miles through dangerous airspace in winter for a meeting in Crimea. But then they were dealing with one of the most exceptional people in history. He believed in the cause, hated the western capitalists and feared any influence whatsoever on his regime.
The book shows a history of the war, with this man at the forefront and to me this perspective is so important and relatively unknown. In 1945 as the crowds in America and Britain waved flags and celebrated, terror, misery and death continued under the Soviet wing. As Poland was abandoned, one is reminded that the UK went to war to protect it. In sorrow it was abandoned, with the only solace being that the holocaust was stopped.
The Chess Grandmaster
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Excellent revisionist account of Russia in WW2
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Perspective Altering
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Important Stuff
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The clear narration is due obviously in part to the prose of Sean McMeekin who does a good job of making this topic enjoyable to a person first dipping into the subject.
Without going into too much detail the two most shocking things I learned from listening to this book were:
1. The extent to which the USSR had moles/spies at some of the highest levels in the F.D. Roosevelt administration and how they with direction from their Soviet handlers guided US foreign policy in a direction favourable to the Soviet Union. This discovery has spurred on further reading and it seems that this communist penetration was a long time in the making, starting in the 1920s. For further reading on this see Eugene Lyon’s “The Red Decade”. Another very surprising aspect of this is the possibility that US foreign policy towards Japan was influenced by Soviet spies in the administration.
2. The amount of Lend-Lease aid received by the USSR from the USA. Prior to reading I had the impression that it was the USSRs superior manpower which led them to victory over Germany. This book paints a different picture, instead we have the USSR getting hammered by the Germans, who had during the initial few weeks of Operation Barbarossa, when comparing irretrievable losses, had a man for man advantage of 35:1. The Germans were able to maintain very favourable ratios like these until late into Barbarossa with the USSR only being able to tip the scales in their favour after receiving billions in Lend-Lease aid in the form of war materiel and other items and with the allies beginning to open a second front which would take German divisions on the eastern front away. It also seems that the USSR got away with not repaying their debts in full, compared to the United Kingdom who was still paying their Lend-lease debt into the 21st century.
All in all, I would highly recommend giving this book a listen. I think I will be going to buy a physical copy so that I might read it and better document the figures it mentions in my notes.
Essential reading
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.