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A review by huerca_armada
Stalin's War: A New History of World War II by Sean McMeekin
1.0
A few months ago, I had the immense (dis)pleasure of reading Julia Lovell's Maoism: A Global History. At the time of finishing it, I believed firmly that it was one of the worst attempts at a history book that I'd ever read, and would ever attempt to read. Fortunately for Lovell, her rather turgid history of global Maoism is surpassed in stupidity, ignorance, and perversity by Sean McMeekin's "book."
This Is How You Don't Write History
Let's get one thing out of the way first. McMeekin's book claims to be a "new history" of WW2 that emphasizes the demands for war material and economic autarky that underpinned the fragile peace of the 1930s as war crept in. It also claims -- with great pride on the inside jacket of the book -- that "the war which emerged in Europe in September in 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler." This itself is an incredible claim to make, considering the tens of millions of Russians citizens and soldiers that died in the war, and yet it is one of the more tame ones made in the text itself. With the amount of times that McMeekin would interject into this already loose text with tidbits made with only the purpose of making faceless apparatchiks and Soviet bureaucrats into actual monsters, it is difficult to even follow the narrative flow of his text.
This is not helped by the fact that McMeekin's sourcing of his claims are horseshit. He sources claims from Robert Conquest and Timothy Snyder, particularly in an attempt to portray the 1932 famine in Ukraine in line with the Banderite narrative of the "Holodomor." Conquest's account of the famine could be very generously called "disregarded" by actual Sovietologists these days (of whom Snyder is not one of). Even dyed-in-the-wool anti-communist academics like Stephen Kotkin (author of the three-volume Stalin biography which I've been told is MUCH better than this) will tell you that it was not a deliberate genocide, but the unfortunate result of two levels of bureaucratic leadership pulling away from reality in different manners, unable to right the ship until it was too late. This does not stop McMeekin from plowing on without the slightest care in the world for simple facts like that -- this is, after all, a man who has only written four books about the Soviet Union at this stage, so I can only admire his sheer lack of care. It takes real talent to just ignore the academic discussions regarding these things, and McMeekin can only leave me dumbstruck with his sheer skill.
Beyond both Conquest and Snyder, however, McMeekin draws upon such notable figures like a Russian expatriate monarchist (and sometimes UKIP political candidate), and a bench full of devotedly conservative, free-market enterprise loving historians whose publication histories point towards each other like some ouroboros, except the snake is made from pure shit. McMeekin has a horrible habit of writing like a college freshman, with huge paragraphs wherein multiple claims are made which he then drops a single footnote for at the end of which rarely talk about what he is actually saying. Prize examples of this include his "sources" for "huge numbers of Soviet soldiers" defecting to the Germans after Barbarossa was launched (in spite, I might add, of how public Hitler's anti-Slavic rhetoric was). Perhaps McMeekin is confused about the differences between prisoners and defectors, but I'll never know.
Red Hitler Does the Red Fascism
One very overarching thing that dominates McMeekin's text is his insistence on calling Stalin "the Vozhd," which he helpfully translates for us as "the Leader." If you've suddenly started to hear a high-pitched whine somewhere, do not worry about it being tinnitus. It is merely the enormous dogwhistle that McMeekin is blowing directly into your ear canal. Not only is it a disgusting and enormously false parallel to draw between both Hitler/Stalin and fascism/communism, but it is borderline parodic. You would almost think it was a joke, but if it is one, McMeekin is operating on an entirely different level than the rest of us.
Aside from this absolutely transparent framing of Stalin here, we do of course have the classic red fascism argument where Stalin purposefully killed and deported millions just for... the evil of it I guess? McMeekin isn't really clear as to this, but again that doesn't stop him. He trots out the same tired arguments of communism killing more than fascism, "so why isn't it derided as much?" which is just laughable on its nose because it has an actual toddler's understanding of fascism. Stalin was not a paragon of virtue, that much is certain. But you don't have to be an ardent Stalinist to understand that there are clear ideological differences between fascism and communism, in that there is absolutely no component of communism theory that posits about the need for racial war for control, domination, and extermination between nations. This is so easy to ascertain from any communist political literature or philosophy that you would have to have some kind of underlying agenda to completely ignore some two centuries of programs, platforms, and policies in order to advance this narrative.
As I touched on earlier, McMeekin gives a lot of oxygen to the classic Banderite/Ukrainian nationalist mythos of the "Holodomor," something which they were working on the finer points of whilst they were murdering of the non-Ukrainians in the western part of the country. Then we have the classic stories of the poor Red Army conscripts, so terrified and stricken with malaise that they fear the Finns will shoot them when they are captured and that their families will be shot by the commissars back home. Constant mentions of "the blood soaked regime of Moscow," the aforementioned monstrous bureaucrats and Soviet apparatchiks who mow down pedestrians out of boredom from the seats of their cars while horrified American military attaches look on... You get the gist. Many of these are so lurid, so fanciful, that they become actually unbelievable, particularly given the sources for these claims. I know this is something that I keep harping on, but it is really quite something that McMeekin managed to push a book this loosely held together out to mass market.
In Summation a/k/a Wow I Wrote a Lot For This and I Don't Want To Anymore
This book is bad. Really bad. So bad that I struggled to get even to the halfway point, and am now shelving it as a DNF. If I could give this book no stars, I would do so in an instant. Hell, if I could give it negative stars, I would do so without hesitation. It is without merit, provides no "new history" that it's subheading would imply, and is more than anything else a colossus of rank anti-communism that veers worryingly class to Nazi-apologia territory. You don't have to be wistfully nostalgic for the Soviet Union to understand that McMeekin has a clear political agenda, and has embedded himself very firmly in the cottage industry of anti-Stalin, anti-Soviet, anti-Russian popular history which churns out books like these with a frantic pace. I can clearly and emphatically say, do not read this stupid, stupid book, and that staring into the corner of your ceiling for hours on end would be both more spiritually fulfilling and less of an exercise in tedium than this book has been.
This Is How You Don't Write History
Let's get one thing out of the way first. McMeekin's book claims to be a "new history" of WW2 that emphasizes the demands for war material and economic autarky that underpinned the fragile peace of the 1930s as war crept in. It also claims -- with great pride on the inside jacket of the book -- that "the war which emerged in Europe in September in 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler." This itself is an incredible claim to make, considering the tens of millions of Russians citizens and soldiers that died in the war, and yet it is one of the more tame ones made in the text itself. With the amount of times that McMeekin would interject into this already loose text with tidbits made with only the purpose of making faceless apparatchiks and Soviet bureaucrats into actual monsters, it is difficult to even follow the narrative flow of his text.
This is not helped by the fact that McMeekin's sourcing of his claims are horseshit. He sources claims from Robert Conquest and Timothy Snyder, particularly in an attempt to portray the 1932 famine in Ukraine in line with the Banderite narrative of the "Holodomor." Conquest's account of the famine could be very generously called "disregarded" by actual Sovietologists these days (of whom Snyder is not one of). Even dyed-in-the-wool anti-communist academics like Stephen Kotkin (author of the three-volume Stalin biography which I've been told is MUCH better than this) will tell you that it was not a deliberate genocide, but the unfortunate result of two levels of bureaucratic leadership pulling away from reality in different manners, unable to right the ship until it was too late. This does not stop McMeekin from plowing on without the slightest care in the world for simple facts like that -- this is, after all, a man who has only written four books about the Soviet Union at this stage, so I can only admire his sheer lack of care. It takes real talent to just ignore the academic discussions regarding these things, and McMeekin can only leave me dumbstruck with his sheer skill.
Beyond both Conquest and Snyder, however, McMeekin draws upon such notable figures like a Russian expatriate monarchist (and sometimes UKIP political candidate), and a bench full of devotedly conservative, free-market enterprise loving historians whose publication histories point towards each other like some ouroboros, except the snake is made from pure shit. McMeekin has a horrible habit of writing like a college freshman, with huge paragraphs wherein multiple claims are made which he then drops a single footnote for at the end of which rarely talk about what he is actually saying. Prize examples of this include his "sources" for "huge numbers of Soviet soldiers" defecting to the Germans after Barbarossa was launched (in spite, I might add, of how public Hitler's anti-Slavic rhetoric was). Perhaps McMeekin is confused about the differences between prisoners and defectors, but I'll never know.
Red Hitler Does the Red Fascism
One very overarching thing that dominates McMeekin's text is his insistence on calling Stalin "the Vozhd," which he helpfully translates for us as "the Leader." If you've suddenly started to hear a high-pitched whine somewhere, do not worry about it being tinnitus. It is merely the enormous dogwhistle that McMeekin is blowing directly into your ear canal. Not only is it a disgusting and enormously false parallel to draw between both Hitler/Stalin and fascism/communism, but it is borderline parodic. You would almost think it was a joke, but if it is one, McMeekin is operating on an entirely different level than the rest of us.
Aside from this absolutely transparent framing of Stalin here, we do of course have the classic red fascism argument where Stalin purposefully killed and deported millions just for... the evil of it I guess? McMeekin isn't really clear as to this, but again that doesn't stop him. He trots out the same tired arguments of communism killing more than fascism, "so why isn't it derided as much?" which is just laughable on its nose because it has an actual toddler's understanding of fascism. Stalin was not a paragon of virtue, that much is certain. But you don't have to be an ardent Stalinist to understand that there are clear ideological differences between fascism and communism, in that there is absolutely no component of communism theory that posits about the need for racial war for control, domination, and extermination between nations. This is so easy to ascertain from any communist political literature or philosophy that you would have to have some kind of underlying agenda to completely ignore some two centuries of programs, platforms, and policies in order to advance this narrative.
As I touched on earlier, McMeekin gives a lot of oxygen to the classic Banderite/Ukrainian nationalist mythos of the "Holodomor," something which they were working on the finer points of whilst they were murdering of the non-Ukrainians in the western part of the country. Then we have the classic stories of the poor Red Army conscripts, so terrified and stricken with malaise that they fear the Finns will shoot them when they are captured and that their families will be shot by the commissars back home. Constant mentions of "the blood soaked regime of Moscow," the aforementioned monstrous bureaucrats and Soviet apparatchiks who mow down pedestrians out of boredom from the seats of their cars while horrified American military attaches look on... You get the gist. Many of these are so lurid, so fanciful, that they become actually unbelievable, particularly given the sources for these claims. I know this is something that I keep harping on, but it is really quite something that McMeekin managed to push a book this loosely held together out to mass market.
In Summation a/k/a Wow I Wrote a Lot For This and I Don't Want To Anymore
This book is bad. Really bad. So bad that I struggled to get even to the halfway point, and am now shelving it as a DNF. If I could give this book no stars, I would do so in an instant. Hell, if I could give it negative stars, I would do so without hesitation. It is without merit, provides no "new history" that it's subheading would imply, and is more than anything else a colossus of rank anti-communism that veers worryingly class to Nazi-apologia territory. You don't have to be wistfully nostalgic for the Soviet Union to understand that McMeekin has a clear political agenda, and has embedded himself very firmly in the cottage industry of anti-Stalin, anti-Soviet, anti-Russian popular history which churns out books like these with a frantic pace. I can clearly and emphatically say, do not read this stupid, stupid book, and that staring into the corner of your ceiling for hours on end would be both more spiritually fulfilling and less of an exercise in tedium than this book has been.