Stalin’s War: Disorted history of a complex second World War
Sean McMeekin’s contention that the second World War was more Stalin’s war than Hitler’s has a long and dubious pedigree reaching back to the war-revolution conspiracy theory of the interwar years. According to this myth, Stalin plotted to precipitate a new world war in order to foment global revolution.
In truth, there was nothing Stalin feared more than a major war. While the first World War had enabled the Russian Revolution, that was followed by foreign military interventions which came close to strangling Bolshevism at birth. Stalin’s nightmare scenario was the revival of that anti-communist coalition. War did offer opportunities – and Stalin certainly took advantage of them – but war also posed an existential danger to the Soviet state.
So sparse is the evidence for the war-revolution hypothesis that McMeekin resorts to citing a blatant forgery: a document purporting to report on a speech Stalin supposedly made in August 1939 in which he spoke about the Sovietisation of Europe as a result of the war he intended to provoke. The document in question initially appeared in the French press shortly after the outbreak of war and was plainly propaganda designed to discredit Stalin at a time when he was collaborating with Hitler.
