Who won the Second World War and why should you care? Reassessing Stalin’s War 75 years after victory

ABSTRACT

Seventy-five years after the Red Army won the war in Europe, this victory is marred by two controversies. The first asks: What was the contribution of the Soviets to victory in World War II? The second is a confrontation between East European and Russian war memories: Was Soviet victory a just war or a totalitarian nightmare of suppression, conquest, and terror? This essay reviews these polemics and argues that if put together, these two separate debates have some unintended consequences of how we assess the strategic alliances of the Second World War.

KEYWORDS:

• Soviet Union
• World War II
• historiography

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Joe Maiolo for comments on earlier drafts and David Edgerton for sharing his unpublished work cited below.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Manfred Zeidler, Kriegsende im Osten. Die Rote Armee und die Besetzung Deutschlands östlich von Oder und Neisse 1944/45 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996); Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945 (New York: Penguin 2003); Ian Kershaw, The End. Hitler’s Germany, 1944–45 (London: Allan Lane 2011).

² Richard B. Frank, Downfall. The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York: Random House 1999).

³ Mark Edele, ‘The Impact of War and the Costs of Superpower Status’, in Simon Dixon (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Russian History (online version), (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015) DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199236701.013.028. On the famine: V. F. Zima, Golod v SSSR 1946–1947 godov: proiskhozhdenie i posledstviia (Moscow: Institut Rossiiskoi istorii RAN 1996). On the number of victims: Michael Ellman, ‘The 1947 Soviet Famine and the Entitlement Approach to Famines’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 24/5 (2000), 603–30.

⁴ Phillips Payson O’Brien, How the War was Won. Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015), 16. A leading economic historian of the Soviet war effort has reviewed the book in this journal: Mark Harrison, ‘World War II: Won by American Planes and Ships, or by the Poor Bloody Russian Infantry?’ Journal of Strategic Studies 39/4 (2016), 592–98.

⁵ That an appreciation of the British ‘warfare state’s’ abilities and achievements does not require playing down the Soviet contribution to victory is demonstrated by David Edgerton’s path-breaking Britain’s War Machine. Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011).

⁶ Winston Churchill, ‘The Sinews of Peace’, (5 March 1946), in Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897–1963 (New York and London: Chelsea House Publishers 1974), vol. VII, 1943–1949, pp.7285–7293, here: 7290.

⁷ James A. Wood, ‘Captive Historians, Captivated Audience: The German Military History Program, 1945–1961’, The Journal of Military History 69/1 (2005), 123–47; Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies, The Myth of the Eastern Front. The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2008). The standard work on the Soviet war myth is Nina Tumarkin, The Living & the Dead. The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: BasicBooks 1994).

⁸ A. M. Nekrich,1941. 22 iiunia (Moscow: Nauka 1965). See also his memoirs: Foresake Fear. Memoirs of an Historian (Boston: Unwin Human 1991).

⁹ Paradoxically, this recovery of the Soviet contribution happened at exactly the time when, in Britain, historians started to nationalise what in reality had been ‘an imperial and international, not a national war.’ Thus, processes of nationalisation and internationalisation of war memory ran in parallel. David Edgerton, ‘Becoming a Nation? Nationalism, “Alone”, and “People’s War” in British history and historiography since 1940,’ unpublished paper.

¹⁰ Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945 (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1964; new editions: New York: Caroll & Graf, 1984, 2nd ed. 2000; New York: Skyhorse Publishing 2017). Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days. The Siege of Leningrad (New York: Harper & Row 1969; new edition: Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press 2003). For an appreciation of Salisbury’s ‘artful tapestry of a blockade narrative’ see Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin. The Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1944. A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2012), 9.

¹¹ John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad. Stalin’s War with Germany: Volume One (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1975); John Erickson, The Road to Berlin. Stalin’s War with Germany: Volume Two (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1983).

¹² M. M. Kozlov (ed), Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina 1941–1945. Entskiklopediia (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia 1985).

¹³ For a good, if partisan, introduction to the debate see Ward Wilson, ‘Military Wisdom and Nuclear Weapons’, Joint Forces Quarterly 68 (2013), 18–24. Another useful overview is Michael Kort, The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press 2007), 107–109.

¹⁴ Edward Drea, Japan’s Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall, 1853–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2009), 251; Sadao Asada, ‘The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan’s Decision to Surrender: A Reconsideration’, in Antony Best (ed.), Imperial Japan and the World, 1931–1945. Critical Concepts in Asian Studies Vol. II: Foreign Policy and Doiplomacy, 1931–1945 (New York: Routledge 2011), 320–48; Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, 330–348, esp. 345–348.

¹⁵ Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins 2000), 511 (quotation). This was also the position of the classic book on the issue: Robert J. C. Butow, Japan’s Decision to Surrender (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1954), 158–59, 231.

¹⁶ Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, ‘Soviet Policy toward Japan During World War II’, Cahiers du monde russe 52/2–3 (2011), 245–71. here: 264.

¹⁷ Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy. Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 2005), 298.

¹⁸ Asada, ‘The Shock’, 326 citing Foreign Minister Togo’s memoirs regarding a conversation with the Emperor on the morning of 8 August.

¹⁹ Kort, The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb, 67, 69, 70, 323–24, 327–28, 330–31, 334.

²⁰ Asada, ‘The Shock’, 327–28, 336 (quotation).

²¹ For a recent ‘contribution’ to this debate see Iurii Vasil’evich Pikalov and Sergei Aleksandrovich Golovin, ‘Popytki fal’sifikatsii istorii Kuril’skoi operatsii sovetskikh voisk (avgust 1945 g.)’, Obshchestvo: filosofiia, istoriia, kul’tura 1 (2018). DOI:10.24158/fik.2018.1.21.

²² R. W. Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd 1989); Dietrich Geyer (ed.), Die Umwertung der sowjetischen Geschichte (Goettingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht 1991); R. W. Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era (New York: St. Martin’s Press 1997).

²³ Viktor Suvorov, Icebreaker. Who Started the Second World War? (London: Hamish Hamilton 1990); for liberal historians in Russia embracing the thesis: Boris Sokolov, The Role of the Soviet Union in the Second World War. A Re-Examintion (Solihull: Helion 2013). For the applause in Germany: Wolfgang Strauss, Unternehmen Barbarossa und der russische Historikerstreit (Munich: Herbig 1999); Joachim Hoffmann, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941–1945. 2nd rev. ed. (Munich: Verlag für Wehrwissenschaften 1996); English translation: Stalin’s War of Extermination, 1941–1945: Planning, Realization, and Documentation (Capshaw: Theses & Dissertations Press 2001). The counter-argument is made well in David Glantz, Stumbling Colossus. The Red Army on the Eve of World War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 1998); or Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (ed.), Präventivkrieg? Der deutsche Angriff auf die Sowjetunion (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch 2011). For the state of our knowledge see Evan Mawdsley, ‘Crossing the Rubicon: Soviet Plans for Offensive War in 1940–1941’, The International History Review 25/4 (2003), 818–65. Key documents and a good guide to the debate are in Alexander Hill, ‘The Icebreaker Controversy and Soviet Intentions in 1941: The Plan for the Strategic Deployment of Soviet Forces of 15 May and Other Key Documents’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 21 (2008), 113–28.

²⁴ Mark Edele, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society 1941–1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008), 211.

²⁵ Jörg Baberowski, Scorched Earth. Stalin’s Reign of Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press 2016), 315–425. (German original: 2012).

²⁶ Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London: Bodley Head, 2010). The Russian patriotic literature ranges from blatant attempts at myth making, like Vladimir Medinskii, Voina: Mify SSSR 1939–1945 (Moscow: OLMA 2011), to serious scholarship like the new multi-volume official history published by the Ministry of Defence: S. K. Shoigu (ed.), Velikaia Otechestvennaia Voina 1941–1945 godov. Vol. 12 (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole 2015).

²⁷ There is a growing literature on these issues. See, for example, James Mark, ‘Remembering Rape: Divided Social Memory and the Red Army in Hungary 1944–1945’, Past & Present, no. 188 (2005), 133–61; Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995. Myth, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2006); David R. Marples, Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press 2007); Stefan Rohdewald, ‘Post-Soviet Remembrance of the Holocaust and National Memories of the Second World War in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 44/2 (2008), 173–84; Siobhan Kattago, ‘War Memorials and the Politics of Memory: The Soviet War Memorial in Tallinn’, Constellations 16/1 (2009), 150–66; Per A. Rudling, ‘The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths’, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian & East European Studies 2107 (2011); Eleonora Narvselius, ‘The “Bandera Debate”: The Contentious Legacy of World War II and Liberalization of Collective Memory in Western Ukraine’, Canadian Slavonic Papers 54/3–4 (2012), 61–83; Serhy Yekelchyk, ‘Memory Wars on the Silver Screen: Ukraine and Russia Look Back at the Second World War’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of European Studies 5/2 (2013), 4–13; Julie Fedor, Markku Kangaspuro, Jussi Lassila, Tatiana Zhurzhenko (eds.), War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2017); Mark Edele. ‘Fighting Russia’s History Wars: Vladimir Putin and the Codification of World War II’, History and Memory 29/2 (2017), 90–124; Vita Zelče, ‘The Transformation of “Holiday” in Post-Soviet Space: Celebrating Soviet Victory Day in Latvia’, Europe-Asia Studies 70/3 (2018), 388–420; Vicky Davis, Myth Making in the Soviet Union and Modern Russia. Remembering World War II in Brezhnev’s Hero City (London: I. B. Tauris 2018); and Iva Glisic and Mark Edele, ‘The Memory Revolution Meets the Digital Age. Red Army Soldiers Remember World War II’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 45/1 (2019), 95–119.

²⁸ Ishaan Tharoor, ‘Don’t forget how the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler,’ TheWashington Post, 8 May 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/05/08/dont-forget-how-the-soviet-union-saved-the-world-from-hitler/?utm_term=.4fe33126d8c9 (accessed 30 April 2019).

²⁹ John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London and New York: Longman 1991). This standard work is only now surpassed by archival research by Wendy Goldman and Donald Filtzer, who have a new book on the Soviet home-front in progress. The standard military and economic history remain Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East. The Nazi-Soviet War 1941–1945 (London: Hodder Arnold 2005; 2nd rev. ed. London: Bloomsbury 2016). Other landmarks include: Rodric Braithwaite, Moscow 1941. A City and Its People at War (New York: Knopf 2006); Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War. Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books 2006); Jochen Hellbeck, Die Stalingrad Protokolle. Sowjetische Augenzeugen berichten aus der Schlacht (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 2012); English version: Stalingrad. The City that defeated the Third Reich (New York: Public Affairs 2015); and Alexander Hill, The Red Army and the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2017).

³⁰ O’Brien, How the War Was Won, 6.

³¹ Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare. The Evolution of British and American Ideas About Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2002).

³² Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, 184.

³³ Ben H. Shepherd, Hitler’s Soldiers. The German Army in the Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press 2016), 382.

³⁴ John Erickson, ‘Red Army Battlefield Performance, 1941–45: The System and the Soldier’, in Paul Addison and Angus Calder (ed.), Time to Kill. The Soldier’s Experience of War in the West 1939–1945 (London: Plimco 1997), 233–48; Mawdsley, Thunder in the East (2016 edition), 217–18.

³⁵ Shepherd, Hitler’s Soldiers, 395.

³⁶ John Ellis, Brute Force. Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War (London: Andre Deutsch 1990), 119.

³⁷ O’Brien, How the War Was Won, 90–91, figures 9 and 10; 360, figure 69. This lack of precision reflects his primary source, a British intelligence report, which only shows overall numbers, not data by front. See Paul Winter, Defeating Hitler. Whitehall’s Secret Report on Why Hitler Lost the War (London: Continuum 2012), 254–56.

³⁸ G. F. Krivosheev and M. F. Filimoshin, ‘Poteri vooruzhennykh sil SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine’, in Naselenie Rossii v xx veke. Istoricheskie ocherki. Tom 2: 1940–1959 (Moscow: Rosspen 2001), 19–39, here: 21.

³⁹ David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed. How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 1995), 254.

⁴⁰ Ellis, Brute Force, 119.

⁴¹ Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand. Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 (Berlin: List Verlag 2004).

⁴² See chart in O’Brien, How the War was Won, 290. The importance of this indirect effect of the air-war on German fighting capacity against the Red Army has been made by Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (London: Jonathan Cape 1995), 118, 124, 129; and id., The Bombing War. Europe 1939–1945 (London: Allan Lane 2013), 627.

⁴³ Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, 110.

⁴⁴ Stephen G. Fritz, Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky 2004).

⁴⁵ Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction. The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Viking 2006), Chapter 18. See esp. fig. 22, p. 600.

⁴⁶ Good introductions include Mawdsley, Thunder in the East (2nd. ed, 2016), 182–99; and Alexander Hill, The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941–45. A documentary reader (London: Routledge 2009), 163–92 (which also provides a list of further reading in English).

⁴⁷ Alexander Hill, ‘British “Lend-Lease” Tanks and the Battle for Moscow, November–December 1941 – a Research Note’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 19/2 (2006), 289–94; id., ‘British Lend-Lease Aid and the Soviet War Effort, June 1941–June 1942’, The Journal of Military History 71 (2007), 773–808.

⁴⁸ A good summary is Mark Harrison, ‘The Second World War’, in R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison, S. G. Wheatcroft (ed.), The Economic Transformation of the soviet Union, 1913–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994), 238–67, here: 250–52. Also: David R. Stone, ‘Operations on the Eastern Front, 1941–1945’, in John Ferris and Evan Mawdsley (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Second World War, vol. 1: Figthing the War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015), 331–57; esp. 356.

⁴⁹ Alla Paperno, Lend-liz. Tikhii okean (Moscow: Terra 1998), 6.

⁵⁰ Harrison, ‘The Second World War’, 239, 242.

⁵¹ Drea, Japan’s Imperial Army, 198, 228, 250.

⁵² Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Threat from the East, 1933–1941: Moscow, Tokyo, and the Prelude to the Pacific War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992); Hasegawa, ‘Soviet Policy toward Japan During World War II,’ 245–71. On China’s second world war see Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, and Hans Van de Ven (eds.), The Battle for China. Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2011).

⁵³ The literature on the Holocaust on occupied Soviet territory is growing quickly. For a good introduction see Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem 2009). Other important contributions include Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock (eds.), The Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Studies and Sources on the Destruction of theJews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941–1945 (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe 1993); Zvi Gitelman (ed.), Bitter Legacy. Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Alfonsas Eidintas, Jews, Lithuanians and the Holocaust (Vilnius: Versus Aureus 2003); Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, Die ‘Endlösung’ in Riga. Ausbeutung und Vernichtung 1941–1944 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006); Joseph Levinson (ed.), The Shoah (Holocaust) in Lithuania (Vilnius: The Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum 2006); Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto, 1941–1943. Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press 2008); Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman (eds), The Unknown Blackbook. The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2010); Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin (eds.), The Holocaust in the East. Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press 2014); Waitman Wade Beorn, Marching into Darkness. The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 2014); Eric C. Steinhart, The Holocaust and the Germanization of Ukraine (New York: Cambridge University Pres 2015).

⁵⁴ There is a large and distinguished literature on the genocidal nature of the German war. For a good introduction see Geoffrey P. Megargee, War of Annihilation. Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 2007). On Jews as the testing ground for wider genocides see, for example, Robert Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman. The Life of Heydrich (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2011).

⁵⁵ Mark Edele, ‘Paper Soldiers: The World of the Soldier Hero According to Soviet Wartime Posters.’ Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 47/1 (1999), 89–108; Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, ‘“Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families”: Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War II Propaganda,’ Slavic Review 59/4 (2000), 825–47; Karel C.Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger. Soviet Propaganda During World War II (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 2012).

⁵⁶ On the Soviet liberation of concentration camps see Anita Kondoyanidi, ‘The Liberating Experience: War Correspondents, Red Army Soldiers, and the Nazi Extermination Camps,’ The Russian Review 69/3 (2010), 438–62; and Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps. The end of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New Haven: Yale University Press 2015), 29–64. See also: Arkadi Zeltser and Erina Megowan, ‘Differing Views among Red Army Personnel About the Nazi Mass Murder of Jews,’ Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15/3 (2014), 563–90.

⁵⁷ Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann (eds.), Shelter from the Holocaust. Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (Detroit: Wayne State University Press 2017); Markus Nesselrodt, Dem Holocaust entkommen. Polnische Juden in der Sowjetunion, 1939–1946 (Berlin: DeGruiter 2019).

⁵⁸ See Mark Edele, ‘Take (No) Prisoners! The Red Army and German Pows, 1941–1943.’ The Journal of Modern History 88 (2016), 342–79; Mark Edele and Filip Slaveski, ‘Violence from Below: Explaining Crimes against Civilians across Soviet Space, 1943–1947,’ Europe-Asia Studies 68/6 (2016), 1020–35; Kerstin Bischl, ‘Presenting Oneself: Red Army Soldiers and Violence in the Great Patriotic War,’ History 101 (2016), 464–79; Vojin Majstorović, ‘The Red Army in Yugoslavia, 1944–1945,’ Slavic Review 75/2 (2016), 396–421.

⁵⁹ N. F. Bugai, L. Beria – I. Stalinu: Soglasno Vashemu ukazaniiu … (Moscow: AIRO-XX 1995); J. Otto Pohl, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937–1949 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press 1999); Pavel Polian, Against their Will. The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest: Central European University Press 2004); N. L. Pobol’ and P. M. Polian (eds.), Stalinskie Deportatsii 1928–1953 (Moscow: Demokratiia 2005).

⁶⁰ Mark Edele, ‘Soviet Liberations and Occupations, 1939–1949,’ in Richard Bosworth and Joe Maiolo (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Second World War, vol 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015); Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski (eds.), Katyn. A Crime without Punishment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2007). The history of the GULAG at war has come a long way since the opening of the archives. See, in particular: Edwin Bacon, The Gulag at War: Stalin’s Forced Labour System in the Light of the Archives (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1994); and Wilson Bell, Stalin’s Gulag at War. Forced Labour, Mass Death, and Soviet Victory in the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2018). Important chapters on the war include: Anne Applebaum, Gulag. A History (New York: Anchor Books 2007), chapters 19–21; Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2011), chapter 4; Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta (New Haven: Yale University Press 2014), chapters 1 & 2. Wilson T. Bell, ‘Forced Labor on the Home Front: The Gulag and Total War in Western Siberia, 1940–1945,’ in Michael David-Fox (ed.), The Soviet Gulag. Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 2016), 114–35. An important contribution with a broader chronological focus and thematic structure, but with coverage of the war years is Golfo Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag (New Haven: Yale University Press 2017).

⁶¹ Olaf Mertelsmann and Aigi Rahi-Tamm, ‘Soviet Mass Violence in Estonia Revisited,’ Journal of Genocide Research 11/ 2–3 (2009), 307–22; esp. 308, 311.

⁶² This accusation was indeed levelled during the Cold War, especially against Roosevelt. To such critics, Yalta in 1945 was like Munich in 1938. See Leopold Labedz, ‘The Spectre of Yalta,’ Encounter 57 (December 1981), 92–96. A more reasonable variant of the argument acknowledged the centrality of the Soviet front and agreed that the Normandy invasion ‘would certainly have been defeated’ without the Red Army’s fighting in the East. But once British and US troops were on the continent, they should have rushed to end the war in order to limit Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. See Chester Wilmot, The Struggle for Europe (New York: Harper 1952), 12, 144, 707–17.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this essay was supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship [FT140101100].

Notes on contributors

Mark Edele

Mark Edele is a historian of the Soviet Union and its successor states, in particular Russia. A former Australian Research Council Future Fellow, he is the inaugural Hansen Professor in History at The University of Melbourne. His publications include Soviet Veterans of the Second World War (2008), Stalinist Society (2011), Stalin’s Defectors (2017), Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (with Atina Grossmann and Sheila Fitzpatrick, 2017), The Soviet Union. A Short History (2019), Debates on Stalinism (forthcoming 2020); and, with Martin Crotty and Neil Diamant, Winners and Losers: War Veterans in the Twentieth Century (forthcoming 2020). He is currently working on a history of Stalinism at war.