Stalin's War by Sean McMeekin

A New History of World War II

A revisionist account arguing that the Soviet leader’s prewar diplomacy, the pact with Germany, and calculated wartime maneuvers helped shape and exploit World War II, enabling Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe; drawing on newly available archives, it portrays Soviet policy as driven by strategic opportunism and miscalculation that both contributed to the outbreak and determined the brutal human and geopolitical costs of the conflict.

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