num_pages: 496
description: A chilling riveting account based on newly released Russian documentation that reveals Joseph Stalins true motivesand the extent of his enduring commitment to expanding the Soviet empireduring the years in which he seemingly collaborated with Franklin D. Roosevelt Winston Churchill and the capitalist West. At the Big Three conferences of World War II Stalin persuasively played the role of a great world leader. Even astute observers like George F. Kennan concluded that the United States and Great Britain should view Stalin as a modern-day tsarist-like figure whose primary concerns lay in international strategy and power politics not in ideology. Now Robert Gellately uses recently uncovered documents to make clear that in fact the dictator was an unwavering revolutionary merely biding his time determined as ever to establish Communist regimes across Europe and beyond and that his actions during these years (and the poorly calculated Western responses) set in motion what would eventually become the Cold War. Gellately takes us behind the scenes. We see the dictator disguising his political ambitions and prioritizing the future of Communism even as he pursued the war against Hitler. Along the way the ascetic dictators Machiavellian moves and bouts of irrationality kept the Western leaders on their toes in a world that became more dangerous and divided year by year. Exciting deeply engaging and shrewdly perceptive Stalins Curse is an unprecedented revelation of the sinister machinations of the Soviet dictator.
language: None
title: Stalin's Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War
publisher: Vintage