Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Revisionismo interessante

Intendo leggerlo al piu' presto.
http://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Wars-World-Cold-1939-1953/dp/0300112041/ref=sr_1_1/103-2859437-0012627?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188988044&sr=8-1
http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=15368
Man of Steel, Re-forged
by Andrew J. Bacevich
08.29.2007
Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 496 pp., $35.00.
STALIN'S WARS by Geoffrey Roberts, a professor of history at
University College Cork, is in many respects a model of scholarship.
It draws on an impressive array of Russian, British and American
archives as well as a large number of published documents and
secondary sources. It is impeccably organized. The author writes with
clarity and authority. He advances a sharply defined and well-
supported argument about an important topic, challenging the
conventional wisdom and offering a thoroughly substantiated
alternative. His canvas is large, but his brushstrokes are precise and
vigorous. Stalin's Wars is revisionism of a high order.
In brief, the story that Roberts tells goes like this: Josef Stalin,
uncontested leader of the Soviet Union from 1927 until his death in
1953, deserves to be remembered as a great statesman-indeed, as the
greatest of the age. Although Stalin made his share of mistakes,
especially in the early phases of World War II, he learned from those
mistakes and thereby grew in wisdom and stature. Among allied
chieftains, he alone was irreplaceable. He, not Churchill and not
Roosevelt, was the true architect of victory, "the dictator who
defeated Hitler and helped save the world for democracy."
Furthermore, once Germany went down to defeat-with British and
American leaders immediately turning on the Soviet Union-Stalin strove
valiantly to sustain Allied unity. Time and again he exerted himself
to avert the confrontation that became the Cold War. Even after his
efforts failed, "He strove in the late 1940s and early 1950s to revive
détente with the west." In British and American eyes, Stalin became
the embodiment of the totalitarian ideologue and warmonger. This was a
misperception. To the very end, "Stalin continued to struggle for the
lasting peace that he saw as his legacy." In denying Stalin the
reconciliation for which he devoutly worked, Western governments
succeeded only in inflicting grave injury on the Soviet people. The
East-West rivalry thrust upon Stalin nipped in the bud his postwar
efforts to nurture within the Soviet Union a "more relaxed social and
political order."
Roberts neither denies nor conceals the cruelty and ruthlessness that
marked the Stalinist era. He freely admits that Stalin was
"responsible for the deaths of millions of his own citizens." He
concedes that in the 1930s Stalin presided over the Great Terror in
which "millions were arrested and hundreds of thousands were shot." He
notes that Stalin directed "a process of ethnic cleansing involving
the arrest, deportation and execution of hundreds of thousands of
people living in border areas" of the Soviet Union. He holds Stalin
accountable for the Katyn Forest massacre of 1940, involving the
liquidation of 20,000 Polish officers and government officials.
Although speculating that "Stalin must have bitterly regretted the
subsequent embarrassment and complications" when the events at Katyn
Forest became known, Roberts makes it clear that the Soviet leader
employed mass murder as an instrument of policy-and did so without
compunction.
Still, Roberts leaves the distinct impression that when it comes to
evaluating Stalin's standing as a statesman, such crimes qualify as
incidental. He acknowledges them in order to dismiss them. Whether
intentionally or not, Roberts suggests that Stalin's penchant for
ordering people shot qualifies as a sort of personal quirk, akin
perhaps to FDR's infidelities or Churchill's fondness for drink. For
Roberts, there are only two marks on Stalin's report card that really
count: The first conferred for defeating Hitler, the second for doing
his level best to forestall the Cold War. In each instance, Roberts
awards Stalin an A-plus.
When it comes to Hitler, moreover, the achievement is an emphatically
personal one. According to Roberts, it was not the Red Army or
Stalin's generals that defeated the Wehrmacht, but the individual
serving as both People's Commissar for Defense and Supreme Commander
of the Armed Forces. The author's account of the German failure to
capture the Soviet capital in December 1941 makes the point. "Stalin
Saves Moscow", it begins. Roberts is equally insistent that Stalin's
well-intentioned efforts to sustain the Grand Alliance after 1945
foundered for one reason only: Britain and the United States
maliciously obstructed his entirely reasonable quest "to establish
friendly regimes in Eastern Europe" and to create "a united but peace-
loving and democratic Germany."
In essence, Roberts takes Stalin at his word as a man who sought only
peace. Once having embraced this view, he finds nothing in Soviet
policy at odds with Stalin's professed aspiration. "Time and again
during the war", he writes, "Stalin denied that his aim was revolution
or the imposition of communism." For Roberts, such denials affirm the
benign nature of Stalin's wartime aims. In public remarks offered on
the occasion of Germany's surrender, "Stalin emphasized that the
defeat of Hitler meant freedom and peace between peoples." This,
Roberts suggests, accurately represents Stalin's fondest hope.
Roberts credits the Soviet dictator with a self-induced sincerity. He
finds "no reason to suppose that Stalin and the Soviet leadership did
not believe their own propaganda about the essentially peace-loving
policy of the USSR." In this sense, Stalin's commitment to "freedom
and peace between peoples" bears comparison with President Bush's
post-9/11 commitment to eliminating tyranny. For Roberts, such high-
minded professions mean everything.
THERE ARE at least three problems with this depiction of Stalin as
great statesman and man of peace. The first problem relates to the
nature of the Grand Alliance, which Roberts misinterprets. The second
relates to the nature of statecraft, which Roberts misunderstands. The
third relates to the moral obligation inherent in the craft of
history, which Roberts abdicates. The misinterpretation, the
misunderstanding and the abdication all work to Stalin's advantage,
adding luster to his reputation. Yet none of the three is persuasive
or acceptable.
The Grand Alliance existed for one purpose only, which was not to
nurture "freedom and peace between peoples", but to defeat Nazi
Germany. Absent the shared perception that Hitler posed an intolerable
threat, Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union would
never have forged their compact in the first place. With Hitler's
removal from the scene, the unraveling of that partnership became all
but inevitable. Hopeful sentiments expressed by Stalin-or for that
matter, by Churchill and Roosevelt-do not change that essential
reality.
Moreover, even during its heyday, the alliance was as much a
competitive enterprise as it was a collaborative one. Even as the Big
Three professed their common devotion to freedom and peace, they
simultaneously maneuvered against one another for advantage on matters
of far more immediate concern. This was true whether the issue at hand
involved the opening of the second front, the disposition of the
Balkans, the occupation of Germany or the future of the Far East.
For any great power, the essential prerequisite of "peace" is that
others should accede to the aspiring hegemon's own requirements.
Certainly, this is how Stalin understood the term, whether during
World War II or after. Note, for example, that sixty years before
9/11, Stalin promulgated a variant of what we today call the Bush
Doctrine. "Defending our country", he told a graduating class of Red
Army officers in May 1941, "we must act offensively." Stalin was
anticipating the Bush Administration's rationale for invading Iraq:
Peace tomorrow requires the initiation of war today against those who
stubbornly resist our legitimate demands.
To assign to the Soviet Union then (or to the United States today) a
defensive orientation is to open up a rich vein of interpretive
possibilities, which Roberts is quick to tap on Stalin's behalf. At
first glance, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 and the subsequent Soviet
complicity in dismembering Poland might seem reprehensible. Roberts
sees these actions as entirely justifiable: the first an effort to
avert war, the second a prudential attempt to acquire additional
strategic depth. On the surface, the Soviet invasion of Finland that
same year might look like naked aggression. Upon reconsideration,
however, Roberts faults the Finns for bringing the conflict on
themselves. "The 'Winter War' with Finland was not of Stalin's
choosing", he writes. When the Finns refused to grant the Soviet Union
territorial concessions needed to mount a proper defense of Leningrad,
however, they left Stalin with no recourse. Besides, Roberts explains,
Soviet leaders genuinely expected the Finns to welcome the Red Army as
liberators.
This pattern continued through the war and into the postwar period. To
enhance Soviet power and influence, Stalin took whatever he could-or
more accurately, whatever his legions enabled him to take. As long as
the Red Army bore the brunt of the fighting against a common foe,
Stalin's allies granted him considerable leeway to do as he wished,
especially in Eastern Europe. Once Germany collapsed (and the
successful testing of the atomic bomb rendered Soviet participation in
the war against Japan less important), their attitude became less
permissive. Hence, rather than fulfilling his vision of "a united but
peace-loving and democratic Germany"-that is, one dominated by the
Soviet Union-Stalin had to settle for a divided Germany partly
occupied by Soviet troops. To attribute this outcome-and the Cold War
that ensued-to British and American leaders obstructing or undermining
Stalin's efforts to build a lasting peace is to wildly misconstrue the
nature of international politics.
Then there is the question of whether Stalin deserves to be included
in the pantheon of great statesmen. In making his case for the
affirmative, Roberts devotes well over 300 pages to the period from
1939 to 1947 followed by a mere 24 pages for the period 1948 to 1953,
when his account abruptly ends. Yet gauging Stalin's achievements
requires consideration of the years following his death.
Statecraft is not a charitable pursuit. The measure of merit is clear:
Success entails advancing the interests of the state. Based on that
criterion, Stalin's legacy was almost entirely negative. The victory
he engineered over Hitler cost the Soviet people dearly both in human
costs and resources. Beyond survival, it yielded few tangible
benefits. Moscow gained an empire, but it proved almost worthless.
Certainly, it never turned a profit. Moreover, because Stalin had
ruled by terror and intimidation, the system he bequeathed to his
successors possessed limited legitimacy and almost no dynamism. Hoping
to rejuvenate the Soviet economy, his successors almost immediately
embarked upon a campaign of de-Stalinization. Although reform efforts
continued sporadically from the era of Khrushchev to the era of
Gorbachev, Soviet leaders never succeeded in eliminating the
pathologies left over from the Stalinist era. The collapse of the
Soviet empire and of the Soviet Union itself-drab, stagnant and
soulless-stands as the ultimate verdict on Stalin's achievements as a
statesman.
If World War II produced a master of statecraft, then surely it was
Roosevelt. He won the most at the least cost. Alone among great
powers, only the United States emerged from the war stronger than when
the war had begun. Fate dealt Roosevelt a strong hand-far stronger
than Churchill's-and he played it well. As a consequence of victory,
Washington too acquired an empire of sorts, but this empire helped
sustain American prosperity and bolstered American security. Hardly
less significantly, FDR succeeded by 1945 in restoring popular
confidence in basic institutions, muting the impact of the Great
Depression. To his successors Roosevelt bequeathed widely shared
expectations that the "American Century" was meant to continue
indefinitely, as it has, despite periodically ill-advised policies and
reckless misadventures. The contrast with Stalin's legacy could hardly
be greater. (Whether or not the American Century can survive the folly
of George W. Bush remains to be seen.)
Finally, there is the question of Stalin's crimes and how they should
figure in reckoning with his place in history. As Roberts embarks upon
his effort to re-evaluate the Soviet leader, he assures his readers
that "we can undertake that task without fear of moral hazard." This
strikes me as not only misguided but even dangerous.
Although insisting that his intent is "not to rehabilitate Stalin but
to re-vision him", Roberts shows negligible interest in considering
whether Stalin's record passes muster with respect to any commonly
accepted standards of right and wrong. His dispassion amounts to a
form of ethical narcosis. The effect, even if inadvertent, is to
subvert the moral consensus informing our understanding of the
twentieth century. That consensus rests in no small part on the
conviction that the Stalinist regime cannot be regarded as other than
patently evil. Geoffrey Roberts now encourages us to think otherwise.
Furthermore, Stalin's Wars appears at a moment when such encouragement
to think otherwise is ongoing in other, even more sensitive quarters.
The inclination to do so is especially apparent in connection with the
suffering endured by citizens of the Third Reich. Matters once quietly
ignored or viewed as off-limits are now receiving sympathetic
consideration: The indiscriminate killing of German noncombatants as a
result of the Combined Bomber Offensive of 1943-1945; the tens or
hundreds of thousands of German women raped and assaulted by soldiers
of the victorious Red Army entering Berlin; the forced expulsion of
millions of ethnic Germans caught on the wrong side of borders when
the war ended. Admitting these victims into the narrative of World War
II is both justified and unavoidable. But to pretend that the process
of doing so is not fraught with hazard is foolishness: If the victims
of violence are all innocent, does it follow that the perpetrators of
that violence are equally culpable?
The answer to that question must be an unequivocal no. Here political
historians have a particular obligation to render unambiguous
judgments, discriminating right from wrong. By tacitly issuing Stalin
a moral waiver, Roberts shirks that obligation. In doing so, he opens
the door to further revisionism of the most pernicious sort. If Stalin
gets a pass, then perhaps Mao deserves similar reassessment: Is it not
likely that he too believed his own propaganda? Perhaps too the events
of the 1930s and 1940s might look different if considered from
Hitler's point of view. Not unlike Stalin, Hitler yearned for the
peace that derives from absolute dominion.
Stalin's Wars concludes with this strange injunction: "History can
make us wiser, if we allow it to" (emphasis in the original)-seemingly
suggesting that "we" are to sit quietly at History's feet receiving
instruction. I prefer T. S. Eliot's warning about history's "cunning
passages [and] contrived corridors." Stalin's Wars is such a contrived
corridor. The unwary will enter at their peril.
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international
relations at Boston University. He is the editor of The Long War: A
New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II
(Columbia University Press, 2007).

 peace that derives from absolute dominion.
la conclusione è tagliente:
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 hai letto bene la recensione (interessante assai), però?
Beh, certo che l'ho letta, mica sono come quelli che postano gli
articoli che non leggono?  :)
La recensione, sebbene ostile, mi ha fatto venire la voglia di leggere
anche il libro.
Anche i commenti su amazon sono interessanti.
GT
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