Special Interview: Sean McMeekin

Big Serge chats with the author of Stalin's War

And now for something completely different.

I have something very different and very exciting today, which I hope you will enjoy. Dr. Sean McMeekin is a name that readers may recognize from his regular appearance in my recommended reading segments at the ends of our regular history pieces. Dr McMeekin is a prolific author of what I like to call “muscular history”, particular the wars and revolutions of the early 20th Century. A Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College, Dr. McMeekin is the author, among other works, of The Russian Origins of the First World War, July 1914: Countdown to War, Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, The Russian Revolution: A New History, Stalin’s War, and To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. Some historians are fine scholars but rather dry writers, and some people are good writers and shoddy scholars, but I have always enjoyed the McMeekin corpus because it is muscular, interesting history which is actually enjoyable to read, with clear and direct prose.

In any case, a few weeks ago I reached out to Dr. McMeekin inquiring if he would be willing to have a conversation with me about his books, his approach to writing, and more generally about the World Wars. To my delight, he not only obliged but gave lengthy answers, which I hope you will enjoy as much as I did.

Big Serge: “One of the first things that stands out about your work is that you have found success writing about topics which are very familiar to people and have a large extant corpus of writing. World War One, the Russian Revolution, World War Two, and now a broad survey of Communism – these are all subjects with no shortage of literature, and yet you have consistently managed to write books that feel refreshing and new. In a sense, your books help “reset” how people understand these events, so for example Stalin’s War was very popular and was not perceived as just another World War Two book. Would you say that this is your explicit objective when you write, and more generally, how do you approach the challenge of writing about familiar subjects?”

Dr. McMeekin: “Yes, I think that is an important goal when I write. I have often been called a revisionist, and it is not usually meant as a compliment, but I don’t particularly mind the label. I have never understood the idea that a historian’s job is simply to reinforce or regurgitate, in slightly different form, our existing knowledge of major events. If there is nothing new to say, why write a book?

Of course, it is not easy to say something genuinely new about events such as the First World War, the Russian Revolution, or World War Two. The scholar in me would like to think that I have been able to do so owing to my discovery of new materials, especially in Russian and other archives less well-trodden by western historians until recently, and that is certainly part of it. But I think it is more important that I come to this material – and older material, too – with new questions, and often surprisingly obvious ones.

For example, in The Russian Origins of the First World War, I simply took up Fritz Fischer’s challenge, which for some reason had been forgotten after “Fischerites” (most of them less than careful readers of Fischer, apparently) took over the field. In the original 1961 edition of Griff nach der Weltmacht (Germany’s “Bid” or “Grab” for World Power, a title translated more blandly but descriptively into English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War), Fischer pointed out that he was able to subject German war aims to withering scrutiny because basically every German file (not destroyed in the wars) had been declassified and opened to historians owing to Germany’s abject defeat in 1945 – while pointing out that, if the secret French, British, and Russian files on 1914 were ever opened, a historian could do the same thing for one of the Entente Powers. I had already done a Fischer-esque history on German WWI strategy, especially Germany’s use of pan-Islam (The Berlin-Baghdad Express), inspired by a similar epigraph in an old edition of John Buchan’s wartime thriller Greenmantle – Buchan predicted that a historian would come along one day to tell the story “with ample documents,” joking that when this happened he would retire and “fall to reading Miss Austen in a hermitage.” So it was a logical progression to ask, if Fischer can do this for Germany’s war aims, why not Russia?

Readers may have missed the obvious Fischer inspiration for Russian Origins owing to the editors at Harvard/Belknap, who thought my original title – the obviously Fischer-inspired Russia’s Aims in the First World War – was boring and unsexy. Probably this helped sell books, but it did lend my critics an easy line that I was “blaming Russia for the First World War” rather than simply applying a Fischer-esque lens to Russia’s war aims. Some also called me Russophobic, which is understandable, though I think it misses the point. To my mind, subjecting Russian strategic thinking, wartime diplomacy and maneuvering to the same scrutiny as those routinely applied to Germany and the other Powers is taking the country seriously on its own terms, rather than ignoring Russia, as nearly every historian of, say, Gallipoli has done.

A book on Russian war aims was also long overdue. Other than an underwhelming Chai Lieven study from 1983 and a few articles, no one had really done this for Russia since Soviet scholars and archivists had (with very different motivations) published annotated volumes of secret Russian diplomatic correspondence back in the 1920s. For me, this was a door wide open, and I walked right in. Stalin’s War is in many ways a sequel to Russia’s Aims in the First World War (my own title!), written in a similar spirit, albeit much longer and in some ways more ambitious.

With the Russian Revolution, it was probably still harder to say anything really new, particularly after the popular histories of Richard Pipes and Orlando Figes (and a huge new literature written partly in response to them) came out in the 1990s. And I do not think my “take” was quite as revisionist or controversial as those on WWI or WW2. What I did try to do, in order to add something new to the story, was to combine my own research in a number of areas (Russian army morale reports before and after Order No. 1, depositions taken after the July Days, police reports from 1917, Bolshevik finances and expropriation policies, etc.) with new work done by others since 1991 on, especially, Russia’s military performance in WWI (a topic almost completely ignored in Cold War era literature on the Revolution, both Soviet and western), to reinterpret both the February and October Revolutions. In full disclosure, I would have preferred to write an ambitious history on just 1917, where I had the most original material and new points to make, but my publisher wanted a one-volume “comprehensive” history of the Revolution, so that is what I wrote. Like most historians and writers, I like to think that I write entirely from inspiration with a free hand, but of course there are all kinds of factors that play into our work.

Getting back to your question – while I have certainly done original research for all of these books, I am hardly the only historian to take advantage of Russian archives opened after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 – including, I should add, all the incredible archival material compiled by Russian researchers in the 1990s and 2000s into huge published volumes of Soviet-era documents. I think it is my mindset that differentiates me from other scholars who have taken similar advantage of this opportunity. Simon Sebag Montefiore, for example, uncovered incredibly rich veins of new material for Stalin. Court of the Red Tsar, as Antony Beevor did for Stalingrad, both of which books made an enormous splash. They’re not exactly “revisionists,” though. Rather, these historians retell stories already partly familiar, but with reams of fascinating new details that greatly enrich the story. I think this is a wonderful way to write history, and thousands of readers evidently agree. It is just not what I do.”

Big Serge: “I’m glad you brought up The Russian Origins of the First World War. This was the first of your books that I read, and I found it interesting for a counterintuitive reason, in that its arguments seem like they should be obvious and not particularly controversial. The essence of the book is that the Tsarist state had agency and tried to use the First World War to achieve important strategic objectives. That should be obvious, after all this was an immensely powerful state with a long pedigree of muscular foreign policy, but people are very accustomed to the Guns of August sort of narrative where all the agency and initiative is with Germany, and everyone else is reduced to the role of objects in a story where Germany is the sole subject.

It makes me think somewhat of a quip that Dr. Stephen Kotkin has used in interviews about his Stalin biographies, when he says that the “big secret” of the Soviet archives was that the communists really were communist. His point is that, even in a very convoluted and secretive regime, sometimes what you see really is what you get. I think you made a similar sort of point with Russian Origins. If I could paraphrase you, the big reveal is that the big, powerful Tsarist Empire was behaving like a big powerful empire, in that it had cogent war aims and it consistently sought to work towards those – so consistently in fact that the war aims were initially largely unchanged after the fall of the monarchy in 1917. You’re saying something very similar with Stalin’s War: the shocking secret here is that a powerful, expansionist, heavily militarized Soviet regime acted like it and worked aggressively to pursue its own peculiar interests.

How do you conceptualize this? It strikes me as a little bit odd, because, as you say, there is sometimes a bit of a stigma round the label “revisionist”, but your books generally present schemas that are fairly intuitive: Tsarist Russia was a big, powerful empire that pursued big imperial aims; Stalin was the protagonist of his own story and exercised a muscular, self-interested foreign policy; the Bolsheviks used extraordinary violence to conquer an anarchic environment. Are you surprised that people are surprised at these things?”

Dr. McMeekin: “I wish I was surprised, and perhaps at first I was, but I suppose that, over the years, I have become inured to the shocked! Shocked! reactions I receive when I point out fairly obvious things. Historians, like most groups, tend to be pack animals, who like to run in safe herds. When it comes to a familiar subject such as the outbreak of World War I, the literature tends to groove around well-trodden themes and questions. Certainly it has done since Fischerites took over the field: it’s Germany all the time, with perhaps a nod to Austria-Hungary in the Serbian backstory, or Britain with the naval race. France and Russia had almost disappeared from the story, as if one of the two major continental alliance blocs was irrelevant. I was heartened that my own treatment of Russia’s role in the outbreak of the war and Russia’s war aims garnered attention and shaped the conversation, both in itself and through Christopher Clark’s bestseller Sleepwalkers (which draws on Russian Origins). By contrast, Stefan Schmidt’s pathbreaking 2009 study of the French role in the outbreak of the war (Frankreichs Aussenpolitik in der Julikrise 1914), which Clark and I draw on heavily, has still not been translated into English, making barely a ripple in the profession. Clark and I have poked around with English-language publishers, trying to gin up interest in a translation, but so far without luck.

With the Second World War, I suppose the “shock” value is still greater, and perhaps therefore even less surprising. In Germany, after all, there are laws on the books making it illegal to “trivialize” the Holocaust, for example by foregrounding Soviet war crimes on the eastern front, and of course whole areas of the war such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Soviet war plans in 1941, and even Lend-Lease are highly sensitive in Russia, though I’ll note that there has been a curious exception for the “full-on” revisionism of Rezun-Suvorov (Icebreaker, etc.) – perhaps because his thesis is so extreme as to be easily caricatured, or maybe just because his books sell so well, it has never been difficult to find them in Russian bookstores. In a way, I also think the popularity of Suvorov’s books in Russia relates to the way they do take the Soviet Union seriously as a great power, as I do, of course – whether or not one agrees with his thesis, and I’m sure many of his Russian readers do not, it is less condescending than western histories that treat the Soviets as passive victims of fate in the Barbarossa story before Stalin woke them up.

I was perhaps more surprised at the visceral reaction to Stalin’s War in Britain, particularly my discussion of Operation Pike (eg British plans to bomb Soviet oil installations in Baku in 1940), which sent certain reviewers into paroxysms of rage I found absolutely bewildering. If anything, I should have thought my sharply critical treatment of Hopkins and Roosevelt would have offended Americans far more gravely than my slightly more sympathetic portrayal of Britain’s wartime statesmen, but it was quite the opposite. Certainly some American Roosevelt admirers were annoyed, but this was nothing like British reviewers’ hysteria over Operation Pike. Curiously enough I had dinner not long ago with one of these reviewers, and he brought up Stalin’s War. He was very civil, full of British charm, but he still wanted desperately to know why I had argued that Britain “should have gone to war against the Soviet Union instead of Nazi Germany.” As always when I am accused of this – another reviewer stated this point blank in the TLS – I simply asked him if he could locate a passage in the book where I had stated any such thing? The entire subject of World War II has become so encrusted with emotion and taboos that I think it clouds people’s vision. They see ghosts.”

Big Serge: “As I’m sure you are well aware, it’s always common to force analogies between current events and World War Two, so that we’re constantly reliving the Munich Pact, reliving the Hitler-Stalin pact, and so on. If you watch the news and scroll social media, you’d think we’re always stuck in 1939. However, there’s one comparison to the present that I think is rather apt, and that’s the similarity between Presidents Trump and Roosevelt, in terms of the primacy they put on personality in politics. We know that President Trump prides himself on being a dealmaker, somebody who just needs to get everybody in the room (Putin, Zelensky, Xi, or whomever) so he can hammer out a deal. FDR was very similar: he was a very skilled politician and he put a lot of weight on his own ability to handle people in meetings. When I hear President Trump talking about how people respect him and want to make deals with him, it instantly makes me think of FDR bragging to the British that he can handle Stalin because Stalin likes him. Do you think this is a reasonable comparison, and what do you think the diplomacy between Stalin and FDR (and Harry Hopkins by extension) tells us about the role of personal politics in history?”

Dr. McMeekin: “That’s an interesting comparison, Trump and FDR. Others have pointed out the obvious parallels with the flurry of executive orders in the first “100 days” in office, and the assertion of Executive authority more generally. And there was certainly some Trumpian braggadocio in FDR’s approach to wartime diplomacy, particularly vis-à-vis Stalin as you suggest. I do think both Presidents overpromised what personal diplomacy could avail them vis-à-vis Stalin and Putin, respectively, although I should add, in fairness, that it is still very early in Trump’s second term and therefore perhaps too early to dismiss his administration’s efforts to broker an end to the war in Ukraine before we know how the story turns out.

All this said, I do think there are important differences, and not only in the personalities and the ideology – FDR being politically “progressive” for his time (at least on some issues) and Trump some kind of populist reactionary (even if, as many have pointed out, many Trumpian positions on trade and immigration, and even his skepticism of ambitious foreign military interventions, were held by mainstream Democrats until fairly recently). Trump seems willing to try out his deal-making prowess on nearly every foreign leader, even those from hostile countries such as North Korea and (presumed) ideological opponents such as Keir Starmer of Britain. He is obviously susceptible to flattery, but he also uses flattery on foreign leaders in turn, not universally but very nearly so. FDR, by contrast, was almost brutally offensive in his treatment of “lesser” figures such as de Gaulle and more painfully, Churchill. In Stalin’s War, I only mentioned a few of these episodes, such as Roosevelt publicly insulting Churchill at Teheran in order to cozy favor with Stalin, or forcing Churchill to “beg like Fala” (Fala being FDR’s dog) at Québec. Far more dramatic was a story Peter Hitchens recounts in his recent book Phoney War, when FDR forced Churchill’s ship to circle around aimlessly at sea for several hours before being welcomed into Placentia Bay in August 1941, simply to get his beauty sleep.

One could almost imagine Trump doing this to Starmer – he would certainly have cause, in view of the insulting things some of Starmer’s Ministers have said about him. Curiously, though, for whatever reason, Trump has been far friendlier with Starmer than FDR ever was with Churchill – though with the caveat that he bullied Starmer into accepting a lopsided trade deal. Come to think of it, that trade deal is reminiscent of the extortionate prices FDR charged Churchill’s government in the bases-for-destroyers deal and other wartime aid packages.”

Big Serge: “One of the aspects of Stalin’s War that I particularly liked was that it presented a more nuanced alternative to the Soviet Attack hypothesis, or the infamous Suvorov Icebreaker theory. There doesn’t seem to be concrete evidence that Stalin was planning an imminent attack on Germany, and the Germans don’t seem to have understood Barbarossa as a preemptive strike, but you lay out a strong case for Barbarossa as a sort of preventative war. The basic idea here is that Hitler was checkmated in East-Central Europe on issues like Romania and Finland (very clear after Molotov’s trip to Berlin), and the terms of their bilateral trade were strengthening the USSR at the expense of Germany. So essentially, the Germans realize that war with the Soviets is probably only a matter of time, and they choose to start it on their own terms when they have the best odds. The question that follows from this, then, is that despite the Nazi-Soviet War having powerful ideological/eschatological overtones, is it possible that the best way to understand it is as a straightforward geopolitical question of preventative war, almost analogous to Thucydides Trap? Do we need the ideological trappings to make sense of this conflict, or can Barbarossa and German-Soviet diplomacy be fully understood through mundane, power-maximizing politics?”

Dr. McMeekin: “I am glad you distinguished between “preventative” and “pre-emptive” war, as many people conflate or confuse the two. That is very well put – Hitler did see Barbarossa as a way of seeing off a mounting danger, of a future threat coming from the East if the Soviets kept strengthening their position, but he was not forestalling an imminent attack.

As for your question about “ideological trappings,” in view of how dramatic and destructive the ensuing war on the eastern front was, it would seem reductive to ignore ideology entirely. Once the war got going, ideology (Naziism/anti-Communism and anti-Semitism on one side, Communism and anti-fascism or anti-Naziism on the other, along with a more traditional Russian nationalistic fervor against the invader), along with metastasizing ethnic hatreds – all this helped fuel the horrendous cycle of war crimes and often indiscriminate reprisals that made the conflict so unfathomably bloody.

That said, I do not think that the war was caused by these ideological and ethnic tensions, except insofar as they may have influenced Hitler’s final decision to strike, or Stalin’s war preparations. It is possible to explain the outbreak of the Nazi-Soviet war largely, if not exclusively, through a fairly traditional story of power-maximizing politics, as you say, with Soviet and German interests clashing with increasing vehemence in Finland, Romania, and the Balkans. I do think that Hitler made his decision to strike after, not before, Molotov’s trip to Berlin in November 1940, more specifically after he received Stalin’s borderline insulting counter-proposal of Soviet terms to join the Tripartite Pact (eg a German withdrawal from Finland and Romania, and German permission for Soviet troops to occupy Bulgaria and the Turkish Straits). The transcript I discovered in the Bulgarian archives of Hitler’s reaction to this proposal, which I cite in Stalin’s War, shows Hitler in full, semi-unhinged rant mode – but also calculating how badly Germany’s geopolitical interests (eg owing to the Wehrmacht’s need for regular supplies of oil, chrome, bauxite/aluminum, nickel, etc.) were being threatened by any further Soviet encroachment in Finland, Romania, and the Balkan region. Of course, one could make the counter-argument that Hitler would have been better off grudgingly allowing the Soviets to continue supplying the Wehrmacht with most of what it needed, rather than invading Russia to seize Soviet resources, but this would imply that he trusted Stalin, a man who had just used Soviet economic leverage to (try to) bully him into sacrificing vital German interests.

Certainly the personal element was in play here, and I would no more want to reduce the Nazi-Soviet war to “mere” geopolitics or economics than to ideology alone. I also don’t think the “Thucydides Trap” quite works, as it is unclear which was the rising and falling power between Nazi Germany and the USSR in 1940-1941 – if anything, one could say that both powers, and Britain, too, were being unnerved if not menaced by the inexorable rise of the United States. But Barbarossa may be the most dramatic example we have of the Great Man theory of history, with the lives of millions of people upended or ended owing to the decisions of two men – or perhaps just one, if we absolve Stalin of starting the war (though not of preparing for it and perhaps provoking Hitler into invading). No matter how many factors were in play in 1940 and 1941, the final decision to invade the Soviet Union was made by Hitler alone, just as the decision to reject Hitler’s overtures in November 1940 and then aggressively deploy Soviet armor, warplanes, and build hundreds of new aerodromes and tank parks in border regions abutting the German Reich in early 1941, with whatever precise purpose, was Stalin’s alone. I honestly think that, had Stalin not been so paranoid about security and foreign travel, had he traveled to Berlin instead of Molotov in November 1940, he and Hitler may even have worked out a deal of some kind postponing, if not forever ruling out, an armed conflict between them. Not that this would have been an unreservedly positive outcome for their oppressed subjects, necessarily – and certainly not for Churchill and Britain, for whom a renewed Hitler-Stalin Pact that winter would have been a strategic nightmare, likely dooming Egypt and sowing doubt in FDR’s mind that Britain’s war against Nazi Germany was winnable and worth supporting. But it could have happened.”

Big Serge: “I appreciate your comment about Hitler, and that even when he was deep into one of his classic rants he was still making generally rational calculations about the German war economy. I’ve explored similar themes in my own writing, that Hitler – for all the neuroses – was generally trying to make rational decisions. One example that I use is the no-retreat order outside Moscow in the winter of 1941-42. This is often lampooned as an example of the Nazi appeal to willpower, but it had a fairly sound military logic, in that retreating in the snow would have meant leaving lots of heavy equipment behind, and in the end Army Group Center was able to defend itself throughout the winter and retain its cohesion. Without going too far down this rabbit trail, it’s very common that decisions by both Stalin and Hitler are construed as fundamentally ideological, and if you attempt to explain them rationally this is often interpreted as “defending” them.

We can see similar tendencies today in the way Putin is construed, but in a sense it’s even worse. Putin does not have an ideological brand that is recognizable to westerners, so his actions can’t even be chalked up to an ideology per se – instead, he’s simply a dictator doing vaguely dictatorlike things. When Vice President Vance said that he thinks Putin is genuinely motivated by his understanding of Russian self-interest, it was met with incredulity and outrage.

My question for you, in this vein, is that both in current events and when reading history, do you think it’s a best practice to begin with the assumption that everybody is rational and is pursuing state self-interest? Obviously ideology has a great deal to do with how those interests are understood – IE, the collectivization of agriculture makes perfect sense given the imperatives of the Marxist-Leninist project, but appears to be an act of insanity otherwise. Do we ever see truly irrational state actors in history? More importantly, is it possible to make good decisions if we cannot acknowledge that even our adversaries are attempting to coherently pursue cogent objectives?”

Dr. McMeekin: “The way Putin is discussed by most western politicians and the press must be almost incomprehensible to Russians, or anyone with experience in Russia. In reality he is nowhere near as colorful as the media caricature – though I do think this caricature is a bit more filled with content than you suggest. In part because Putin’s Russia distanced itself from western “woke” trends in everything from an Orthodox revival to curious western obsessions such as the martyrdom of Pussy Riot, and also because he became associated with Trump by extension through the phantasmagoria of “Russiagate,” I really do think Putin has become a genuine ideological hate figure in the West, beyond simply being a “dictator doing dictator-like things.” I have often tried to push against this, both in print and in various conferences and panel discussions, pointing out as you do that Putin’s foreign policy has usually been fairly standard issue, based on his understanding of the Russian national interest. I am met with bewilderment.

To answer your question, I do think that it is possible for state actors to behave irrationally, and this does happen from time to time. I actually think it happens more frequently with U.S. foreign policy, which has always been subject to – not the vicissitudes of public opinion and/or “democracy” exactly, but a kind of emotional thinking, a fuzzy idealism about democracy, which has led to curious patterns such as the U.S. backing or installing figures such as Batista in Cuba or Diem in Vietnam before ousting them, responding to 9/11 with an ill-begotten crusade to democratize Afghanistan and Iraq, and other boondoggles. I am aware that many people have argued that there is method in this madness, that the U.S. has some mysterious grand strategy that requires periodically wrecking countries, but I’ll confess I don’t see it myself.

Big Serge: “I would be remiss if I did not ask about Lend-Lease. I’ve shared my view in the past that Lend-Lease was not the sole factor ensuring German defeat in the east, simply because the Wehrmacht was already so badly attrited by the winter of 1941-42. However, the vast quantities of material sent to the USSR, which you detail, clearly accelerated the Red Army’s sweep westward. It’s hard, for example, to imagine the Red Army sweeping up to the Vistula so quickly in 1944 without all the motorization provided by the United States. Do you agree with this basic schema, in the final analysis, that Lend-Lease was not why Germany lost the war, but it was the reason that Stalin was able to expand so far to the west? Do you think that in the absence of Lend-Lease, the USSR and Germany would have ground into some sort of attritional stalemate along a line in western Russia? Please give us your view of a plausible outcome in a world where Lend-Lease to the USSR either does not exist, or is radically curtailed.”

Dr. McMeekin: “Those are good questions, and difficult to answer. I would certainly agree that any material Lend-Lease contribution to Soviet survival in 1941 (in tanks, trucks, warplanes, etc.) happened only in December, at the Battle of Moscow, and was even then marginal, as I say clearly in Stalin’s War (though the margins matter!) Yes, the Wehrmacht was by then badly attrited and it is certainly possible, even likely, the Red Army could have saved Moscow absent Lend-Lease aid. I do think the comparative contribution of Lend-Lease armor ramped up significantly by the time of Stalingrad, and more strangely still during and after Citadel/Kursk in July 1943 – I say strangely because, once Soviet survival in the war had been assured and the Wehrmacht was retreating, any strategic logic behind Soviet Lend-Lease was weakened if not undermined entirely. But the Roosevelt administration, instead of slowing down shipments of trucks, tanks, and warplanes as the Red Army began its long “sweep westward” against an ever-weakening German Wehrmacht, instead ramped them up to something like hyperspeed.

I am sure that many critics of Stalin’s War think that I overrate the importance of Lend-Lease aid in the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, but I do think that I am careful not to exaggerate – I give precise figures and percentage estimates even in categories, such as tanks, in which the contribution from Soviet domestic production was comparatively greater than in trucks, where it was negligible, or in warplanes, which fell somewhere in between. One thing I will say is that the Soviet military, by restricting access to the archives in Podolsk severely, has made it almost impossible to document how and how many Lend-Lease tanks, trucks, warplanes, Bren gun carriers etc. were incorporated into individual Red Army units – but oh how I tried! Unfortunately, now that my book, producing the first serious estimates of this nature, made such a ruckus, I very much doubt anyone will again squeeze as much out blood of this stone as I did.

More broadly, I really think it is vital that we distinguish between finished war materiél and military-industrial or other material inputs, and in the latter area I think the Lend-Lease contribution began to factor sooner and ultimately went deeper, eg in the aluminum, refined steel, armor plate, nickel, and so on without which much of Soviet war industry could not have functioned at anywhere near its achieved capacity, not to mention the upkeep of Soviet infantrymen and officers, from Tusonka pork to dehydrated borscht and eggs, to boots and even epaulettes. In the most literal sense of clothing and feeding the Red Army, the Lend-Lease contribution was fundamental, often reaching figures as high as 70% (as in sugar). Then there was U.S. gasoline and aviation fuel, particularly important in the Soviet Far East. Presumably, although of course this is impossible to document, the contribution of massive shipments of American foodstuffs, boots, fuel and so on to Soviet morale was equally significant.

Could there have been an “attritional stalemate” on the eastern front, absent American Lend-Lease aid? I certainly think this was a possibility. Stalin suggested as much to Hopkins at various moments as early as July 1941, admittedly in part to emphasize Soviet need so as to get Hopkins to unleash the Lend-Lease spigot. Perhaps more significant were Stalin’s remarks justifying his “no retreat” order 227 on July 28, 1942, when he observed, as Operation Blau was unfolding and in view of German territorial gains so far in “Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltic Region, the Donbass,” that the USSR had by then lost any initial advantage it had over the Wehrmacht in population, grain output, or in its material-industrial base. And of course, if the Germans cut off the Volga lifeline at Stalingrad to the Caspian and resources of the Caucasus, then the material equation would tilt still more dramatically against the Soviets. It was not an accident that Stalin’s requests for Lend-Lease aid peaked in frequency, intensity and what we might call chutzpah between this decree and the launching of Operation Uranus outside Stalingrad that November (eg “I consider English conduct on the question of Airacobras tremendously insolent. The English had no right to divert the cargo without our consent.”)

I do think the Soviets were in danger of being pitched back across the Volga in 1942 into a defensive position, still more dependent on Lend-Lease aid to continue fighting than they might have been otherwise – though on the brighter side for the Red Army, by then the U.S. was in the war and so the strategic and political imperative behind Soviet Lend-Lease would have been strengthened. In that sense, I think your counter-factual would have cancelled itself out: absent sufficient Lend-Lease aid to let the Red Army hold on and allow Zhukov to mount the giant armored flanking operation of Uranus, the Soviets would have fallen back – which would then have led Washington to unleash more Lend-Lease aid to keep them in the war.”

Big Serge: “Lend Lease is an unusually controversial subject. On the Russian side, it seems that the topic is resented as an attempt to minimize the human losses and effort of the Red Army, while many Americans conversely seem irritated that Russia “takes credit” for winning the war. Frankly it is a little odd to me, simply in the sense that the bravery of a Red Army tanker dicing it up with the Tigers outside Warsaw is unrelated to where the aluminum in the tank came from. It’s perhaps become even harder to speak objectively about this now, because people frequently assume that you are trying to make a thinly veiled point about American aid for Ukraine, even when you are not.

I sometimes frame Lend-Lease as a profligate luxury that comes from America’s unique pair of strategic blessings: immense wealth and strategic standoff. I made a similar point about the withdrawal from Afghanistan (which irritated many people), that America is uniquely able to simply walk away from a long war, and even when the withdrawal goes poorly it does not impact the material conditions of life at home. America is safe, and America is rich, and this generally means that Americans don’t suffer the consequences of mistakes. So in the case of Lend-Lease and the Soviet Union, we can debate the significance of the aid and the wisdom of it, but at the end of the day it was mostly Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Germans who suffered, not Americans.

Do you think that played at all into American decision-making vis a vis Lend-Lease? Is there a tendency, owing to America’s wealth and standoff, to make these sorts of decisions almost casually? One of the impressions that I got from Stalin’s War is that the Soviets were simply much more serious, diplomatically aggressive, and precise about their objectives than the Americans. Is that a fair reading?”

Dr. McMeekin: “I think that is fair. Certainly Roosevelt and Hopkins acted as if U.S. resources were infinite, that ramping up the U.S. war economy to supply the Red Army was just a kind of noblesse oblige which cost them nothing and might win Soviet friendship, beyond which – they simply had no idea what the consequences were and did not much care. And yes, Stalin and the Soviets were more precise in their aims and demands and therefore far more effective. Unfortunately, I think many policymakers in Washington still think this way, despite the U.S industrial base, economy, and financial position being dramatically weaker today than in the 1940s or 1950s, which helps explain why (on top of myopia about the dangers of provoking the country with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal) they are so casual about ginning up a hugely expensive proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. For the record, I was certainly not “trying to make a thinly veiled point about American aid for Ukraine” when discussing Lend-Lease in Stalin’s War, as I was writing the book between about 2017 and 2019, long before the war began (if not the longer U.S.-Russian struggle for influence over Ukraine, which one could date back to 2014 or 2004 or earlier).”

Big Serge: “Stalin’s War made quite a splash, and among the friends of mine who read it I would say there was no small degree of outrage at the idea that the Roosevelt administration was sort of taken to the cleaners by Moscow, or that FDR gave the farm away because he had a sort of nagging sympathy for socialism. If you’ll allow me to play devil’s advocate, I’d like to put the most generous framing on this. Roosevelt and Hopkins, were they here, might point out that they rented the world’s biggest army to use against Germany, and that the Germans and the Soviets chewed each other to pieces. The Soviets lost tens of millions of people and emerged with their economy in shambles, while America loses maybe a quarter of a million men in Europe and ends the war with an intact economy that dwarfs all competitors. So we might say, yes Stalin managed to squeeze huge amounts of aid out of the US, and he gets Poland and the Baltics and Romania and so forth, but the flip side of this is that America gets to win the largest war in modern history, and we do so essentially for free, with economic and human costs that are miniscule compared to other belligerents. Is that a fair framing? Was there an alternative course of action for the United States that didn’t likely lead to much larger American casualties?”

Dr. McMeekin: “These are all fair points, and I do play devil’s advocate for Roosevelt at times in Stalin’s War, pointing out that in his own mind he was saving American lives – or, perhaps more cynically, as you suggest (and as the Russians have complained ever since) using Red Army troops as cannon fodder. The issue I have always had with this argument is – cannon fodder for what? When Roosevelt (at first, secretly) opened the spigot for Lend-Lease aid to the USSR in July 1941, the United States was neutral in the war, and most Americans had no strong preference for either side in the Nazi-Soviet war – or thought, like Truman, that the U.S. should help whichever side was losing (though still hoping the Nazis would lose the larger war in the end). Had the power to tap the vast hydraulic forces of the U.S. economy been in Churchill’s hands, the “cannon fodder/saving lives” argument would have made more sense: Britain was already at war but saw no way to defeat Germany, and now here was the world’s biggest army to do what the smaller British armies couldn’t do, grind down the Wehrmacht while saving British lives. In the circumstances of July-November 1941, however, none of this logic applied in Washington DC.

After Pearl Harbor on December 7 and Hitler’s declaration of war on the U.S. four days later, of course the equation changed. What Hitler expected (this helps explain his foolish and otherwise inexplicable decision to do this; he thought the U.S. and Britain were about to get sucked deeply into the Japanese war instead of Europe), and what most Americans expected, was that Roosevelt would respond to Pearl Harbor by unleashing American fury – and more to the point, America’s vast war-industrial economy – against Japan. Instead, inexplicably to ordinary Americans (who were never consulted), FDR chose to respond to Pearl Harbor with the ARCADIA resolutions, which declared that the Anglo-American strategic priority was not only “Germany first” but, inside the European war, “assistance to Russia’s offensive by all available means.” Even the phrase is suggestive – not Russian “survival” but “Russia’s offensive”: to munition and supply Soviet offensive operations. To what purpose? I suppose one would have to ask Roosevelt, because there was no reason this was the logical, political, moral, or strategic imperative for the U.S. after Pearl Harbor. The obvious alternative was that the U.S. would have focused its war-industrial production, merchant-marine and shipping capacity on the war against Japan, and secondarily supporting the Kuomintang in China, which was fighting and tying down most Japanese land forces. Certainly Lend-Lease aid to Britain, and some Lend-Lease aid to the USSR, would have continued, but almost any other administration in Washington would have prioritized the war against Japan over Stalin’s needs on the eastern front.

Would this have affected the outcome of the war in Europe? Almost certainly it would have. And maybe Roosevelt was right to view Europe as more strategically important than Asia to the United States in 1941 (if not today): despite his oft-stated sympathies for China, she was a secondary power. Perhaps the Red Army really was the cannon-fodder blunt instrument needed to destroy the seemingly unstoppable Wehrmacht, which consideration overruled any concerns about Japan, China, or Britain, for that matter. Still, I think that a more cautious and well-thought out U.S. Lend-Lease policy would have done enough to ensure Soviet survival, but not so aggressively motorized Stalin’s armies that eastern Europe was consigned to a future under Communism. And by cutting off Chiang Kai-Shek in 1943 and 1944 at a time when Lend-Lease shipments to Stalin were peaking, the U.S. gravely weakened nationalist China and postponed Japan’s defeat long enough for the Soviets to take a grotesquely opportunistic hand in it.

None of these were easy decisions to make in the circumstances. Still, I hesitate to say that the outcome of FDR’s policy choices was in the best interest of either Americans or Europeans. Setting aside more sensible U.S. policy vis-à-vis Japan that might have led to a settlement before the “Hull note” ultimatum of late November 1941 – for the sake of this exercise, I’ll assume Pearl Harbor has happened – I do think there were other courses of action that would have led to a better outcome in Europe, which in turn would have benefitted the United States. I think Roosevelt’s dismissal of, and refusal to negotiate with or even acknowledge the existence of, the anti-Hitler resistance in Germany, was a huge blunder. In the wake of Stalingrad, when more and more German generals realized the war was lost, a tremendous opportunity was lost when Roosevelt cut off contacts with these plotters. A coup in Berlin in either 1943 or 1944 would have saved millions of lives, and possibly prevented the Red Army from crashing into eastern Europe. Some kind of Cold War-esque conflict would still have emerged, but on far less equal terms: the Soviets would have infinitely weaker, confined at some point near or even inside the Soviet borders of 1941, maybe even inside those of 1939. Meanwhile, a greater U.S. focus on Japan, greater Lend-Lease and other logistical support for Chiang Kai-Shek, and the absence of those 8.244 million tons of gifted American war materiél shipped to the Soviet Far East, would have made far less likely Mao’s Communist takeover of China in 1949.

More broadly – focusing now on domestic consequences for the U.S. – I think that a more transparent administration, without all of the Roosevelt-Hopkins skullduggery with Lend-Lease, with clearer and more clearly defined strategic priorities and war aims, would not have midwifed the vast American security state and militarized global quasi-empire that emerged after 1945. The passage of the Lend-Lease Act by Congress in March 1941, with its open-ended “good faith” clause allowing the President to commandeer American agricultural and industrial production on behalf of whatever foreign governments he chose to (in the end 36 of them!), basically killed off the constitutional order when it came to U.S. foreign policy. It is no accident that Congress has not declared war according to proper constitutional procedure since the winter of 1941-42. Maybe the U.S. was always fated to become a global power or “empire” of some kind, but the policies of the Roosevelt administration during the Second World War greatly accelerated the process and deprived Americans of any say in the matter, even through their elected representatives. Yes, the U.S. won the largest war in history, certainly at far lower human (if not financial) cost than the Soviets, and inherited the spoils – the ruins, really – of western Europe and the British empire, a war in which much of its industrial competition was flattened. But the price was paid in myriad other ways that Americans still live with today.”

Big Serge: “I like your point about China in particular, as it raises the broader point that the forgotten or ancillary theaters of the Pacific War (Indochina, Korea, and China) directly became flashpoints for America in the postwar era. You could almost argue that current security concerns in Taiwan are merely the third in a sequence of American crises in the former Japanese periphery, following the Korean and Vietnam Wars. We also know that the Mediterranean theater tends to get short shrift, both in popular histories and in real time during the war. The Italian theater, for example, tied up dozens of German divisions, and yet Stalin essentially ignored its existence when he demanded the opening of a second front. We also know that Churchill advocated for Mediterranean-oriented strategy (as a way of preserving British post-war influence) and was largely brushed off by the Roosevelt team.

This all ends up seeming a bit odd, because when you look at the First World War, the western allies were perfectly willing to probe ancillary theaters and peripheral fronts (the Shatt al-Arab, Gallipoli, Salonica, and so forth). Yet in the second war, despite enormous American resources, these peripheral fronts in Asia and the Mediterranean were largely written off, which of course leads directly to communist domination in both the Balkans and China.

So it would seem to me that the lines along which the Cold War was drawn were the direct result of strategic choices and resources allocation, almost exclusively by the United States. Do you think that this was due to short-run strategic thinking in Washington (win the war against the Axis and then figure out what comes next), or did the Roosevelt administration genuinely believe that stable, or even friendly relations with the Soviets could persist after the defeat of Germany? It’s essentially indisputable that American choices caused the Soviet Union to emerge much more powerful from the war than it would have otherwise, correspondingly making America’s cold war position more tenuous. Were these choices the result of myopia, or naivety?”

Dr. McMeekin: “A bit of both, I should think. FDR was certainly naïve about Stalin, perhaps Hopkins a bit less so – I think Hopkins genuinely admired Stalin and the Soviets and wanted unambiguously to help them become more powerful. The myopia came in in just the way you suggest – Roosevelt simply did not want to think about peripheral theaters or spheres of influence, and thus he dismissed Churchill’s Mediterranean proposal at Teheran (though initially showing some interest, until he was scolded by an insidious note under the table, probably from Hopkins) and agreed to write off Chiang Kai-Shek, despite having expressed great sympathy for China.”

Big Serge: “I have one final question for you. As my use of the Sergei Witte avatar hints, I have reactionary inclinations and correspondingly strong anti-communist sensibilities. I find the Lenin-Stalin regime essentially horrifying, with an enormous litany of crimes on the ledger. However, when I read a book like Stalin’s War, or Dr. Kotkin’s biographies, it’s difficult not to come away with a begrudging sense of respect for Stalin. Not in a moral sense, of course, but in his capacity for work, his ability to micromanage foreign policy and military developments, while also having his fingers in minutia like textbooks, movie scripts, and economic planning. It’s as if an American President was not only micromanaging the Pentagon and the State Department, but also chairing the Federal Reserve, running the New York Stock Exchange, and managing Hollywood.

It’s difficult not to find some sort of grudging, slightly horrified sense of respect for Stalin. He was clearly a unique and extraordinarily competent man, and his imprint on history is in a rare weight class. So my question is: do you respect Stalin? If you’d be so kind, give me a word or two to summarize your general impression of the man.”

Dr. McMeekin: “I suppose I have grudging respect for Stalin, as one might appreciate a worthy adversary. I would certainly not wish to be his subject, and I have great sympathy for his manifold victims. But about Stalin’s competence, his curiosity, work ethic and often energetic interventions in the varied fields you mention, and his imprint on history there is no question. As a historian, I’ll admit that I have a sneaking admiration for Stalin’s dry, mordant sense of humor that emerges from transcripts of wartime summits. He was clearly highly intelligent, in addition to being ruthless and cunning. The great men of history are seldom humanitarians.”

Big Serge: “I think it would be hard for me to come up with a better closing line than that. For myself and for my readers, thank you for your time and for the thoroughness of your answers.”

Dr. McMeekin’s books can be found at Basic Books or his author page on Amazon.