Stalin's Other War

Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939-1941

By (author) Albert L. Weeks

Not available to order

Publication date:

16 April 2003

Length of book:

216 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781461643494

On June 22, 1941, just less than two years after signing the Nazi-Soviet Agreements, Adolf Hitler's German army invaded the Soviet Union. The attack hardly came as a surprise to Josef Stalin; in fact, history has long held that Stalin spent the two intervening years building up his defenses against a Nazi attack. With the gradual declassifying of former Soviet documents, though, historians are learning more and more about Stalin's grand plan during the years 1939-1941. Longtime Soviet expert Albert L. Weeks has studied the newly-released information and come to a different conclusion about the Soviet Union's pre-war buildup_it was not precaution against German invasion at all. In fact, Weeks argues, the evidence now suggests Soviet mobilization was aimed at an eventual invasion of Nazi Germany. The Soviets were quietly biding their time between 1939 and 1941, allowing the capitalist powers to destroy one another, all the while preparing for their own Westward march. Stalin, Weeks shows, wasn't waiting for a Nazi attack_Hitler simply beat him to the punch.
Since the demise of the Soviet Union, new documents have surfaced which show, according to Albert Weeks in Stalin's Other War, one of our leading Sovietologists, that, on the contrary, Stalin had developed an offensive-war strategy against both Nazi Germany and the Western democracies as well. Mr. Weeks has produced a volume of history which is bound to stir controversy. Mr. Weeks's analysis of Soviet archives is a piece of scholarly revisionism of major significance.