Mount TBR #17

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

Stalin's Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War II on the Eastern Front - Constantine Pleshakov

When Hitler gave the orders to start the surprise invasion on the USSR in June 1941, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov asked the German Foreign Ministry, “What have we done to deserve this?” The thesis of this book is that Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union at the time, was an ineffective military leader and that his failure lead to the deaths of untold millions of lives in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Historians will argue on this point – it’s not documented - but the author’s conclusion is that Stalin assumed Hitler would eventually get around to attacking the USSR, but Stalin guessed wrong about the timing – he thought the invasion would occur in early 1942. Stalin himself, in fact, was planning a preemptive strike on German-occupied Poland and the Balkans.

This popular history is readable and well-sourced. The stories of the impact on ordinary people move the reader to wonder at the bravery and will to survive in human beings. Sometimes Pleshakov gets into the heads of the players and tell us how they feel, which is in fact unknowable and incredible, but this infrequent tendency aside, this is a good overview of one of the worst chapters in Russian history. 

It’s a problem with authoritarians of all stripes and the crony hacks they surround themselves with: not only are they brutal and without style, but they are erratic, incompetent, and not ever to be trusted with the lives of their people or the security of their country.