This book was provided free by the publisher as a review copy.

In 2017 Professor Sean McMeekin published The Russian Revolution: A New History, and his new book is just as interesting, telling the story of World War II—or, more accurately, the world wars engineered by Iosif Stalin.

More than anything, Stalin's wars were about spreading the Terror to the rest of Europe.

The Spanish Civil War is often considered a trial run for the world war, and Sean McMeekin shows that having political control was more important than achieving military victory. Stalin's overall strategy was always to encourage the two capitalist blocs (Germany on one hand and France and Britain and their Allies on the other) to fight each other.

Stalin's goal wasn't winning, but prolonging.

Even in Asia, Stalin kept the Chinese Civil War going.

After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, on May 3, 1939, Stalin ordered Soviet Jews purged from the Foreign Ministry, apparently as an approach to Hitler.

Pictures of Gestapo officers shaking hands with the NKVD after the Great Terror sent chills down some people's spines.

McMeekin does stress the point that no war is inevitable however.

The United States might have stayed out of the war. Right up until Pearl Harbor, FDR was promising to keep America out of the war. He—or his successor—might have kept that promise.

Stalin was worried that if he seemed to the Allies to be getting on too well with Hitler, they might attack the Soviet Union. This became a distinct worry after Stalin invaded Finland and installed a puppet government. World public opinion was on the side of the Finns and would have supported military action against the Soviet Union.

Politruks—political commisars under the supervision of Stalin's henchman Lev Mekhlis of the Red Army Political Department, spent hours a day lecturing Soviet troops and distributing propaganda newspapers aimed at the Finnish speaking population. Control detachments threatened Soviet troops who retreated with execution.

Then Stalin rounded up Polish elites after blackmailing the Poles into allowing Soviet bases on their territory.

Stalin didn't care, but he appeared to much of the world an aggressor like Hitler. Mussolini almost declared war against the USSR because Stalin had attacked Finland. This would have caused a split between Nazi German and Fascist Italy.

Captured Soviet troops were shocked by the decency with which the Finns treated them (according to interviews with Russian-speaking British officers).

On February 22, 1940, there were secret talks between the Turks and the Allies. The possible target was oil in Baku.

On October 9—19, 1944, the conference in Moscow between Churchill and Stalin codenamed “Tolstoy” was famous for Churchill offtering Stalin a cynical division of the Balkins written on a napkin that Stalin seemed to accept, but it's difficult to know how serious Stalin took the offer.

Stalin had refused to travel very far to meet Roosevelt and Churchill. Sean McMeekin quotes Churchill that if they spent ten years looking for a place to hold a conference, they could find nowhere worse than Yalta to meet.

FDR and Churchill seemed to be trying to exceed Stalin in threatening violent treatment of Germans in the postwar period.

In McMeekin's opinion American officials like Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department, and Harry Hopkins, FDR's closest political advisor for most of his administration and chief Lend-Lease negotiator, were agents of influence who helped Stalin's cause.

McMeekin says the fates of Yugoslavia, Poland, and China were settled at Teheran. Stalin convinced FDR and Churchill to (1) allow him to seize German industry, (2) use enemy soldiers as slave laborers, and (3) take revenge against captured Soviets.

The simple fact was in the postwar the Allies let Stalin build a slave labor empire.

World War II is often considered the most violent conflict in history, and at the same time one of the few necessary wars. McMeekin comes to some uncomfortable conclusions.

If the point of the war was to save western Europe, that could have been achieved at less human cost in negotiations.

If the point was to save eastern Europe, it failed.

If the war in Asia was over Manchuria, the conclusion of that war just handed that territory to Stalin.

Sean McMeekin is sure that Stalin was the victor in Europe and Asia.