In a weak moment, of sympathy for the German Führer, Adolf Hitler, that he had been dealt with too harshly by history for killing a mere six million Jews and many millions of Poles and others, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Soviet dissident who spent many years in Stalin’s gulags, commented that Stalin killed many times the number of people that Hitler had, and most of them were his fellow Russians. And there is scarcely a word said against him.

Hitler again got all of the attention for starting World War II, but is that fair? Historian Sean McMeekin, in his book “Stalin’s War”, says that World War II should be more fairly seen as starting in 1931 and ending in 1989 when the Soviet military occupation of Eastern Europe finally came to an end. Well that’s not strictly true. North Korea is still occupied by a regime that Stalin imposed on it. The same with Vietnam, at a stretch. The man who should get most of the credit for bringing about the Second World War, and then gaining the most from it, was Joseph Stalin. All Stalin lost was maybe 25 million people, and what does that matter in the grand scheme of things. What Sean McMeekin has to say makes a lot of sense and I’m going to share his thoughts with you in this programme.

Tag words: Stalin’s War; Sean McMeekin; World War II; Adolf Hitler; Joseph Stalin; Russian Empire; Czars; Winston Churchill; Roosevelt; Pearl Harbour; Chiang Kai-Shek; Operation Barbarossa; Battle of Khalkin Gol; Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto; Matsuoka; Hans Krebs;