A fascinating study, drawing on hitherto unavailable Soviet documents and on Pleshakov’s ready command of a vast literature...
Josef Stalin made for an accomplished dictator, writes young Russian historian Pleshakov (The Tsar’s Last Armada, 2002, etc.). He was a terrible military leader, though, and his failings cost millions of Soviet lives, especially at the outbreak of WWII.
Was Stalin planning a preemptive strike against the Nazis? The question has consumed historians for decades, and though, as Pleshakov notes, he hasn’t turned up any smoking guns, the evidence certainly seems to point in that direction. For sure, the Nazi generals and operatives who were more or less freely operating inside Russian territory in the days of the Soviet–Axis nonaggression pact thought so: Stalin’s armies were configured to strike, and they had trained for the eventuality. “If Stalin ordered an offensive strike,” Pleshakov observes, “each salient would serve as a thrust into Germany. But if the Germans forestalled him, the salients would become lethal traps for the Red Army.” The Germans did indeed act first, and the Red Army died in swarms, at the rate of a soldier every two seconds. Stalin had already murdered the best of his military leaders—rightly, Pleshakov suggests, at least in a way, because they were sure to rebel sooner or later—and had tied the hands of the survivors so that they could not act on their own initiative, even if they had been capable of doing so. (Pleshakov severely devalues Marshal Georgi Zhukov, for one, as a tactician and commander.) Moreover, as if paralyzed by Hitler’s betrayal, Stalin absented himself from the Kremlin several times during the first ten days of the war, making it impossible for his underlings to deliver decisions to the front. In the end, Pleshakov writes, in the first 20 days of the war the Soviets lost 600,000 men, “one in five soldiers stationed on the front.” The social reverberations, he adds, would be many and long-lasting, from xenophobia to the destruction of Russian feminism to a mistrust of authority.
A fascinating study, drawing on hitherto unavailable Soviet documents and on Pleshakov’s ready command of a vast literature little known to Western scholars.Pub Date: May 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-36701-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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