The experience of World War II was arguably the central moment in the Soviet experiment. It legitimized Iosif Stalin's regime, made the USSR a superpower, and persists as a formidable episode in historical memory in the region. The policies that Stalin enacted to contend with the war are a source of curiosity that Alfred Rieber examines in this volume.
Rieber asserts that Stalin's policymaking was a “paradox.” The book uses the term or a variation sixty-four times, excluding chapter headings and notes. One suspects that the author would have preferred a title like “The Paradox of Stalin at War” if Stephen Kotkin's 2014 biography, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, had not used the term prominently in its title. (Rieber notes that his use of the term predates Kotkin's, 274). The main paradox was that the construction of the Stalinist state involved processes that were immensely destructive. This framing is broad enough to carry a history of the Soviet state from the 1920s until Stalin's death in 1953. The book synthesizes secondary sources, a large number of Soviet and post-Soviet published document collections, memoirs, and a handful of unpublished archival documents. Stalin is the book's central interest, but it spends many pages with elite figures from scientific and academic circles, industry, the military, and politics. The “warlord” of the title just means a wartime leader and does not herald a reinterpretation of Stalin as a regional strongman.
The work is divided into three chronologically ordered sections. The first part examines the prewar years, where the destruction of cadres in the purges developed parallel to the construction of a state capable of conducting a modern war. The cultivation of non-Russian loyalists at home and abroad coincided with policies that repressed them as perceived threats to national security. The second section, on the war itself, is the core of the book. Its three chapters cover military-industrial developments, the regime's relationship with scientific and technical elites, and the role of culture and propaganda. Rieber identifies Stalin's paradoxical impulses during the war to centralize political decision making while decentralizing aspects of technical implementation. The final section enters the postwar period, arguing that the victory in WWII propelled the USSR to the apex of its geopolitical power but at the cost of immense human and economic losses.
The framing of paradox is worth considering. Rieber interprets Stalinism as a cohesive but contradictory approach to waging war, and regards Stalin as an intentional state builder in the mold of Peter the Great. He dismisses moments of radicalism during collectivization or WWII as times when Stalin made “irrational decisions” (119). Yet another framing of those episodes would cast them as the choice of a Marxist-Leninist who saw the world through the lens of class conflict and the irrational aspect of Stalinism as the pragmatic compromises it made that seemingly contravened ideological preferences. At the risk of splitting the hair of paradox, another interpretation would be that Stalinism meant the tension between these aspects rather than their paradoxical concurrence. Along similar lines, it is worth considering whether Stalinism was the product of intentional, paradoxical policies or the sum of reactions to crises.
A paradox of this book is that it focuses on wartime policies but dismisses their importance in the long run. The major policy changes of the wartime years were “discarded or repressed” after 1945 (268). This argument, though valid, misses an opportunity to meditate on the continuities between the Stalinist state of the prewar and postwar periods as connected by the threat and reality of war. It is a strange omission because a strength of the book is its recognition that the prospect of war was a central influence on Stalinist policies from the 1920s and the war's impact continued for decades after it ended.
This volume serves as an elegant account of the Soviet state in the crucible of WWII with many excursions into the biographies of significant figures. It is a useful introduction, and more, that would work well in fostering classroom discussions about the complexities of Stalinism. The bibliography, collected over Rieber's long career, is worth consulting for anyone writing about the Soviet experience of WWII.
