Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 496 pp., $35.00.

STALIN'S WARS by Geoffrey Roberts, a professor of history at University College Cork, is in many respects a model of scholarship. It draws on an impressive array of Russian, British and American archives as well as a large number of published documents and secondary sources. It is impeccably organized. The author writes with clarity and authority. He advances a sharply defined and well-supported argument about an important topic, challenging the conventional wisdom and offering a thoroughly substantiated alternative. His canvas is large, but his brushstrokes are precise and vigorous. Stalin's Wars is revisionism of a high order.

In brief, the story that Roberts tells goes like this: Josef Stalin, uncontested leader of the Soviet Union from 1927 until his death in 1953, deserves to be remembered as a great statesman-indeed, as the greatest of the age. Although Stalin made his share of mistakes, especially in the early phases of World War II, he learned from those mistakes and thereby grew in wisdom and stature. Among allied chieftains, he alone was irreplaceable. He, not Churchill and not Roosevelt, was the true architect of victory, "the dictator who defeated Hitler and helped save the world for democracy."

Furthermore, once Germany went down to defeat-with British and American leaders immediately turning on the Soviet Union-Stalin strove valiantly to sustain Allied unity. Time and again he exerted himself to avert the confrontation that became the Cold War. Even after his efforts failed, "He strove in the late 1940s and early 1950s to revive détente with the west." In British and American eyes, Stalin became the embodiment of the totalitarian ideologue and warmonger. This was a misperception. To the very end, "Stalin continued to struggle for the lasting peace that he saw as his legacy." In denying Stalin the reconciliation for which he devoutly worked, Western governments succeeded only in inflicting grave injury on the Soviet people. The East-West rivalry thrust upon Stalin nipped in the bud his postwar efforts to nurture within the Soviet Union a "more relaxed social and political order."

Roberts neither denies nor conceals the cruelty and ruthlessness that marked the Stalinist era. He freely admits that Stalin was "responsible for the deaths of millions of his own citizens." He concedes that in the 1930s Stalin presided over the Great Terror in which "millions were arrested and hundreds of thousands were shot." He notes that Stalin directed "a process of ethnic cleansing involving the arrest, deportation and execution of hundreds of thousands of people living in border areas" of the Soviet Union. He holds Stalin accountable for the Katyn Forest massacre of 1940, involving the liquidation of 20,000 Polish officers and government officials. Although speculating that "Stalin must have bitterly regretted the subsequent embarrassment and complications" when the events at Katyn Forest became known, Roberts makes it clear that the Soviet leader employed mass murder as an instrument of policy-and did so without compunction.

Still, Roberts leaves the distinct impression that when it comes to evaluating Stalin's standing as a statesman, such crimes qualify as incidental. He acknowledges them in order to dismiss them. Whether intentionally or not, Roberts suggests that Stalin's penchant for ordering people shot qualifies as a sort of personal quirk, akin perhaps to FDR's infidelities or Churchill's fondness for drink. For Roberts, there are only two marks on Stalin's report card that really count: The first conferred for defeating Hitler, the second for doing his level best to forestall the Cold War. In each instance, Roberts awards Stalin an A-plus.

When it comes to Hitler, moreover, the achievement is an emphatically personal one. According to Roberts, it was not the Red Army or Stalin's generals that defeated the Wehrmacht, but the individual serving as both People's Commissar for Defense and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. The author's account of the German failure to capture the Soviet capital in December 1941 makes the point. "Stalin Saves Moscow", it begins. Roberts is equally insistent that Stalin's well-intentioned efforts to sustain the Grand Alliance after 1945 foundered for one reason only: Britain and the United States maliciously obstructed his entirely reasonable quest "to establish friendly regimes in Eastern Europe" and to create "a united but peace-loving and democratic Germany."

In essence, Roberts takes Stalin at his word as a man who sought only peace. Once having embraced this view, he finds nothing in Soviet policy at odds with Stalin's professed aspiration. "Time and again during the war", he writes, "Stalin denied that his aim was revolution or the imposition of communism." For Roberts, such denials affirm the benign nature of Stalin's wartime aims. In public remarks offered on the occasion of Germany's surrender, "Stalin emphasized that the defeat of Hitler meant freedom and peace between peoples." This, Roberts suggests, accurately represents Stalin's fondest hope.

Roberts credits the Soviet dictator with a self-induced sincerity. He finds "no reason to suppose that Stalin and the Soviet leadership did not believe their own propaganda about the essentially peace-loving policy of the USSR." In this sense, Stalin's commitment to "freedom and peace between peoples" bears comparison with President Bush's post-9/11 commitment to eliminating tyranny. For Roberts, such high-minded professions mean everything.

THERE ARE at least three problems with this depiction of Stalin as great statesman and man of peace. The first problem relates to the nature of the Grand Alliance, which Roberts misinterprets. The second relates to the nature of statecraft, which Roberts misunderstands. The third relates to the moral obligation inherent in the craft of history, which Roberts abdicates. The misinterpretation, the misunderstanding and the abdication all work to Stalin's advantage, adding luster to his reputation. Yet none of the three is persuasive or acceptable.

The Grand Alliance existed for one purpose only, which was not to nurture "freedom and peace between peoples", but to defeat Nazi Germany. Absent the shared perception that Hitler posed an intolerable threat, Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union would never have forged their compact in the first place. With Hitler's removal from the scene, the unraveling of that partnership became all but inevitable. Hopeful sentiments expressed by Stalin-or for that matter, by Churchill and Roosevelt-do not change that essential reality.

Moreover, even during its heyday, the alliance was as much a competitive enterprise as it was a collaborative one. Even as the Big Three professed their common devotion to freedom and peace, they simultaneously maneuvered against one another for advantage on matters of far more immediate concern. This was true whether the issue at hand involved the opening of the second front, the disposition of the Balkans, the occupation of Germany or the future of the Far East.

For any great power, the essential prerequisite of "peace" is that others should accede to the aspiring hegemon's own requirements. Certainly, this is how Stalin understood the term, whether during World War II or after. Note, for example, that sixty years before 9/11, Stalin promulgated a variant of what we today call the Bush Doctrine. "Defending our country", he told a graduating class of Red Army officers in May 1941, "we must act offensively." Stalin was anticipating the Bush Administration's rationale for invading Iraq: Peace tomorrow requires the initiation of war today against those who stubbornly resist our legitimate demands.

To assign to the Soviet Union then (or to the United States today) a defensive orientation is to open up a rich vein of interpretive possibilities, which Roberts is quick to tap on Stalin's behalf. At first glance, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 and the subsequent Soviet complicity in dismembering Poland might seem reprehensible. Roberts sees these actions as entirely justifiable: the first an effort to avert war, the second a prudential attempt to acquire additional strategic depth. On the surface, the Soviet invasion of Finland that same year might look like naked aggression. Upon reconsideration, however, Roberts faults the Finns for bringing the conflict on themselves. "The ‘Winter War' with Finland was not of Stalin's choosing", he writes. When the Finns refused to grant the Soviet Union territorial concessions needed to mount a proper defense of Leningrad, however, they left Stalin with no recourse. Besides, Roberts explains, Soviet leaders genuinely expected the Finns to welcome the Red Army as liberators.

This pattern continued through the war and into the postwar period. To enhance Soviet power and influence, Stalin took whatever he could-or more accurately, whatever his legions enabled him to take. As long as the Red Army bore the brunt of the fighting against a common foe, Stalin's allies granted him considerable leeway to do as he wished, especially in Eastern Europe. Once Germany collapsed (and the successful testing of the atomic bomb rendered Soviet participation in the war against Japan less important), their attitude became less permissive. Hence, rather than fulfilling his vision of "a united but peace-loving and democratic Germany"-that is, one dominated by the Soviet Union-Stalin had to settle for a divided Germany partly occupied by Soviet troops. To attribute this outcome-and the Cold War that ensued-to British and American leaders obstructing or undermining Stalin's efforts to build a lasting peace is to wildly misconstrue the nature of international politics.

Then there is the question of whether Stalin deserves to be included in the pantheon of great statesmen. In making his case for the affirmative, Roberts devotes well over 300 pages to the period from 1939 to 1947 followed by a mere 24 pages for the period 1948 to 1953, when his account abruptly ends. Yet gauging Stalin's achievements requires consideration of the years following his death.

Statecraft is not a charitable pursuit. The measure of merit is clear: Success entails advancing the interests of the state. Based on that criterion, Stalin's legacy was almost entirely negative. The victory he engineered over Hitler cost the Soviet people dearly both in human costs and resources. Beyond survival, it yielded few tangible benefits. Moscow gained an empire, but it proved almost worthless. Certainly, it never turned a profit. Moreover, because Stalin had ruled by terror and intimidation, the system he bequeathed to his successors possessed limited legitimacy and almost no dynamism. Hoping to rejuvenate the Soviet economy, his successors almost immediately embarked upon a campaign of de-Stalinization. Although reform efforts continued sporadically from the era of Khrushchev to the era of Gorbachev, Soviet leaders never succeeded in eliminating the pathologies left over from the Stalinist era. The collapse of the Soviet empire and of the Soviet Union itself-drab, stagnant and soulless-stands as the ultimate verdict on Stalin's achievements as a statesman.

If World War II produced a master of statecraft, then surely it was Roosevelt. He won the most at the least cost. Alone among great powers, only the United States emerged from the war stronger than when the war had begun. Fate dealt Roosevelt a strong hand-far stronger than Churchill's-and he played it well. As a consequence of victory, Washington too acquired an empire of sorts, but this empire helped sustain American prosperity and bolstered American security. Hardly less significantly, FDR succeeded by 1945 in restoring popular confidence in basic institutions, muting the impact of the Great Depression. To his successors Roosevelt bequeathed widely shared expectations that the "American Century" was meant to continue indefinitely, as it has, despite periodically ill-advised policies and reckless misadventures. The contrast with Stalin's legacy could hardly be greater. (Whether or not the American Century can survive the folly of George W. Bush remains to be seen.)

Finally, there is the question of Stalin's crimes and how they should figure in reckoning with his place in history. As Roberts embarks upon his effort to re-evaluate the Soviet leader, he assures his readers that "we can undertake that task without fear of moral hazard." This strikes me as not only misguided but even dangerous.

Although insisting that his intent is "not to rehabilitate Stalin but to re-vision him", Roberts shows negligible interest in considering whether Stalin's record passes muster with respect to any commonly accepted standards of right and wrong. His dispassion amounts to a form of ethical narcosis. The effect, even if inadvertent, is to subvert the moral consensus informing our understanding of the twentieth century. That consensus rests in no small part on the conviction that the Stalinist regime cannot be regarded as other than patently evil. Geoffrey Roberts now encourages us to think otherwise.

Furthermore, Stalin's Wars appears at a moment when such encouragement to think otherwise is ongoing in other, even more sensitive quarters. The inclination to do so is especially apparent in connection with the suffering endured by citizens of the Third Reich. Matters once quietly ignored or viewed as off-limits are now receiving sympathetic consideration: The indiscriminate killing of German noncombatants as a result of the Combined Bomber Offensive of 1943-1945; the tens or hundreds of thousands of German women raped and assaulted by soldiers of the victorious Red Army entering Berlin; the forced expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans caught on the wrong side of borders when the war ended. Admitting these victims into the narrative of World War II is both justified and unavoidable. But to pretend that the process of doing so is not fraught with hazard is foolishness: If the victims of violence are all innocent, does it follow that the perpetrators of that violence are equally culpable?

The answer to that question must be an unequivocal no. Here political historians have a particular obligation to render unambiguous judgments, discriminating right from wrong. By tacitly issuing Stalin a moral waiver, Roberts shirks that obligation. In doing so, he opens the door to further revisionism of the most pernicious sort. If Stalin gets a pass, then perhaps Mao deserves similar reassessment: Is it not likely that he too believed his own propaganda? Perhaps too the events of the 1930s and 1940s might look different if considered from Hitler's point of view. Not unlike Stalin, Hitler yearned for the peace that derives from absolute dominion.

Stalin's Wars concludes with this strange injunction: "History can make us wiser, if we allow it to" (emphasis in the original)-seemingly suggesting that "we" are to sit quietly at History's feet receiving instruction. I prefer T. S. Eliot's warning about history's "cunning passages [and] contrived corridors." Stalin's Wars is such a contrived corridor. The unwary will enter at their peril.

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is the editor of The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II (Columbia University Press, 2007).