This is CBSI in the world.

I'm John Batchel with Professor Sean McMeakin.

His new book is Stalin's War, an assembly of facts and quotes and observations and narrative

that add up to a surprising version of what happened between 1939 and 1948 and the beginning of the Cold War.

We go to the event that is celebrated as the beginning of the collapse of Germany.

However, it started as a massacre along the Russian frontier with Germany.

Stalin, having gobbled up all the buffer states, I learned from the professor, has now a border

with Germany of thousands of miles. He's made himself vulnerable. In his greed for territory

without fighting, he's created

the conditions that on June 22nd, 1941, lead to Operation Barbarossa. The Germans jumping the

border and rolling, I think, Army Group Center or something significant, rolled 40 miles on the

first day.

The story told at the time was that Stalin was shocked, even to the point of having a nervous breakdown. No one heard from him until he addressed the nation in July via radio, which

at that point was available for very few people. But in any event, that's the story.

The facts mitigate that story.

Professor, where was Stalin June 22nd, June 21st, June 22nd, and all the way to his July address?

Oh, well, he was mostly in the Kremlin meeting with all of his ordinary advisors. I mean, as it was happening in real time, there's no sign of any kind of serious break where Stalin has any type of a breakdown or panic.

There is a dramatic scene about a week into the war.

Once all the horrendous reports are pouring in from the frontier, and there are different versions of what he says.

There's a catastrophe. We've flushed Lenin's legacy down the toilet. It's all done. And there are different versions of what he says. There's a catastrophe. We've flushed

Lenin's legacy down the toilet. It's all done. And there's a bit of a tantrum and he goes to his dacha, but this is only for a short period. I mean, of course, he had to rest and sleep from time to time. And the idea, for example, that there were, that he disregarded all warnings about the war. Now, it was true, he didn't believe every intelligence report he got, in part because it just got so many of them, but he couldn't hide a military buildup of this scale. The Soviets weren't hiding their military buildup either, and that's the part most people don't know about, is just how much the Soviets were shifting to the frontier. It's just that in the end, the Soviets were effectively caught

a little bit in this mid-mobilization limbo.

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