Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

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Welcome to the Quillett podcast.

I'm Jonathan Kay.

By any objective measure, Joseph Stalin deserves to be considered among the great mass murderers of the 20th century.

During his time as communist dictator, the Soviet Union created a personality cult around the man,

even as he sentenced millions of citizens to torture, exile, or death for ideological crimes.

Yet his legacy is complicated because it was under Stalin's command that the USSR

marshalled the resolve and manpower to defeat the Nazis through four grinding years of combat during the Second World War.

The Battle of Stalingrad alone took five months and cost the lives of about 500,000 Soviet soldiers. More deaths than the United States suffered during the entire war.

At the Yalta conference and elsewhere on the international stage, Stalin was the public face of that gargantuan Soviet war effort.

In a newly published book, Bard College history professor Sean McMeekin takes us through this historical

period in a narrative that places Stalin at the center, not just on the eastern front against the Nazis,

but in the machinations that preceded the war on the Soviet Union's border regions.

Professor McMeekin's book is called Stalin's War, a new history of World War II.

He spoke to me by Skype from New York.

...