Stalin's Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War Two on the Eastern Front

Stalin's Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War Two on the Eastern Front | Constantine Pleshakov | Gripping History

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Stalin's Folly: Th...

	Stalin's Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War Two on the Eastern Front Constantine Pleshakov Houghton Mifflin, 2005 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Stalin's Folly is a great read!

By 1941 Stalin had either killed off his best military leaders or brutally subdued them into fearful and servile yes-men. His psychotic breakdown in the face of the German invasion paralyzed the Red Army and resulted in the needless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers and civilians.

Pleshakov transforms the history of the first ten days of World War II into a profoundly moving account of the capacity of the human spirit to survive. His portrait of Stalin is devastatingly on target.

Gripping History

"Stalin's Folly" is a book that the reader can't put down. It is rare to find a book on the Soviet experience in WWII that isn't as thick as a phone book, but the reader of "Stalin's Folly" will not feel shortchanged.

Pleshakov takes the reader through the months leading up to June 22nd, showing us the indecision at the top of the Soviet system. This is probably the most controversial part of the book,as he claims Stalin was thinking about an attack on Germany.

Then the Germans invade and it becomes impossible to put the book down. Usually, histories speed through these first ten days, but Pleshakov shows us the persons caught up in this hurricane, particularly the hapless commanders of the Soviet Western and Southwestern fronts, who watched their armies disintegrate. Some were arrested and shot, others short themselves. A few, like Zhukov, managed to thrive. Pleshakov puts a face to the confusion and chaos of this week.

Perhaps the best thing about "Stalin's Folly" is that it is written to be accessible to the general reader and undergrads. Most books about the Eastern Front, while very good, tend to intimidate the average American reader. "Stalin's Folly" serves as a fine introduction to the Soviet experience in WWII to the American reader who may not even know what role the USSR played in that war.

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A must read

Stalin could not be woken. The warnings had been there all along. Zhukov was calling him on the phone. Operation Barbaroosa was already in full swing, the greatest titanic clash of arms the world had ever seen began on June 22nd, 1941. This book takes the reader through the outbreak of hostilities to the first ten days. The lead up to the war and the causes of Russia's weak position are given a tour de force of story telling. We learn how Stalin, while pretending to prepare for war and claiming he knows the attack is coming, puts his army in the worst possible situation.

When war comes, the army is helpless, the commanders shaken, and they want leadership. Stalin offers to resign, and then he disappears. He is shaken too. He has been betrayed? Perhaps he worries he will lose his empire? Zhukov and the few competent Soviet commanders are forced to deal. In the end millions die, hundreds of thousands are captured. 10 days did no change the world however. As the Nazis strike deep into Soviet territory already the gears are coming into motion that will make the Russian war machine unstoppable. For all his failings Stalin had built up a country economically to win, he had instilled an ideology of victory. Stalin waited for the Germans in Moscow and he declared "if the Germans want a war of extermination they will get one." When Churchill visited in 1942, Stalin said "the Germans are not supermen".

This is a masterful account of these days, an insiders account of the Soviet mindset, a character study of people under crises, no one will be disappointed with this excellent account.

Seth J. Frantzman

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Superbly Written

This is an excellent work, well-written, and well-edited. The author focuses on personalities and events and incidents rather than attempt a general or technical narrative. This approach works as history, as he has done his research well, but has the added benefit of making the book read very fast, almost at novel pace. His conclusions, while not groundbreaking, are dead on and need be repeated to undo the misinformation of the last sixty-plus years. To repeat, the German invasion of the East can be classified as a preventitive first strike at least as logically as it can be called a colonial war of conquest. Barbarossa was indeed both. That Pleshakov makes this clear in such a concise fashion is a great service to the history of WWII. Kudos and I eagerly await his next work!

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Not much we didn't know before

This is an entertaining and well-written book, but it really doesn't add anything to what we already know about the topics of (a) how badly prepared the Soviet Union was before the June 22, 1941 Nazi invasion and (b) whether Stalin had really been planning to launch his own attack on Germany at about the same time. One irritation was the fact that the captions on some of the photos (one about a military man dying shortly after his wedding, another of a German fraternising with a Russian family, one female member of whom allegedly later tried to kill him) were not really followed up in the text. So the idea that this book gives new insights into the first 10 days of the war by quoting from personal papers of ordinary Soviet citizens isn't really borne out.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5

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