1In his new book, the author, who has already published numerous works on the period of the Second World War and Stalinism, aims to unite the military, economic and political history of the Soviet Union with individual stories. He thus proposes to combine “an anthology of war experience with the historian’s bird’s eye view on larger social, economic, cultural and governmental structures” (p. 5). The book is based on a solid bibliography, archives (from Russia, Ukraine, the Baltics, Germany, and the United States) and personal testimonies (ego-documents and interviews) of famous and unknown people.

2One of the main points of this book is to counter Euro-centric narratives of what the author called the “Soviet Second World War”. It argues for a consideration of the Asian dimension of the war, the eastern front, which is usually forgotten by historians, although Stalin refers to both in his speech on 2 September 1945. Edele points out that for some Soviet citizens, the Second World War was entirely Asian (p. 3). It follows that the Second World War is here re-casted not only in a wider geographic context but also in a broader timeline than the usual 1939-1945: it begins with the involvement of the USSR in the Chinese-Japanese war in 1937 and ends after the pacification of the borders of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics in 1949.

3In his introduction, after recalling the central contribution of the Soviet Union in the Victory, and the heavy price it paid, Edele distinguishes five phases of the “Soviet war”: a defensive one, in Asia (1937-1939); an offensive one, resulting from the Soviet-German pact (1939-1940); a defensive phase after the invasion of USSR by German troops (1941-1942); a fourth phase of victories against Germany and Japan (1943-1945); a final phase of pacification and consolidation (1943-1949).

4The book is divided into nine chronological chapters. The first three focused on the period before the invasion of the USSR by German troops. In the first one, the author seeks to answer the question “Was the Soviet Union prepared for war?” After going back to WWI and to the NEP, he argues that Stalin's strategy and his “revolutions from above” (industrialization, collectivization, Great Terror) aimed to avoid losing a future war because of the country's backwardness, as had happened to the Tsarist empire. The industrial, agricultural and cultural overhauls established a warfare state. More interestingly, the author asks what it means to be ready for war – from a military, economic and cultural point of view. He also distinguishes between effectiveness (the military capacity) and efficiency (the capacity to fight in a less costly manner); in this regard, the results of Stalin's policies in the 1930s are ambivalent: the Soviet war machine was successful but wasteful and chaotic. The conclusion is that the “Soviets were ready to be unprepared” (p. 28).

5The second chapter explores the oft-forgotten phase in Asia. Edele reminds us that in the 1930s, given the aggressive Japanese intentions and the numerous border incidents, the prospect of a war in the east was just as realistic as a war in the west. That is why Stalin chose to help China resist Japan, to distract the latter from attacking the Soviet Union. Hence the central role played by China in keeping the Soviet Union's back free until Stalin managed to secure peace with Japan in April 1941, and even after, until the Japanese surrender in 1945. The Soviet-Japanese border war of 1938-9 (battles of Lake Khasan and Khalkin Gol), which had significant casualties, also helped later to dissuade Japan from attacking the USSR. Thus, Stalin managed to avoid a major threat: a war on two fronts. That is why Edele insists that Soviet actions during this period were crucial for the entire further history of WWII: the east remained calm and could be used later to relocate industry.

6The third chapter focuses on the period of the German-Soviet pact. Questioning whether Stalin had the choice of such an alliance, Edele argues that there were alternatives and that it was an opportunistic move to expand his own sphere of influence. As for the effectiveness of this pact, the expansion to the west left the Soviets more vulnerable than they had been before 1939. Meanwhile, Edele tells the well-known story of those years: the aggressive actions of the Soviets in Eastern Europe and Finland, the annexations of foreign lands and their Sovietization, the deportations.

7The next three chapters deal with a better-known period, between the invasion of the USSR in 1941 and the victory of 1945. Edele first examines the reasons for the initial chaos, then presents the dimensions of the war effort (humanly and economically) and several aspects of the war (hunger, displacements, dual process of centralization and de-centralization, terror), as well as the evolution of the military situation on the eastern front and the role of Allied support. In the process, he shows little by little why the USSR won the war.

8The seventh chapter (“War ideologies”) examines the support of Soviet citizens for Stalin's war effort against Germany, its evolution, its motivations, the role of hatred toward the enemy and patriotism, the dimension of the collaboration and the repression. Developing the atrocities committed by the Nazis, Edele argues that “the Holocaust was just a dress rehearsal for much more large-scale genocides” (p. 143). The next chapter shows how the violence of war continued to spill over into the post-war society all over the Soviet Union: the counter-insurgencies during the years 1944-1949 in the newly acquired territories and the Soviet responses (Edele focuses on the case of Lithuania and Estonia), the police work against collaboration with the Germans, the crime wave among the society, and an institutionalized culture of violence. Only 1949 marked the start of some stability – the “Stalinist normalcy”. The last chapter examines the war's impact on Soviet society (destruction, famine, then reconstruction, consolidation of Stalinism after the so-called wartime “de-Stalinization”, creation of a ring of satellites) and the way war is remembered since then.