190 e lusive v ictories
overwhelmed in the fi rst weeks of the war, due in part to Stalin’s rigidity,
and suffered as many as 2 million casualties. But where the French
never recovered from their shattering defeat in May 1940, the Red Army
withdrew into the vast Soviet interior, while vital Soviet heavy industry
was swiftly dismantled and relocated to new factories east of the Ural
Mountains. Stalin was profl igate in his use of human resources, too,
and the fi nal butcher’s bill for Soviet victory was staggering. No alter-
native, though, presented itself. After all, the Red Army engaged the
main mass of the German Wehrmacht for three years, from June 1941
until the Normandy invasion in June 1944, while the Anglo-Americans
nibbled on the perimeter of German-occupied Europe as he cajoled
them in vain to open a real Second Front. Although Soviet forces
benefited most from Hitler’s obsession with holding every foot of
ground, winning major encirclement battles at Stalingrad and else-
where, no other Allied army fought a longer, more brutal campaign, or
paid so high a price.
Stalin pursued far more modest war objectives than those of either
Roosevelt or Churchill. Th e Soviet dictator fought for security in a
narrow and very concrete form: he intended to establish a much larger
buff er zone between his country and a potentially resurgent Germany
or any other threat from the West. He was willing to participate in a
postwar international organization, yes, but he did not expect much
from it and preferred to rely on an old-fashioned sphere-of-infl uence
approach, consisting of satellite nations compelled to adopt the Soviet
system (an innovation in power politics). His cold realism led him to
dismiss the Chinese communists as weak challengers to the Nation-
alists, and so he initially backed Chiang Kai-shek after the war. Stalin
also took an opportunistic approach to war gains. He expressed support
for dismembering Germany, but the lack of separatist movements there
helped convince him the cost would be too great and he wearied of
Anglo-American equivocation on the matter. He also hoped to secure
reparations to compensate for Soviet material losses. When the Anglo-
Americans refused in the end to cooperate, Soviet troops instead
stripped bare all territory they occupied, ranging from Germany to
Manchuria.
Churchill, stalwart leader of Great Britain in its darkest hour, remains
a captivating fi gure. Probably no other British political leader could