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Market There Is Room for Diversity. in Stalin's Utopia There Was Not. Today Hollywood Still Produces Mostly Bad Films, And Book Reviews market there is room for diversity. In Stalin’s utopia there was not. Today Hollywood still produces mostly bad ªlms, and a few great ones, while the Crimea is no longer in Russia. ✣✣✣ Alexander O. Chubaryan and Harold Shukman, eds., Stalin and the Soviet-Finnish War, 1939–1940. London: Frank Cass, 2002. 301 pp. $80.00. Reviewed by Valur Ingimundarson, University of Iceland This book is an English translation of the verbatim record of a high-level meeting in Moscow on 14–17 April 1940 regarding the performance of the Red Army in the So- viet-Finnish War of 1939–1940 (or the Winter War, as the Finns call it). Together with key Soviet Politburo members, such as Josif Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Kliment Voroshilov, the participants consisted of Soviet army commanders who had taken part in the campaign. The tone of the meeting was unexpectedly self-critical, and it is clear from the minutes that the Soviet ofªcials genuinely wanted to learn from mistakes made in the war. Although Stalin and his associates were not about to accept any responsibility for these mistakes, they did not gloss over the Red Army’s deªciencies in combat readiness. To be sure, the Stalin cult was not wholly absent from the meeting. As one participant put it, “Each soldier went to ªght with the great name of Comrade Stalin on his lips, the name that was the great banner of victory, in- spired heroism, and was a great example of how one should love our homeland and struggle for it” (p. 9). But this example, and several others (pp. 151–152, 218), are more the exception than the rule. As is well known, the Red Army grossly underestimated the scale of Finnish resis- tance to the Soviet invasion of Finland in November 1939 (pp. 4, 18). The Soviet Union ultimately won the war, but only after three-and-a-half months of ªerce com- bat and extensive bloodshed. The costly success and ºawed performance of the Red Army damaged the international stature of the Soviet Union. To Stalin’s unpleasant surprise, it was revealed at the meeting that the peacetime army did not require its sol- diers to conduct ªeld exercises at temperatures below minus 15 degrees centigrade (p. 20) and allowed them to take an hour’s nap in the afternoon (p. 252). Such “kind- ness” toward the army was, of course, denounced as a source of great disciplinary weakness. Because of the experience of the Soviet-Finnish War, the Soviet government decided to strengthen its command staff and accelerate the modernization of the army. There was not much time to implement these reforms before the German inva- sion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, but the Soviet government made a belated ef- fort to redress the lack of preparedness exposed in the campaign against Finland (pp. 78, 96–97, 269–271). This is not a book for the general reader, and, frankly, even specialists may ªnd it at times boring. After all, the meeting itself take up most of the text; the minutes are strictly devoted to military strategy and tactics, and repetitions abound. It gives 86 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2004.6.2.86 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews no comprehensive account of the campaign itself but only complements it. The non- specialist would be better off consulting Carl van Dyke’s The Soviet Invasion of Fin- land, 1939–40 (London: Frank Cass, 1997), before venturing into this jargon-ªlled terrain. The title of the book is also slightly misleading. True, Stalin plays an active role in the meeting, even if his comments are often short and banal—”Our staffs must be taught to work in difªcult war conditions and understand the combat situations” (p. 97)—and he ends the meeting with a long speech on military policy. Nevertheless, the army commanders are the main actors in this story: it is mostly a summary of their experiences, successes, and, not least, failures. Despite the narrow focus, the book is a worthy contribution to the study of So- viet military thinking. It illuminates the tactics used by the Red Army and the lessons drawn from its chastening experience in the Soviet-Finnish War. The foreword (by Alexander Chubaryan) and introduction (by Harold Shukman) put the text into a much needed historical perspective. One of the main reasons for the poor perfor- mance of the Red Army was, of course, the bloody purge of its ofªcer corps in 1937. It is hardly surprising that nobody dared to bring up this issue at the Kremlin meeting. As Shukman makes clear, the purge blocked the military modernization drive initiated by some army leaders—especially the main target of the purge, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii—and exposed the weaknesses of the Red Army in the early stages of the Winter War. The minutes show that the mind-set of key Soviet army ofªcers was still dominated by outdated military thinking stemming from the Russian Civil War. Soviet army leaders even voiced praise for the Tsarist Army at the meeting (pp. xxiii, 178). In a characteristically opportunistic vein, Stalin depicted himself as a modernist (pp. 130, 263–274), even if he had, of course, been personally responsible for slowing down the modernization of the army. As Chubaryan points out, the minutes expose serious mistakes in intelligence gathering, exempliªed by the underestimation of Finnish fortiªcations, especially the much-touted Mannerheim Line (p. xvii). That Stalin himself should have joined in criticizing the “culture of secrecy” within the Red Army (pp. 194–204) is a good testament to his hypocrisy. But the open discussion on intelligence is one of the most interesting aspects of the meeting. The head of Soviet military intelligence, Lieutenant-General Ivan Proskurov, claimed in a surprisingly forthright manner that the Soviet Union had precise knowledge of Finnish military fortiªcations, even though this information was not put to good use. But the Soviet leadership wanted to blame the intelligence services for the performance of the Red Army. Frankness, it turned out, was rarely rewarded in Stalin’s Russia. Proskurov was arrested and shot in July 1940 after he spoke against the German-Soviet Pact. In short, this is a welcome addition to Frank Cass’s series on Soviet military oper- ations, 1939–1945. Together with Dyke’s book and that of Richard N. Armstrong and Joseph G. Welsh, Winter Warfare: Red Army Orders and Experiences (London: Frank Cass, 1997), it gives insight into Soviet military thinking during World War II.11. It also contains several photographs and short biographies of the partici- pants. The book is geared toward the specialist, but because of its freewheeling tran- script format, it frequently will test the patience of even the most dedicated readers. As a primary source material, however, it is valuable; it shows how the Soviet leadership 87 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2004.6.2.86 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews worked behind the scenes, how it was able to voice self-criticism—even learn from mistakes—while never being able to cross the line needed to free itself from the deep-seated self-deception undertaken in the name of “Comrade Stalin.” ✣✣✣ Jeffrey Glen Giauque, Grand Designs and Visions of Unity: The Atlantic Powers and the Reorganization of Western Europe, 1955–1963. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 326 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Alan S. Milward, United Kingdom Cabinet Ofªce The “Grand Designs” discussed in this book emerged in response to the European Common Market. They include the European Free Trade Area proposed by the United Kingdom, the Atlantic Community proposed by U.S. President John Ken- nedy, the Fouchet Plan for “European Unity” proposed by France under Charles de Gaulle’s leadership, and the Franco-German Treaty of Friendship signed in 1963. The general argument is that the Common Market had a more unsettling effect on West- ern political relationships during the Cold War than historians have hitherto allowed, but not so unsettling as to prevent the West from uniting when it perceived itself un- der serious threat, as in the case of the Cuban missile crisis. Rather than being, as often presented, the capstone of European reconstruction, the Common Market provoked further attempts at reconstruction. Because all these attempts failed and because all their chief proponents with the exception of de Gaulle were out of ofªce by the end of 1963, the period has a certain unity. It left behind much mistrust but little overt an- tagonism between the Western allies afterward. Historical accounts of these episodes have usually been separate tales. Giauque’s book is valuable in synthesizing and combining them. As such, it brings out clearly the connections between these separate designs for holding together the West, designs that were also intended to advance national ambitions. Only Kennedy’s Atlantic Community with its Multilateral Force still reads like a muddle—mainly because, as Giauque shows, it was a muddle. From all the other schemes every country took what it wanted and jettisoned or sabotaged the rest. None was interested in subservience. Notably, the Franco-German Friendship Treaty became a triumph for West German parliamentary democracy in its rewriting by the West German Bundestag, with con- siderable encouragement from Washington and London. British Prime Minister Har- old Macmillan’s successive “Grand Designs” were rejected by France and the United States, and de Gaulle’s aspirations were rejected by all. Giauque is now a State Department ofªcial, and some time seems to have elapsed between the completion of his thesis—the basis of the book—and the book’s publica- tion.
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