June 3 Program: Stalin’s War

June 3 Program: Stalin’s War
By Gregory Ehr
On Friday, June 3, at 2:00 p.m., professor and award-winning author Sean McMeekin, pictured here, will present the free program “Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II,” based on his 2021 book of the same title. The presentation will be held at the Transylvania County Election Center, 150 South Gaston Street in Brevard. The book is available for purchase at Highland Books in Brevard.
McMeekin is the Francis Flournoy Professor of European History at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. McMeekin’s research has focused on Russian and German history, communism, and the First and Second World Wars. He has authored eight books, along with scholarly articles which have appeared in journals such as Contemporary European History, Current History, Common Knowledge, Historically Speaking, The World Today, and Communisme.
McMeekin’s program on June 3 will review the major findings and insights of his most recent achievement, Stalin’s War, which is a deeply-researched and highly original scholarly work of more than 800 pages. Stalin’s War has been described as a revisionist history of WWII. Unlike most other histories of WWI, which focus on the goals and behavior of Adolf Hitler, Stalin’s War focuses on the critical role played by Joseph Stalin.
Viewing WWII from this perspective, McMeekin observes that it was Stalin who gave Hitler a green light to invade Poland in 1939 via the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and it was Stalin who emerged from WWII holding the territorial acquisitions sought by Hitler. Stalin’s War also analyzes the way in which Stalin’s success was enabled by massive support from the Allies, especially the American Lend-Lease program, provided at the expense of other Allied challenges in the Pacific. Stalin’s War thus takes a fresh, imaginative look at WWII, asking new questions and answering old ones in thought-provoking ways.
McMeekin received his Ph.D. and M.A. in History from UC Berkeley and his B.A. from Stanford University. He has previously taught at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey; at Yale University; at Bilkent University in Ankara; and at New York University. In addition to Stalin’s War, he has authored A New History of World War II; The Russian Revolution: A New History; The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East; July 1914: Countdown to War; The Russian Origins of the First World War; The Berlin to Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898–1918; History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks; and The Red Millionaire. He lives in Clermont, New York with his wife and two children.

This program is offered by the Veterans History Museum of the Carolinas as part of our history series of guest speakers. We invite you to join us for this free program, which will also be live-streamed on Facebook beginning at 2:10 PM EDT on June 3. The recorded program will also be available later on www.theveteransmuseum.org, the museum’s website.
Attendees of the June 3 event who bring their copy of Stalin’s War with them can have it signed by Sean McMeekin.
For more information, please call 828-884-2141 or visit www.theveteransmuseum.org