John Murray The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance that Won the War

Revealing history of Mr Churchill

Fascinating description of the events leading to the US and UK agreement's and massive supplies of weapons and aid in the defeating the Nazi invasion of Russia. Well written with a storyline that is gripping at times.

To keep selling books that cover and re-cover the well-trodden ground of the Second World War, I guess the publishers have to keep finding new ‘angles’ – new perspectives on the same actual history. Then, they have a chance of selling new titles on old subject-matter to avid readers, like me. It has worked previously on me. Very much in the same bracket as The Stalin Affair are Giles Milton’s own Checkmate in Berlin and the excellent The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson. My reviews of both of these books are online.What characterises these works of Milton and Larson is that they tell history ‘bottom-up’. Conventional history texts tend to take a strategic or ‘top-down’ view: Beevor’s Stalingrad, for example, first looks at the world situation in 1941-2, then Europe, then the Eastern Front, then the south-eastern part of same, with a focus on the space between the Don and the Volga, and finally the city of Stalingrad. Having zeroed in on the battle in this way, we get to meet all the main players and to experience the grim horror of the struggle itself.The ‘bottom-up’ view, by contrast, takes the point(s) of view one or a few people close to the centre of the historical action – but not themselves the main players – and tells the story from their perspective. With The Splendid and the Vile, Larson’s principal source is Mary Churchill (daughter of the great man) and her diaries. The Stalin Affair covers the period 1941-1945 and the interactions of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. Here, Mr Milton leans heavily on the wartime writings of Kathleen (Kathy) Harriman, daughter of Averell, President Roosevelt’s emissary to the Soviet Union. He also draws, to a lesser extent, on the writings of Harriman himself and the British ambassador to Moscow Archie Clark Kerr (ACK). The President gave Averell Harriman plenipotentiary powers to maximise the flow of US supplies to the embattled USSR; ACK carried out much the same function for Churchill. Both, of course, also acted as flies on the Kremlin wall for their masters. Averell Harriman brought along his 25-year-old daughter in an official capacity. For four years, Kathy was observant, met all the main players, became fluent at Russian, and compiled a matchless, gossipy, record of epochal world events and the actions of the leaders shaping them. She never herself published these writings, which provides an opening for authors such as Giles Milton.And The Stalin Affair is, mostly, very good. As with Checkmate in Berlin, the reader can perceive that the narrative is constructed from an assemblage of factoids, anecdotes, meetings, quotations and incidental events reported by the observers. It all builds up to a complete story, but tends to read a bit disjointed – with not quite a seamless flow. The gossip and the personal observations are delicious and fascinating. Stalin comes out of the Teheran and Yalta summits as a much more impressive operator than either Churchill or Roosevelt. But big-picture history it ain’t. Indeed, I would say that Mr Milton’s treatment of the wider wartime context smacks of the elementary or of ‘World War II 101’ – maybe suitable for a modern generation of young readers but not so much for someone already widely read in the area.Although the publisher has filled Mr Milton’s book out into a handsome hardcover volume, the actual text runs to 317 pages, of which a surprising amount, for example between each of the 7 Sections and allowing for embedded photographs, is white space. Building a book from fragments of reportage, as opposed to from top-down theme and narrative, makes building volume a challenge. In summary: The Stalin Affair is a good read, in places delicious and fascinating, that doesn’t have a deep view of the war, and which doesn’t otherwise add much to the canon of already-well-covered World War II history.

Well written history

Really conveys circumstances in Moscow during WW2. A great deal of interesting detail of the essence of the war against the Nazis set out to read like a thriller. Recommended!