{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03188319427890346, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01400476758045292, 'mean_word_length': 4.879159369527145, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Gorbachevsky, Boris, Generalissimo Stalin: The Myth of Stalin as a Great Military Strategist

A few years ago, I reviewed another translated Russian-language history of the Second World War also published by Helion: Peter Mezhiritsky’s On the Precipice: Stalin, the Red Army Leadership and the Road to Stalingrad, 1931–1942. I wrote then that Mezhiritsky’s book was characteristic of a particular sort of Russian semi-popular history: ‘autobiographical asides, literary allusions, philosophical musings, rhetorical questions, quotations in big blocks, and extensive speculationdevoid of concrete evidence about the intentions andmotives of historical actors’. Boris Gorbachevsky’s Generalissimo Stalin is remarkably similar, though it is not the same. Gorbachevsky has fewer literary pretensions than Mezhiritsky, so his book is more down-to-earth. Unlike Mezhiritsky, Gorbachevsky is a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, so his autobiographical recollections might have genuine value. The problem, though, is that Gorbachevsky’s nearly 500 pages of wartime memoirs have already been published in English as Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier’s War on the Eastern Front, 1942–1945 (University Press of Kansas, 2008). As a result, the intended audience for the book, and what it is intended to achieve, is not clear. It is not for general readers. The book requires far too much background knowledge to be useful to students or those looking for an introduction to key issues. It follows no chronological order— chapter 11 covers the last few days of thewar in detail, while chapter 13 returns to 1942 and Order #227 — the ‘no step back’ directive. Chapter 14 then covers Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and chapter 15 leaps forward to Stalin’s interpretations of the meaning of victory. It is less a sustained argument than a collection ofmusings about particular subjects: Aleksandr Korneichuk’s play The Front, the place of rumors in a soldier’s life, Yalta, the US-Soviet meeting at Torgau on the Elbe. As a result, students could not use the book for a coherent narrative of the war in the East. The book is likewise not particularly useful for scholars in the field. While the book does include some notes and references, it is filled with claims and assertions of fact with no documentation.Many of its arguments and interpretation are already quite familiar to historians. It cannot even be used as a reference in its own right, since it is shaky on accuracy. In the space of only a few pages, it refers to noted historian O. A. Rzhev instead of Rzheshevskii (p. 238), misidentifies the late Russian Prime Minister Yevgenii Primakov as Iurii (p. 241), and labels the Brezhnev-eraHistory of the SecondWorldWar as the Great World War (p. 243). Finally, the book does not at all do what its subtitle claims to do — that is, to explore the merits of Stalin as a war leader. There is indeed room for debate on Stalin’s contributions or damage to the Soviet war effort. This book does little of that, instead focusing on Stalin’s crimes and his distortions of the historical record, about which there is little debate. There are numerous untranslated Russian works on the history of the Second World War that make real contributions to scholarly understanding. It’s not clear why Helion continues to translate and publish books that don’t.