Bibliographic record
Abstract
Geoffrey Roberts. Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. xxii, 468 pp. Illustrations. Maps. Bibliography. Index. $38.00, cloth.After Iosif Stalin slaughtered the Soviet military's best officers in 1937, he then collaborated with Hitler in the dismemberment of Poland. While acting as Hitler's defacto ally, he engineered a disastrous war with Finland. When Hitler turned against the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin presided over military catastrophes of stunning scale, costing the lives of 30 million of his countrymen. After World War II, his brutal Sovietization of Eastern Europe destroyed the wartime Grand Alliance with the United States and Britain. His Berlin blockade then accelerated the rehabilitation of Germany and the formation of the NATO alliance. His subsequent approval of Kim Il-Sung's invasion of South Korea produced the decisive militarization of the Cold War, along with the deaths of millions of Koreans. How then does Geoffrey Roberts argue that Stalin was a very effective and highly successful war leader, who strove in the late 1940s and early 1950s to revive detente with the West (p. xi)?This is a tall order indeed, and Roberts employs a variety of methods to attempt it. One is minimizing Stalin's responsibility for blunders and crimes. By starting his book in 1939, for example, Roberts escapes exploring the full damage done to the Soviet military by the Great Purges. Stalin is hailed for the creation of Soviet mechanized corps in 1940 (p. 54) but blamed for their dissolution in 1941 (p. 97). In Roberts's description of German successes in 1941, Stalin's name does appear (p. 85). Roberts attacks at length the myth of Stalin's panic on 22 June 1941 (pp. 89-91), but makes no mention of Stalin's betterdocumented panic a week later (p. 94). He notes the appointment of Stalin's cronies Semen Budenny and Kliment Voroshilov to command strategic directions in July 1941, but their manifest incompetence. Stalin is responsible for Soviet operational and strategic successes, but overambitious offensives are the fault of the Red Army's institutional culture (pp. 70-71, 100, 113). Stalin is rightly blamed for the Katyn massacres of Polish officers, but Roberts quotes at length from Kathleen Harriman's testimony suggesting German responsibility (pp. 171-172) In one place he allows Stalin's responsibility for wartime deportations of entire peoples (p. 18) but in another makes no mention of Stalin's involvement (p. 326).In other cases, Roberts makes claims and assertions that are difficult to reconcile with the historical record. He describes the Winter War with Finland as not of Stalin's choosing, (p. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".