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Modern Europe
war preparations, and overstatements of British
strength in the Mediterranean.
But, as this volume's title indicates, there was a
double deception. Stalin's deception was defensive due
to perceived weakness. Hitler, on the other hand, was
engaged in deception for offensive purposes. The
Germans were attempting to convince Stalin that
everything he saw or heard that might indicate a
possible invasion was a mirage. For instance, the
expansion of German troop com:entrations near the
Soviet border was justified as keeping them beyond the
range of British bombers. In the meantime, those
troops were secretly being retrained, rearmed, and
prepared for an invasion of England in 1941. General
Georgy Zhukov conflrmed that Stalin believed the
Nazi chicanery.
James Barros's and Richard Gregor's book is a spy
thriller better than any creative novelist could concoct.
Yet none of the deception accomplished the intended
goals. Stalin's deceptions were unsuccessful; the invasion took place at monumental cost to the USSR.
Hitler gained temporary advantage through his deceit,
though more because of Stalin's inflexibility than Germanic cleverness. In the end, however, Hitler's Soviet
invasion led to the Reich's destruction.
Perhaps the greatest merit of this book is that it
vividly illustrates the shortcomings of Stalin's leadership and the security mechanisms he created for
himself and his country. He was so paranoid and
suspicious that American, British, French, Czech, Yugoslav, Swedish, Finnish, German, or Polish sources
were unbelievable to him when they collectively indicated a Nazi invasion was near. Nor would he believe
his own intelligence organizations. Yet somehow he
could bring himself to trust Hitler. This blunder was
facilitated by the fact that the Vozdh surrounded
himself with acolytes whose chief purpose was to
launder information to make it compatible with the
views he already accepted. No one dared to tell the
emperor he wore no clothes.
Barros and Gregor will encounter arguments regarding their view that Stalin actually preferred to cooperate with Nazi Germany rather than Britain or France.
With a war on the horizon, neither Western government seriously offered Stalin any sort of reasonable
lifeline. His only serious alternative came from Hitler
via the Nazi-Soviet pact. Also absent is an analysis of
the specific impact of the Soviet disinformation on thc
Nazis. Was any of it believed? Was there an impact on
military preparations? Or did Hitler simply ignore
everything that might stand in the way of his objective?
Finally, with the Soviet archives more accessible to
Western scholars, why were these most valuable resources not consulted? Moreover, the Bundesarchiv,
Bundesarchiv-Militararchiv, and the Politisches Archiv
des Auswartigen Amtes offer materials beyond what is
available in the published sources or the great postWorld War II German microfilm collections. Barrows
and Gregor have provided a good and readable summary of what is already known to the scholarly co m-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
munity, but a more definitive study of the demise of
the Nazi-Soviet pact is still to be undertaken.
JACK R. DUKES
Carroll College
R. C. RAACK. Stalin's Drive to the West 1938-1945: The
Origins of the Cold War. Stanford: Stanford University
Press. 1995. Pp. viii, 265. $45.00.
Fifty years after its end, World War II continues to
exert tremendous fascination on historians, who seem
to flnd various excuses to produce countless volumes
dealing with different aspects of that conflict. The last
few years have proved especially fertile in this respect,
the common excuse being the opening of hitherto
closed wartime archives held by the former Soviet
Union and its equally former allies, such as Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland.
Ordinarily, one would have to applaud the efforts of
Western scholars to explore the newly available archival resources. It is clear, however, that the results of
this initiative have proved rather meager and did little
if anything to force us to revise earlier interpretations
of, and conclusions about, the key decisions taken
before and during the war. The promised revelations
throwing new light on World War II simply have not
materialized, and one is tempted to conclude that in
many instances a mountain produced a mouse.
Unfortunately, the study under review falls in that
category. R. C. Raack has written extensively on the
German and Soviet propaganda films and has also
authored several articles on Stalin's postwar plans. In
his introduction, he strongly criticizes Western wartime political leaders for relying on "faulty information," and he fiercely castigates American historians
for their "most confused, uninformed, indeed, downright incorrect historical reporting." The book's jacket
makes the extravagant assertion that "the author reveals that the story-widely believed by historians and
Western wartime leaders alike- '" is a fantasy,"
which implies that Raack will provide liS with the real
story.
I regret to say that seldom, if ever, has a promise
been less fulfilled than in this case. In discussing the
events leading to the outbreak of the war, including the
notorious Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, Raack simply repeats the thesis first presented by George F. Kennan in
Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (1961): that
Stalin's main purpose in signing the treaty with Hitler
was not only to gain time and territory but also to
prepare the ground for a Soviet invasion of Western
Europe in the event of a stalemate between Germany
and Britain and France. Stalin miscalculated, there was
no stalemate, and in June, 1941, Stalin was suddenly
faced with a German attack. To be sure, Raack
acknowledges Kennan's work, but he does it rather
sparingly. The chapters dealing with the Yalta and
Potsdam conferences are based mostly on secondary
sources with a sprinkling of archival documents showing little that is new.
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Reviews of Books
All this means that students of World War 11 who
expected to find new information will not find it in
Raack's study and will do much better by continuing to
rely on the well-tested works of Kennan, John Gaddis,
Vojtcch Mastny, and William McNeill, the last of
whom is not cvcn listcd in the bibliography.
ANDRZEJ KORBONSKI
University of California,
Los Angeles
JOHN L. H. KEEP. Last of the Empires: A History of the
Soviet Union 1945-1991. New York: Oxford University
Press. 1995. Pp. viii, 477. $29.95.
In this volume, John L. H. Keep provides an encyclopedic history of the Soviet Union since 1945. He makes
no claims to bring new insight to ongoing debates but
instead, writing for "the general reader," aims to "sum
up what is now generally known" about the Soviet
system after Josef Stalin's death (p. 1). Keep succeeds
in providing a comprehensive and intelligent survey of
the period, but his narrative is marred by a tendency tu
accept conventional wisdom in the face of complexity
and ambiguity.
Keep frames his narrative in terms of the futile
efforts made by Stalin's successors to overcome that
leader's terrible legacy-the massively wasteful economic system, the backward and oppressed countryside, and the history of terror-without undermining
the regime itself. The narrative begins with a short
discussion of Stalin's last years, which introduces the
reader to the Stalinist system and describes the dictator's brutal efforts to hold back change after World
War 11. Nikita Khrushchev tried a more reformist
course but foundered upon fierce bureaucratic resistance and his own unwillingness to introduce a genuine
pluralism that might threaten the Party's leading role.
Leonid Brezhnev's unimaginative efforts to preserve
bureaucratic prerogatives led to stagnation, corruption, and cynicism but also prompted cultural, national, and religious dissidents to create the beginnings
of a civil society. Finally, Keep shows how Mikhail
Gorbachev sought to recapture the initiative and trust
of the Soviet population by attacking Stalinism at its
roots and ended up unleashing the nationalist and
other social movements that destroyed the regime.
Keep's methods claim to "avoid abstractions as far
as possible and try to depict concrete reality" (p. 5). He
is at his best in discussing institutional history, and he
offers many cogent analyses of the regime's persistent
efforts to improve economic production, its sporadic
efforts at reform, and its constant struggle to keep
under control the expression of cultural and religious
ideas. He also provides copious statistics on economic
production, demographic trends, and party membership. Understandably, Keep's narrative excludes foreign policy, though he might have discussed more fully
how international events such as the Hungarian revolt
of 1956 and the conflict with China affected domestic
decisions.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
If Keep's methods make good institutional history,
they are less able to describe how the Soviet peoples
responded to those institutions. His emphasis on official policy and macrosociological statistics allows him
to approach "concrete reality" only from above; he
cannot depict the different realities confronting individuals within the Soviet population. At bcst, he offers
gencral conclusions regarding popular belicfs and attitudcs obtained by examining the behavior of statistical categories such as "workers," "peasants," or members of a particular nationality, which in effect treats
the individuals making up these categories as abstractions. (As an exception, he does deal with the relatively
few open dissidents of the regime as individuals.) In
many cases, Keep's generalizations are reasonable, as
in his account of the Soviet population's widespread
retreat into private life under Brezhnev. At other
times, he underestimates the deeper, indirect influence
that society exercised on Soviet decision-making after
World War Il. For example, Keep mentions only
briefly the argument-which Khrushchev himself
maintained in his memoirs-that Khrushchev expused
Stalin's crimes to anticipate and contain a process that
was uccurring anyway. Reflecting this methudulugical
bias, Keep's only overt venture into theuretical abstraction consists of a defense of the term "tutalitarianism" as a description of the Soviet system.
One cannot do justice to the complexities of "concrete reality" without dealing with abstractions.
Throughout Keep's narrative, he constantly refers to
such terms as ideology, civil society, ethnicity, nationalism, and gender. These concepts are both abstract
and contested, yet Keep treats them as part of an
unproblematic reality, never even bothering to define
them. Consequently, his pronouncements on Soviet
nationalities, Soviet women, and Soviet popular culture uften luok more like summary judgments than
thoughtful interpretations.
In short, this book provides an excellent resource for
scholars who want a thorough survey of Soviet domestic politics and economic policy after World War 11.
Readers seeking a history of Soviet culture and society
during the period should look elsewhere.
JAMES RICHTER
Bates College
NEAR EAST
AMY SINGER. Palestinian Peasants and Ottoman Officials: Rural Administration around Sixteenth-Century
Jerusalem. (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization.)
New York: Cambridge University Press. 1994. Pp. xvii,
201. Cloth $49.95, paper $22.95.
From 1516 until near the end of World War I,
Palestine was a part of the Ottoman Empire. Shortly
after the Ottoman conquest, the new regime conducted a fiscal survey-census of land and people, just as
it had earlier when the Ottomans had moved into
Europe and central and eastern Asia Minor. The
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1997