In Thunder in the East, Evan Mawdsley has written a solid account of the Nazi-Soviet war, but one that doesn't fully justify its claim to novel revelations that supersede earlier accounts of the war. Nor does he quite succeed in producing a balanced account that provides equal insight into the two sides. As a Russian specialist, Mawdsley gives more weight to the Soviet story, perhaps unavoidably given the fact, as he notes, that Soviet historiography of the eastern front has lagged about fifty years behind that of the Germans. Finally, his is a traditional military history of the war in the east, heavy on strategic and operational analysis, battle accounts, and weapon descriptions. It is good as far as it goes, but the book's major weakness is a serious neglect of the ideological, racial, and economic aspects of the war from the German side. Mawdsley provides virtually no discussion of Nazi racial-ideological goals, nor does he give any but the briefest account of the murderous consequences of Hitler's obsessions. For the social and economic aspects of the war in the east, this book certainly does not eclipse that of Richard Overy, while most of the military assessments are familiar and judicious rather than revelatory.

Mawdsley's most original claim is that Stalin ignored warnings of the looming German attack on the Soviet Union not out of fear or weakness, but because he and the Soviet High Command thought they were dealing from a position of strength. After all, Stalin had presided over one of the most colossal peacetime military expansions ever, and by 1941 possessed an armed force that claimed the largest tank corps and air force in the world. Nor did the Russians underestimate the potential of the German threat; if anything, they exaggerated the extent of the Nazi build-up in the east. Rather, Stalin fell into a common mistake: he underrated the quality of the Wehrmacht and overrated that of the Red Army. Although aware of the German build-up in the east, Stalin was confident that he had over-matched the Germans, having what seemed to be a comfortable superiority in the quantity of men, tanks, and aircraft. It was in many respects precisely this superiority in numbers that led Stalin into his greatest delusion: since Hitler possessed nowhere near the three-to-one advantage deemed necessary for a successful attack, Stalin assumed that the Nazi leader did not intend to use his assembled force immediately. Seen from this perspective, even Stalin's apparent appeasement of Hitler in spring 1941 and his insistence that Russian forces offer no provocation to the Germans seem oddly rational: 1941 was a dangerous year of military reorganization, but one that, gotten through successfully, would result in an even stronger deterrent power for the Red Army. Moreover, Stalin seems to have believed that Hitler would act in his own rational self-interest and not risk a two-front war by attacking the U.S.S.R. Finally, Soviet military doctrine stressed the counteroffensive: absorbing the enemy's blow at the frontier, checking his advance into Russia, and then launching a counterattack that would result in the encirclement and annihilation of the enemy force.

Mawdsley's interpretation of Stalin's actions in 1941 is plausible, and his further observations following the German invasion are sound, not least because both sides operated in an intelligence vacuum, preferring to believe what they wanted to believe. If Stalin thus appears dangerously out of touch with the reality of Hitler's ideological obsessions, the Germans had little understanding of the extent of the Soviet military buildup, the productive capacity of the communist state, or even the logistical problems posed by an advance in breadth as well as depth. Nor did the Germans concentrate the resources they had, preferring to disperse their strength in a broad attack rather than concentrate on key objectives; as a result, although able to achieve spectacular operational victories, the Germans failed to translate these into the destruction of the Soviet state. Here Mawdsley paints a familiar picture: Stalin's indecision and near fatal interventions in military matters; Soviet command failures and shock at the swift German advance; stubborn fighting by Red Army units; German surprise at the extent of Soviet manpower reserves; increasing German logistical problems; and the failure of the Germans to take advantage of their great opportunity to seize Moscow in mid-October 1941.

Although Mawdsley aimed at balance in his telling of the story of the war in the east, it is from roughly the time of the Red Army counterattack in front of Moscow that his account acquires a decidedly Soviet character. In the midst of his extensive military descriptions, he devotes only five pages to the increasingly conspicuous ideological essence that the Germans had imparted to this campaign. Problems of space are always a consideration for any author, but the war in the east cannot be understood properly without extensive discussion of the interaction of military, ideological, racial, and economic factors in the German conduct of the war. The rich German historical literature on the eastern war produced over the past two decades certainly testifies to this.

Despite this criticism, Mawdsley has produced a substantive work on the military campaigns of the Nazi-Soviet war. He provides solid assessments of Stalin, his early weaknesses and evolution into an effective military leader, as well as that of other Soviet commanders. He also notes several aspects of the war that, if not necessarily new, nonetheless are thought-provoking: memories of the Marne in September 1914 drove German commanders to persist in the attack on Moscow; the Germans lost fewer men per month in the period December 1941 to February 1942 than in July to September 1941, while the “successful” Soviet counterattack resulted in huge Russian casualties; in 1943 more Germans were killed in the follow-up battles at Kharkov and Belgorod than in the better known confrontation at Kursk; the Germans in 1944 finally out-produced the Soviets in most weapons, but by then it was too late; from 1943 Anglo-American actions in the west, especially lend-lease and the air war, gave the Soviets key advantages over the Germans; the Soviets suffered high losses even during their victorious advances of 1944–45 (astonishingly, Soviet deaths in all but one three-month period of the war were greater than total American losses for the entire war); and, not least, Stalin maintained effective political control of the Soviet state in marked contrast to 1917.

Although the last half of the book tends to be a somewhat tedious account of various military operations, Mawdsley nonetheless gives intelligent assessments of these actions, and his conclusions are reasoned and judicious. As he notes, the ultimate paradox of the war was that, while Germany recovered rather rapidly from its defeat, the Russian victory constituted a major long-term factor in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. To paraphrase Churchill, Russia purchased victory at such a cost as to be virtually indistinguishable from defeat. But as Mawdsley also points out, the worst of the paradox was that the Soviets had no choice: a victory of National Socialism would have been catastrophic for the Soviet people and Europe.