The admirably productive John Lukacs has penned his fourth book on the early phases of World War II in the European theater (1939–1941). He likes to concentrate his analytical powers on the “dueling” great statesmen of this era—Hitler vs. Churchill in 1940 in a previous book and now Hitler vs. Stalin in 1941. He is an unabashed Churchill fanatic, and it now turns out, he displays considerable admiration for Hitler's and Stalin's “statesmanship.” Whatever topic of modern history Lukacs is tackling, he does so both with a felicitous prose and a combative argumentative style.

In this slim volume his usual analytical insights fail him. It seems to have been penned in haste without considering the entire rich record of writings on Hitler's planning for the attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and Stalin's response. Rather than Pearl Harbor or Stalingrad, Lukacs categorically deems June 22, 1941, “the most important turning point of the Second World War” (p. 2). Surely disappointing to the fans of America's “greatest generation,” the Normandy invasion does not even make his list. He is soundly in line with recent authors such as Max Hastings in Armageddon (2004) in arguing that the Anglo-American alliance “could not have really conquered Hitler's Germany without Russia” (p. 2).

Lukacs's single-minded argument is geopolitical. Hitler's Russian policy was based on his long-standing disappointment with the stubborn British, who refused to cooperate with the Führer and his plans for ruling the continent. Hitler attacked Russia in June 1941 in order to make Great Britain pliable—“the ultimate objective of the Reich is the defeat of Great Britain” (p. 137). It would seem that Hitler could have concentrated his forces in the Mediterranean to beat the British on the battlefield and make them sue for peace, as his naval advisors suggested, rather than pick the arduous detour through Moscow. This, however, is a standard argument in the literature and nothing new.

What is different about Lukacs's argument is his monochromatic dismissal of ideology. He concedes that Hitler's anti-communism was an important part of his politics in the 1930s. Lebensraum in the east, however, was more part of his 1920s thinking than his program in the 1930s and beyond. Lukacs asserts that Hitler “did not say or write anything about the eastward limits” of a Germanic empire. Yet Gerhard Weinberg has unearthed documents that show that the Germans planned to delimit their division of central Asia with Japan at the seventieth degree longitude well beyond the Urals (Visions of Victory [2005], p. xxiv [map], 13).

The non-aggression pact signed between the Soviets and Nazis on August 23 represented “the biggest bombshell in the modern history of relations between states” (pp. 20f), notes Lukacs hyperbolically. This power deal, intended to deter the British from going to war with Germany, is “proof of the genius of Hitler's statesmanship (p. 21). Was it a temporary expedient or a long-term deal? Given Hitler's vast territorial concession signed away in the secret protocol, the “Hitler-Stalin Pact,” it was probably the latter, says Lukacs.

Lukacs preposterously dismisses or conveniently ignores recent books that strike a complex balance between Hitler's geopolitical and ideological goals behind the attack on the Soviet Union. He calls Lord Bullock's masterful Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1992) “useless” (p. 140), probably because Bullock takes the ideological nature of Hitler and Stalin's politics seriously. He ignores Sir Ian Kershaw's exhaustive and brilliant Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (2000) entirely, presumably because Kershaw argues that Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union was a “war of annihilation” with the wiping out of Jewish Bolshevism as the ultimate goal (p. 356ff). Kershaw's conclusion: “By 22 June the genocidal whirlwind was ready to blow” (p. 382).

Stalin greatly admired Hitler. His chief concern was not to “pull the chestnuts from the fire” (pp. 51f) for England and France by going to war with Hitler in 1939. Stalin wanted to keep the Soviet Union out of the war so he “could rake up the ruins of Europe” (p. 56) at a later date. In his relationship with Hitler, he saw himself as a Russian statesman determined to reconquer the eastern European lands lost at the end of World War I. Nationalism was more important to Stalin than international socialism (p. 58). Again geopolitics trumps ideology, which flies in the face of much recent scholarship about Stalin's mindset. Hitler got irritated when Stalin moved into Bessarabia and Bukovina, attacked Finland, and showed interest in Bulgaria and the Balkans, beyond the “spheres” agreed on in the Secret Protocols. In late 1940 Hitler ordered his generals to begin planning “Operation Barbarossa” for a spring 1941 launching date. Now Stalin's “statesmanship” collapsed as he ignored the massive German troop build-up on Russia's Western borders; he also failed to heed an avalanche of Western intelligence warnings about an imminent attack. To Lukacs' credit, he soundly dismisses the “Präventivkriegsthese” (p. 70), the old Nazi propaganda moniker that Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in order to preempt a Soviet attack on Germany, recently revived among some German authors.

Apart from the German Ambassador in Moscow Count Schulenburg, Lukacs has nothing good to say about the principal diplomatic actors in this drama. Stalin's personality was a compound of “Caucasian chieftain and a peasant tsar” (p. 57); he characterizes German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop as “the rigidest [sic] blinkered servant of Hitler” (p. 91), his Soviet and Japanese counterparts Molotov as a “wooden and unimaginative dolt” (p. 30) and Matsuoka as “despicable” and “slimy” (p. 36); and Soviet Ambassador to Berlin Dekanasov was “uneducated and uncultured, a stump of a man” (p. 153). Like his anti-ideological bent, these may well be a representation of Hungarian-born Lukacs's Old-World-world mental baggage.