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Loading... The Soviets, the Munich Crisis, and the Coming of World War IIby Hugh Ragsdale
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. This monograph sifts through the tantalizing hints as to what Soviet intentions really might have been during the Munich Crisis, with the intention being to make the best use of the surviving East European sources; particullarly those in Romanian hands. The tentative conclusion: Stalin was probably serious about collective security and had London and Paris found their nerve it's possible that a united front might have been forged against Hitler. At the very least Ragsdale is skeptical that there was much interest in Moscow in the Thirties towards using the European crisis as an avenue to spread the revolution. If nothing else Ragsdale enlivens his work with an acerbic attitude I'm not used to seeing in diplomatic history, particularly towards Chamberlain. ( ) no reviews | add a review
The Munich crisis is everywhere acknowledged as the prelude to World War II. If Hitler had been stopped at Munich then World War II as we know it could not have happened. The subject has been thoroughly studied in British, French and German documents and consequently we know that the weakness in the Western position at Munich consisted in the Anglo-French opinion that the Soviet commitment to its allies - France and Czechoslovakia - was utterly unreliable. What has never been seriously studied in the Western literature is the whole spectrum of East European documentation. This book targets precisely this dimension of the problem. The Romanians were at one time prepared to admit the transfer of the Red Army across their territory. The Red Army, mobilised on a massive scale, was informed that its destination was Czechoslovakia. The Polish consul in Lodavia reported the entrance of the Red Army into the country. In the meantime, Moscow focused especially on the Polish rail network. All of these findings are new, and they contribute to a considerable shift in the conventional wisdom on the subject. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)940.53History and Geography Europe Europe 1918- World War IILC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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