Sean McMeekin Livres

In this remarkable, ground-breaking new book Sean McMeekin marks a generational shift in our view of Stalin as an ally in the Second World War. Stalin's only difference from Hitler, he argues, was that he was a successful murderous predator. With Hitler dead and the Third Reich in ruins, Stalin created an immense new Communist empire. Among his holdings were Czechoslovakia and Poland, the fates of which had first set the West against the Nazis and, of course, China and North Korea, the ramifications of which we still live with today. Until Barbarossa wrought a public relations miracle, turning him into a plucky ally of the West, Stalin had murdered millions, subverted every norm of international behaviour, invaded as many countries as Hitler had, and taken great swathes of territory he would continue to keep. In the larger sense the global conflict grew out of not only German and Japanese aggression but Stalin's manoeuvrings, orchestrated to provoke wars of attrition between the capitalist powers in Europe and in Asia. Above all, Stalin's War uncovers the shocking details of how the US government (to the detriment of itself and its other allies) fuelled Stalin's war machine, blindly agreeing to every Soviet demand, right down to agents supplying details of the atomic bomb.

In a major reinterpretation, Sean McMeekin rejects the standard notion of the war's beginning as either a Germano-Austrian pre-emptive strike or a miscalculation. The key to the outbreak of violence, he argues, lies in St. Petersburg. Russian statesmen unleashed the war through policy decisions based on imperial ambitions in the Near East.

WINNER OF THE BARBARA JELAVICH BOOK PRIZE 'Sean McMeekin has written a classic of First World War history ... This superb and original book is the reality behind Greenmantle' Norman Stone The Berlin-Baghdad Express explores one of the big, previously unresearched subjects of the First World War: the German bid for world power - and the destruction of the British Empire - through the harnessing of the Ottoman Empire. McMeekin's book shows how incredibly high the stakes were in the Middle East - with the Germans in the tantalizing position of taking over the core of the British Empire via the extraordinary railway that would link Central Europe and the Persian Gulf. Germany sought the Ottoman Empire as an ally to create jihad against the British - whose Empire at the time was the largest Islamic power in the world. The Berlin-Baghdad Express is a fascinating account of western interference in the Middle East and its lamentable results. It explains and brings to life a massive area of fighting, which in most other accounts is restricted to the disaster at Gallipoli and the British invasions of Iraq and Palestine.

A bold, gripping history of the first month of World War I When an assassin gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914, no one could have imagined the shocking bloodshed that would soon follow. Indeed, as award-winning historian Sean McMeekin reveals in July 1914, World War I might have been avoided entirely had it not been for the actions of a small group of statesmen in the month after the assassination. Whether they plotted for war or rode the whirlwind nearly blind, these men sought to capitalize on the fallout from Ferdinand's murder, unwittingly leading Europe toward the greatest cataclysm it had ever seen. A deeply-researched account of the genesis of World War I, July 1914 tells the gripping story of the month that changed the course of the twentieth century.

"Drawing extensively on recently opened Moscow archives, McMeekin chronicles Munzenberg's political career throughout the 1920s and 1930s. He describes how Munzenberg parlayed his friendship with Lenin into a media empire, leveraging his corporate ventures against the currency of his reputation in the Kremlin. He explains how Munzenberg's mysterious financial manipulations outraged Social Democrats and lent rhetorical ammunition to the Nazis and how, by the last years of the Weimar Republic, Munzenberg and his Nazi counterpart Joseph Goebbels were firing off reckless propaganda salvos, feeding a destructive spiral of lies that poisoned the political atmosphere irrevocably.".

On 28 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. A little over a month later the world was engulfed in the bloodiest conflict mankind had ever seen. How did such tragedy unfold so quickly?

"Between 1911 and 1923, a series of wars--chief among them World War I--would engulf the Ottoman Empire and its successor states. It is a story we think we know well, but as Sean McMeekin shows us in this revelatory new history, we know far less than we think. Drawing from his years of ground-breaking research in newly opened Ottoman and Russian archives, The Ottoman Endgame brings to light the entire strategic narrative that led to an unstable new order in postwar Middle East--much of which is still felt today"--

Now in paperback, the first major new history of the Russian Revolution in a decade combines cutting-edge scholarship and a fast-paced narrative to shed new light on a great turning point of the twentieth century.

"Marx held that the progression of society from capitalism to communism was 'historically inevitable'. In Russia in 1917, it seemed that Marx's theory was being born out in reality. But was the Russian Revolution really inevitable? This collection of fourteen contributions from the world's leading Russian scholars attempts to answer the question by looking back at the key turning points of the revolution. From the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1904-5 through to the appropriation of church property in 1922, and focusing especially on the incredible chain of events in 1917 leading to the October Revolution itself, Historically Inevitable? is a forensic account of Russia's road to revolution. Each contribution gives not only a fast-paced, incisive narrative account of an individual aspect of Revolution but also, for the first time, an intriguing counter-factual analysis of what might have gone differently. Featuring Richard Pipes on the Kornilov affair, Orlando Figes on the October Revolution, Dominic Lieven on foreign intervention and Martin Sixsmith on the attempted assassination of Lenin in 1918, Historically Inevitable? explains how each of these moments, more through blind luck than any historical inevitability, led to the creation of the world's first communist state. Tony Brenton's afterword to the volume draws parallels between the Revolution and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and places the events of 1917 in the context of more recent events in Russia and the Crimea. Featuring contributions from: Donald Crawford - Sean McMeekin - Dominic Lieven - Orlando Figes - Richard Sakwa - Douglas Smith - Martin Sixsmith - Simon Dixon - Boris Kolonitsky - Richard Pipes - Edvard Radzinsky - Catriona Kelly - Erik Landis - Evan Mawdsley"--Publisher's description

Renomovaný historik Sean McMeekin nám ve své knize Červenec 1914 dokazuje, že první světové válce bylo možné zabránit, kdyby zde neexistovala nepočetná skupina státníků, kteří se v průběhu měsíce následujícího po Ferdinandově smrti rozhodli, že tohoto atentátu využijí jako rozbušku pro rozpoutání dlouho očekávané konfrontace evropských mocností. McMeekin nás seznamuje s pozoruhodnými novými prameny z různých evropských archivů a dokazuje, jak jediný měsíc dokázal změnit podobu dvacátého století.