As I said, McMeekin’s account is polemical, written as a corrective to other histories and open to counterarguments in turn. I don’t think he quite succeeds in displacing Hitler’s pride of place as the evil protagonist of 1939-45, and many of the choices that Western nations made in temporarily allying with Stalin seem retrospectively inevitable. It’s not surprising that the British and the French in 1939 would fear the dictator with troops on the French border more than the dictator poised to swallow the Baltic States, or that America would prefer a resilient Soviet Union to an all-conquering Nazi Germany in 1941.
McMeekin has a fascinating argument that the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939 opened the possibility of a war of the liberal West against both totalitarianisms, with Britain and an as-yet-unconquered France bombing the Baku oil fields in the Soviet Union and thereby undermining both the Soviet and Nazi war machines. I’m not persuaded, however, that this counterfactual would have ended well for the democracies.
But the necessity of an alignment with Stalin against Hitler, like the necessity of hiring a bunch of scientists with communist connections in the same period — if that’s what it took to forge atomic weapons in a short span of time — has to coexist with a recognition that the world looked quite different as the German and then Japanese defeats became inevitable. By war’s end, our pivot toward an intense suspicion of everything that Stalin touched was both imperative and arguably (and I do think McMeekin makes a strong argument) insufficient, coming later than it should have for both American interests and for Stalin’s conquered peoples.
The necessity of that pivot doesn’t prove that Oppenheimer the man was treated justly. But what happened to him happened for reasons distinct from simple yahoo-ism and xenophobia. And any viewer of “Oppenheimer” the movie would be wise to hold the malignancy of Stalin, the scale of his success at both conquest and manipulation, in mind while watching its complex hero’s complex fate unfold.
Read the whole thing.