On the Precipice: Stalin, the Red Army Leadership and the Road to Stalingrad, 1931–1942

Peter Mezhiritsky

Sep 2012 · Casemate Publishers

About this ebook

Nominated for the 2013 PushkinHouse/Waterstone's Russian Book Prize. Like some astronomers, who discover cosmic objects not by direct observation, but by watching the deviations of known heavenly bodies from their calculated trajectories, Peter Mezhiritsky makes his findings in history through thoughtful reading and the comparison of historical sources. This book, a unique blend of prosaic literature and shrewd historic analysis, is dedicated to events in Soviet history in light of Marshal Zhukov's memoirs. Exhaustive knowledge of Soviet life, politics and censorship, including the phraseology in which Communist statesmen were allowed to narrate their biographical events, gave Peter Mezhiritsky sharp tools for the analysis of the Marshal's memoirs. The reader will learn about the abundance of awkward events that strangely and fortuitously occurred in good time for Stalin's rise to power, about the hidden connection between the purges, the Munich appeasement and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, and about the real reason why it took so long to liquidate Paulus' Sixth Army at Stalingrad. The author presents a clear picture of the purges which promoted incompetent and poorly educated commanders (whose most prominent feature was their personal dedication to Stalin) to higher levels of command, leaving the Soviet Union poorly prepared for a war against the Wehrmacht military machine. The author offers alternative explanations for many prewar and wartime events. He was the first in Russia to acknowledge a German component to Zhukov's military education. The second part of the book is dedicated to the course of the Great Patriotic War, much of which is still little known to the vast majority of Western readers. While not fully justifying Zhukov's actions, the author also reveals the main reason for the bloody strategy chosen by Zhukov and the General Staff in the defensive period of the War. In general, the author shares and argues Marshal Vasilevsky's conviction - if there had been no purges, the war would not have occurred. The book became widely known to the Russian-reading public on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the last ten years its quotations have been used as an essential argument in almost all the debates about the WWII. The book is equally intended for scholars and regular readers, who are interested in Twentieth Century history.

About the author

Author Peter Mezhiritsky belongs to the so-called Shestidesyatniki -"the 60s generation" - Soviets born between 1925 and 1945 who resisted the Communist Party's cultural and ideological restrictions in adulthood. As children, they'd been fully convinced in the ideals of communism, only to be disillusioned by knowledge of the widespread repressions as they matured. Many of this generation became noted writers. Mezhiritsky obtained a Master's Degree in Engineering, but quickly understood the phantom essence of the socialist economy and started sharing his views by writing. His first novel was a complete success, being translated into Polish and made into a movie by Belarusfilm. In 1979, forced by the growing impositions of Soviet censorship, Mezhiritsky emigrated to the United States, where he kept working as an engineer while continuing to write books. His Russian-language books "Longing for London" and "Reading Marshal Zhukov" (published in 1994 and 1995 respectively) were dedicated to the consequences of Stalinism. The novel "On the threshold of immortality" (2006) was dedicated to the patriarchs Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac. He is the author of many short stories, essays and articles, which have been published in the United States, Germany, Israel, Russia and the Ukraine. He lives in San Diego, CA. / Stuart Britton is a freelance translator and editor residing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He has been responsible for making a growing number of Russian titles available to readers of the English language, consisting primarily of memoirs by Red Army veterans and recent historical research concerning the Eastern Front of the Second World War and Soviet air operations in the Korean War. Notable recent titles include Boris Gorbachevsky's 'Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier's War on the Eastern Front 1942-45' (University Press of Kansas, 2008) and Yuri Sutiagin's and Igor Seidov's 'MiG Menace Over Korea: The Story of Soviet Fighter Ace Nikolai Sutiagin' (Pen & Sword Aviation, 2009). Future books will include Lev Lopukhovsky's detailed study of the Soviet disaster at Viazma in 1941, Svetlana Gerasimova's analysis of the prolonged and savage fighting against Army Group Center in 1942-43 to liberate the city of Rzhev, and more of Igor Seidov's studies of the Soviet side of the air war in Korea, 1951-1953.