Stalin's Great Raid: The Plundering of Germany and the Rise of the Soviet Union to a Superpower

A revelatory new history from one of Europe’s leading scholars, uncovering how Stalin’s systematic plunder of Germany after World War II fueled the Soviet Union’s rise to superpower status.When the Red Army advanced into Central Europe in 1944-45, its battlefield victory marked only the beginning of a vast Soviet project of domination and extraction.Behind the language of “reparations,” Stalin and his planners initiated one of the most sweeping programs of industrial plunder in modern history.Entire factories, whole industries, research institutes, rail networks, and cultural infrastructure were dismantled and transported eastward, along with tens of thousands of German engineers and specialists, as well as millions of German prisoners turned workers, all constituting the material and human basis for the USSR’s subsequent transformation from a ravaged wartime power into an industrial and military superstate.In Stalin’s Great Raid, distinguished Polish-German historian Bogdan Musial, dr