ABSTRACT
The German invasion of Poland and the subsequent declaration of war by Britain and France marked the beginning of the Second World War in twenty-five years. Although historians often debate the degree to which Joseph Stalin alone shaped Soviet history, most agree that what Stalin thought and did fundamentally shaped the way the Soviet Union entered World War II. During the war, Soviet leaders and the Soviet media ratcheted up the use of the emotional term rodina, which until the mid-1930s had been a distinctly un-Bolshevik word, as a powerful mobilizing tool. From the very beginning, the Nazis approached the war against the Soviet Union as a war of annihilation, an ideological fight to destroy what they regarded as the twin evils of Bolshevism and Jewry. The Soviets fulfilled the commitment made at Yalta to enter the war against Japan in exchange for concessions that reversed the losses sustained by the Russian empire in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905.
