| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Steven Merritt Miner. Stalin's Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. Pp. xix, 407 $55.00.
Steven Merritt Miner discusses the wartime uses and abuses of religion in the USSR. Like other scholars, he ties the war years' relative improvements for the Orthodox Church to domestic issues. He then maps new ground by pointing to the Soviet regime's desire to make its westward expansion in 1939 and again in 1944–1945 more palatable to inhabitants of the newly acquired regions. Miner acknowledges that the church became prominent in Soviet talk and propaganda only in 1943 but notes that the regime promoted a more positive image of Russian Orthodoxy from the start of the German invasion.	1
Joseph Stalin, Miner finds, played a delicate game with his own citizens, foreign officials, and the American and British publics. Stalin had to make some concessions to religious sentiment but could not go too far in permitting the church to operate independently. For various reasons, including naïveté, several notable foreigners assisted this effort. Some cooperation stemmed from commitment to the Soviet cause, for example by the director of the British Foreign Ministry's Soviet Relations branch, Peter Smollett, born Smolka, who passed documents to Moscow. Miner suggests that Smollett significantly affected British public opinion but recognizes that wartime circumstances favored building a positive attitude toward the USSR.	. . .

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