Book Review: Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War by Ian Ona Johnson.

Johnson begins with the crisis year 1918-1919 when a defeated Germany faced Bolshevik Russia in the east. Johnson argues, surely rightly, that historians have underestimated the importance of earlier collaboration with Germany in explaining who was targeted by the Stalin purges. Johnson, Ian Ona Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War, Oxford University Press: New York, NY, and Oxford, 2021; xvii + 350 pp.: 9780190675141, $29.95 hardback So much has been written about the origins, significance and consequences of the pact made between the Soviet Union and Germany in August 1939 that it is a bold historian who claims to have found anything left to say. [Extracted from the article]