It also helps that the creator of Hetalia is open at least to the idea of human names, and given how many there already are, as well as the real life world history, it should come as no surprise that the original main characters (Germany, Italy, Japan, America, England, France, Russia, China) have been supplemented by a whole world of major, minor and periphery characters. Nevertheless they're popular in fandom, mostly because many people don't like using the actual country names in fanfic. Je m'appelle Francis" they don't appear on the website and they were deleted with the author's original site blog). The human names are technically not canon, but nonetheless are mentioned (although they are Word of God they're not used in the manga aside from two dubious instances in strips and one of the image songs note France's " Embrace the tres bien moi" opens with the line " Bonjour. There is potentially a character for every country that exists now or ever has, even ones that were never independent countries like Hong Kong, and supernational states like the Holy Roman Empire. Sean McMeekin has done a fantastic job telling that war’s story.In hell, the police are German, the lovers are Swiss, the chefs are British, the engineers are French, and the bankers are Italian. Instead, Stalin was allowed almost total victory in a war he had largely engineered for his own benefit. “these should have been dispelled by his behavior as the Red Army, riding on the trucks and rubber tires of lend-lease, powered into formerly (and soon again) occupied Poland in the second half of 1944.”Īt the end of the war, Churchill instructed his chiefs of staff to prepare a plan for attacking Soviet forces in Eastern Europe (his generals called it “Operation Unthinkable”), but of course nothing like it was ever done. Stalin's duplicity and rapacity were exercised on a scale not seen in the world since Genghis Khan, and yet for an entire generation subsisting on Western-produced wartime propaganda, he was stern-but-kindly “Uncle Joe,” sending millions of his people to the fight. And as so many books have done before it, “Stalin’s War” makes abundantly clear that the dictator was, if anything, even more coldly reptilian than Hitler. “Thus began,” McMeekin writes, “a renewed period of Soviet terror, fed by increasing paranoia about Jews and other pro-Western cosmopolitans, that would last until Stalin’s death in 1953.”īy any accounting, the number of innocent people Stalin caused to be murdered, particularly in the decade after the war, dwarfs that of Hitler’s victims, military or civilian. In those areas, Stalin’s “postwar wars” netted millions of new forced laborers for Soviet industries from Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, Romania, Ukraine, and Hungary – plus, after 1945, nearly a million Japanese, Mongolians, and Koreans. McMeekin is absolutely right when he writes that the Allied victory in World War II brought only more pain – in the form of conquest and civil war – in Eastern Europe and northern Asia. Joseph Stalin and Soviet Russia dominate the picture. “In all these ways,” he writes, “it was not Hitler’s, but Stalin’s war.”. a protagonist whose armies fought in both Asia and Europe on an epic scale that spanned the whole Eurasian continent, who participated in the conquest of the Axis powers and enormously enlarged his own empire in the process.