Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

At the Kremlin in August 1942 Stalin, in the early hours of the morning, gave me one aspect of the Soviet position. ‘We formed the impression,’ said Stalin, ‘that the British and French Governments were not resolved to go to war if Poland were attacked,’ but that they hoped the diplomatic line-up of Britain and France and Russia would deter Hitler. We were sure it would not. ‘How many divisions,’ Stalin had asked, ‘will France send against Germany on mobilisation?’ The answer was, ‘About a hundred.’ He then asked, ‘How many will England send?’ The answer was, ‘Two, and two more later.’ ‘Ah, two and two more later,’ Stalin had repeated. ‘Do you know,’ he asked, ‘how many divisions we shall have to put on the Russian front if we go to war with Germany?’ There was a pause. ‘More than three hundred.’³⁹

In its defence of the pact, the third volume of Istoriya Diplomatii highlighted the role of western anti-appeasement critics and their prewar campaign for an alliance with the Soviet Union. The most prominent of these critics had been Churchill, who advocated a ‘grand alliance’ of Britain, France and the Soviet Union against Hitler. It was the failure of Churchill’s campaign and the collapse of the 1939 Anglo-Soviet-French triple alliance negotiations that had led to the Soviet–German non-aggression treaty.⁴⁰

For decades the key Soviet text on the Nazi–Soviet pact was Fal’sifikatory Istorii, a brochure issued by the Soviet Information Buro in response to the documentary collection Nazi–Soviet Relations, 1939–1941 (NSR), published by the US Department of State in January 1948.

NSR was a selection of diplomatic documents from captured German archives. It revealed the contacts between German and Soviet diplomats prior to the pact and the extensive co-operation between the two states after the agreement was signed. Most important, the book included the text of the non-aggression treaty’s secret additional protocol that divided Poland and the Baltic States into Soviet and German spheres of influence. Implicit in the selection and arrangement of the NSR documents was a narrative that Soviet negotiations with Britain and France for an anti-German front were a sham; far from being a desperate, last-minute gamble, the origins of the pact lay in a carefully prepared secret rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow.

Stalin couldn’t have been surprised by the Americans’ weaponising of the secret protocol. It had cropped up at the Nuremburg Trial in 1946 when the Nazis’ defence lawyers used it to show that if Germany was guilty of conspiracy to wage aggressive war then so, too, was the Soviet Union. Soviet jurists got the protocol excluded from evidence, but its text was discussed in open court by former German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who had signed the pact in Moscow in August 1939. It was also leaked and published in the American press.⁴¹

The Soviet response to this American propaganda strike was remarkably speedy. Nazi–Soviet Relations was immediately translated into Russian by TASS and sent to Stalin.⁴² By 3 February, Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky (the former prosecutorial star of the Moscow show trials) sent Stalin a detailed draft rebuttal prepared by a group of historians.⁴³ The pamphlet’s title was Otvet Klevetnikam (Reply to Slanderers), but Stalin changed this to Fal’sifikatory Istorii (Falsifiers of History), a phrase that he picked up from the Vyshinsky draft and decided to run with as a theme of the document. Stalin’s chosen subtitle was Istoricheskaya Spravka, which can be variously translated as historical information, reference, enquiry or survey. He also changed the subtitles of sections two and three of the brochure to reflect the idea that western policy was aimed at isolating the USSR. By the late 1940s, Europe was dividing and the cold war heating up. In Fulton, Missouri in March 1946, Churchill claimed that ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’. To Stalin, however, it was the west once again striving to isolate the Soviet Union from the rest of Europe, as Hitler had done in the 1930s.

In modern parlance, the basic thrust of Falsifiers of History was that NSR was fake news, a selective spin on Nazi documents that did not correspond to the truth.

Falsifiers’ four parts were published separately by Pravda, on 10, 12, 15 and 17 February. Stalin was in such a hurry that the first three parts appeared in the newspaper before he had even finished editing part four. All four parts were then republished and promoted by Soviet embassies across the world. Two million copies of the Russian-language brochure containing the complete text were printed, as were hundreds of thousands in English and other languages.⁴⁴