Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin edited the draft in detail and added about fifteen pages of his own text to the seventy-five pages of the Russian edition. Stalin’s additions were either handwritten or dictated to a member of his staff and then hand-corrected by him.⁴⁵ Many of his additions were rhetorical in character:

The slanderous claptrap that . . . the USSR should not have agreed to conclude a pact with the Germans can only be regarded as ridiculous. Why was it right for Poland . . . to conclude a non-aggression pact with the Germans in 1934, and not right for the Soviet Union. . . . Why was it right for Britain and France . . . to issue a joint declaration of non-aggression with the Germans in 1938, and not right for the Soviet Union. . . . Is it not a fact that of all the non-aggressive Great Powers in Europe, the Soviet Union was the last to conclude a pact with the Germans?⁴⁶

Falsifiers of History promulgated Moscow’s view of the Second World War’s origins and of Soviet–German relations after the signature of the non-aggression treaty in August 1939. Western culpability for the outbreak of war was its major theme. Western states had aided and abetted Nazi rearmament, appeased and encouraged Hitlerite aggression, and attempted to direct German expansion eastward, in the Soviet direction. By contrast, the Soviet Union strove to negotiate a great-power collective security front against Hitler, only to be thwarted by double-dealing Anglo-French appeasers who had no intention of allying themselves with the Soviet Union and indeed were all the while secretly negotiating with Berlin. Hence Moscow found itself faced with the unenviable choice of a temporary non-aggression pact with Berlin or being manoeuvred by the western powers into waging a war with Germany that the British and French did not want to fight themselves.

The USSR’s post-pact incorporation of Polish, Baltic, Finnish and Romanian territory was characterised as legitimate moves to build an ‘Eastern Front’ to defend against inevitable Nazi aggression against the Soviet Union – actions that pushed hundreds of miles to the west the line from which the Germans invaded Russia in summer 1941.

The booklet’s relatively frank account of Soviet policy during the period of the pact with Hitler was all Stalin’s doing. He wrote the first couple of pages of this section and framed Soviet policy in 1939–41 as the creation of an Eastern Front against German aggression – a narrative device he may well have derived from a speech of Churchill’s in October 1939, quoted with approval – in which his comrade-in-arms during the Second World War had said the Soviets were right to create such a front by invading eastern Poland to keep the Nazis out.⁴⁷

Later, in a passage that parodied Churchill’s iron curtain speech, Stalin wrote of Soviet expansion into the Baltic States and Romania:

In this way the formation of an ‘Eastern Front’ against Hitler aggression from the Baltic to the Black Sea was complete. The British and French ruling circles, who continued to abuse the USSR and call it an aggressor for creating an ‘Eastern Front’, evidently did not realise that the appearance of an ‘Eastern Front’ signified a radical turn in the development of the war – to the disfavour of the Hitler tyranny and to the favour of the victory of democracy.⁴⁸

Stalin’s next interpolation concerned the Soviet Union’s entry into what he called a ‘war of liberation’ against Hitler’s Germany. Here he contrasted President Harry Truman’s statement the day after the German invasion of the USSR with that of Churchill:

If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible. (Truman)

The Russian danger is our danger, and the danger of the United States . . . the cause of free men and free peoples fighting in every quarter of the globe. (Churchill)⁴⁹

Foreign Commissar Molotov’s trip to Berlin in November 1940 was one of the most contentious episodes of Soviet–German relations during the period of the pact. Molotov’s task was, if possible, to sign a new Nazi–Soviet pact with Hitler and Ribbentrop. In Falsifiers, Stalin presented it as a mission to ‘sound out’ and ‘probe’ Hitler’s intentions, ‘without having any intention of concluding an agreement of any kind with the Germans’.⁵⁰ This was only partly true. Stalin was willing to sign a new agreement if Soviet security could be guaranteed.⁵¹

The final words of the booklet were Stalin’s, too:

The falsifiers of history . . . have no respect for the facts – that is why they are dubbed falsifiers and slanderers. They prefer slander and calumny. But there is no reason to doubt that in the end these gentry will have to acknowledge a universally recognised truth – namely that slander and calumny perish, but the facts live on.⁵²