The State of the Literature

Born in newspaper and magazine articles of the late 1930s the orthodox understanding of World War II, was later confirmed by Stalin, only hours after the German invasion had began, and decorated with especially selected evidence, thanks to the exhausting work done by the Soviet propaganda machine. This understanding is another example of the Western failure to understand Stalin. An example of their reluctance to see and recognize that Stalin at the time, despite all possible negatives one could find in his system and his army, was independent and powerful enough to have his own foreign policy plans, which in no way depended on the opinion of Britain, France or Germany, as they were only given small and insignificant roles in Stalin’s war plans.

The orthodox thesis came about only naturally as a result of journalists’ honest try to come to possible explanation to Uncle Joe’s sudden and unexpected foreign policy maneuver which brought about the non-aggression treaty signed with Germany and consequently the beginning of what turned out to be the bloodiest war in human history. Their motives are clear and understandable, they lacked all the information, which we have today, and to their best knowledge they tried to offer possible speculations, which was fair enough.

This thesis is based on the western understanding of the situation then, which practically excluded any knowledge of the Soviet Union, unless we count the propaganda information found in the official Soviet publications, and later swollen by the western journalists; true, not without questioning it, but nevertheless swollen by them. Luckily for most of us, the Soviet Union collapsed, and in the process leaked some vital information of its bloody history. Based on this information, many historians wrote in-depth studies of this evil state.

Hence, the state of the literature today consists of protecting by any means this speculative thesis against the massive historic works on the Soviet Union released (especially) during the past 15 years, which not only question, but simply repute it. The political and career aspects involved unfortunately in this otherwise academic dispute forces many of the authors behind those studies to either refrain from commenting on this point, or to introduce some hilariously absurd conclusions at the end of their works, in order to try and link their results with the above described thesis, even though these conclusions contradict their own works!