Sleeping dogs lie through their teeth

In 1989, Vladimir Rezun, aka Viktor Suvorov, delivered an analytical tour de force.

He published the book Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War?, in which he answered that question by showing that Stalin was at least as culpable as Hitler.

What made Suvorov’s findings so astounding is that he had no access to any Soviet archives, indeed to the Soviet Union. A former GRU spy, he defected in 1978 and was living in Britain under a sort of witness protection programme.

Since Suvorov’s only sources were books and articles in the public domain, he didn’t have any new data at his disposal to challenge the Soviet version shared by Western historians: Stalin’s Russia was a peaceful state, whose army was designed strictly for defensive purposes.

That’s why on 23 August, 1939, Stalin (or, to be pedantic about it, Molotov) signed, and put his faith in, the Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler (or, to be pedantic about it, Ribbentrop). Yet on 22 June, 1941, Hitler perfidiously broke the Pact and attacked the Soviet Union, catching Stalin off-guard.

Suvorov hadn’t uncovered any dusty documents giving the lie to this received version. All he had to bring to bear on the task was his keen analytical brain, inside knowledge of the Soviet Union and its army, and intelligence training.

He showed that, rather than being unprepared for war, Stalin created the biggest and best-equipped military machine in history. His plan was to realise Lenin’s dream of world conquest by using Germany as what Lenin had called the ‘Icebreaker of the Revolution’.

To that end, Stalin formed an alliance with Hitler, the two predators agreeing to divide Europe between them. Immediately after the Pact was signed, Stalin claimed his contractual sphere of influence by invading the three Baltic Republics and the eastern parts of Poland and Romania, including Bukovina, which wasn’t mentioned in the Pact at all.

He also tried to grab Finland, but that tiny republic heroically repelled Stalin’s hordes, ceding some of its territory but retaining its sovereignty.

A week after the Pact, on 1 September, 1939, Nazi Germany attacked Poland from the west, and on 17 September the Red Army attacked her from the east. The two victorious predators held a joint victory parade in Brest. The Second World War started, with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as allies.

Yet Soviet gains fell far short of a world revolution, and Stalin’s plan had been from the beginning to build up his military muscle and overrun Germany, which by 1941 meant most of Europe.

Suvorov was the first analyst to show convincingly, nay irrefutably, that the Soviet war machine was designed, manned and equipped for offensive purposes. To accelerate that process, Stalin turned the country into a diabolical combination of boot camp, concentration camp and war factory. The Soviet Union became a single-industry country, churning out more (and better) tanks than the rest of the world combined, more warplanes than Germany had, more and better cannon.

The most telling give-away was the way the giant Red Army was deployed. Suvorov knew from his Military Academy education that an army planning to stop enemy aggression is always deployed some distance from the border, keeping it out of trouble’s way in the first days and giving it time to marshal its defences.

Conversely, an army planning an aggressive thrust is always deployed right at the border, to take time away from the other side. That’s how the Red Army was set up in June, 1941, but it was more than just its proximity to the border.

The massive attack force, the greatest in military history before or since, was arranged in two wedge-like salients, one in West Byelorussia, the other in the West Ukraine. The two wedges were aimed at the heart of Germany’s Poland, and from there Germany itself.

Such a formation had obvious advantages, all of them offensive, and disadvantages, all of them defensive. Offensively, an all-out attack from the Białystok and Lvov salients would be like two knives cutting into Germany. That deployment allowed the greatest concentration of forces on two strategic directions, which would eventually converge.

But defensively, such a formation was fraught with danger. If Germany delivered a pre-emptive strike, it was a relatively easy matter to strike between the two wedges, cut them off from the flanks and achieve a complete encirclement. That’s what happened on 22 June, 1941, when Hitler beat Stalin to the punch by a few days.

Since Suvorov published his book, Russian academic historians enjoyed the few years of relative freedom in the early ‘90s, when the doors of Soviet archives were open ajar and a few documents became available. ‘A few’ are the operative words, because access was granted merely to a fraction of one percent of archival material with its millions of documents.

Still, Russian historians managed to uncover several plans of strategic deployment written by Gen. Vasilevsky, head of the General Staff. They were all versions of the same plan, with only minor modifications. That was more or less the plan Suvorov had deduced.

Since then, historians like Mel’tyukhov and Solonin, along with dozens of others, have produced a whole library of books, proving Stalin’s aggressive plans beyond any reasonable doubt. One can safely say that Russian academic historians reached a consensus on this issue.

With the arrival of Putin, all scholarly research stopped, and history was again turned into propaganda. Remaining within that consensus became unsafe, and Russian historians had the choice of either toeing the new (Stalin’s) line or emigrating.

Yet Western historians, supposedly working in conditions of untethered freedom, never reached the same consensus. They continued to cling to Stalin’s version of why and by whom the Second World War started.

One exception that springs to mind is Joachim Hoffmann (d. 2002), a German historian, the academic director of the Military History Research Office of the German Armed Forces. Working mainly with German archives, he produced in 1995 the seminal work Stalin’s War of Extermination, in which he confirmed the version of his Russian colleagues.

Yet by and large Western scholars continue to reject the conclusions reached by Messrs Suvorov, Mel’tyukhov, Solonin, Hoffmann et al. Their counterarguments hinge on the absence of a single document signed by Stalin that ordered a strategic offensive and specified its date.

However, as we know, the absence of evidence isn’t the evidence of absence. Thus, the Red Army undeniably attacked Finland on 30 November, 1939. However, no single document for which Western historians pine existed there either.

Before they were put out of business (or in prison), Russian historians had been able to amass a vast corpus of evidence that collectively adds up to the truth of the Second World War. Yet Suvorov is the only one of them whose books have been published in the West, even though historical science has advanced no end since his Icebreaker.

Books of academic history, on the other hand, need to be peer-reviewed to be published, and Western historians have a vested interest in keeping the findings and conclusions of their Russian colleagues under wraps.

They sneer at Suvorov, that rank amateur who dares to write in a lively, colloquial style, eschewing the ponderous, involute jargon that alone can render a book credible to our historians. Moreover, Suvorov looked at the same data they knew – but had the audacity to analyse it more deeply to show the only way in which it could make sense.

If historians bending under the weight of their credentials and tenures couldn’t make heads or tails of that material, how come that charlatan could? And even academic historians mustn’t be published if their research has reached the same conclusions.

Show us that single document or shut up, such is the consensus of Western historians. What, you’ll do so when the Soviet archives have opened up? Fine, we’ll talk then.

These gentlemen ought to ask themselves a simple question. How is it that the Russians refuse to open up those archives even now, almost 80 years since the war ended and 100 years after Stalin took over from Lenin? Why are they guarding Soviet secrets so vigilantly?

After all, the Soviet Union doesn’t even exist any longer. What’s there to hide?

Let’s just say that the doors of those archives would have been flung wide open long ago if the documents inside confirmed the Stalin-Putin version of Soviet strategic plans. After all, the big war is the axis around which Putinism revolves. Long before Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine, Russian cities were awash with posters and bumper stickers, saying “We can do it again!”

It ought to be clear to anyone that archival secrets would confirm the conclusions of Suvorov and his academic followers – which is why they remain secret. Meanwhile, there’s only one possible reply to falsifiers of history who scream, “Shows us that single document proving that Stalin planned to conquer Europe”.

That reply is, “Show us a single document proving he didn’t.” Meanwhile, those archival sleeping dogs continue to lie — by omission.