Secrets of the Second World War

G. Deborin's Secrets of the Second World War is a Soviet historian's account of the war's concealed diplomacy, and a more substantial book than its Cold War purpose might suggest.

Published by Progress Publishers in 1972, it argues a single clear thesis: that unjust wars require concealment and just ones do not. Much of what it assembles stands up. Its documentary chapters on Western pre-war diplomacy, its handling of the Anglo-French military negotiations of summer 1939, and its account of the Polish government's refusal of Soviet military assistance rest on a real case, one that even the Fourth International's own historian of the war, Ernest Mandel, granted in substance.

The chapter on the Polish campaign is the book's strongest, and for twenty pages it is a serious military narrative: Operation Himmler and the staged raid on Gleiwitz; the Schleswig-Holstein firing on Westerplatte and thirteen assaults repulsed; mobilisation ordered only on 31 August, leaving a third of the Polish army unready; the Poznan Army's counter-attack on the Bzura from 9 to 18 September, which broke two German divisions and drew the strike force away from the capital; the defence of Warsaw, its organisation by Stefan Starzynski, the workers' battalions formed from 5 September, and the German entry into the ruined city on 1 October; Hans Frank's diary and the order to devastate mercilessly. Deborin is careful to separate the Polish government, which he despises, from the population, whose resistance he documents from Polish sources including the London-published Polskie Sily Zbrojne.

This edition carries a new critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, which tests the book against its own standard, sets it beside the companion Progress volumes on the same question, and shows where and exactly how its argument breaks.