A book called Secrets of the Second World War invites one obvious test, and this introduction is going to apply it. The book passes a good deal of it. Where it fails, it fails in a way the three companion volumes in this series did not, and the difference is worth setting out precisely, because it is the difference between a silence and a denial.
Deborin's premise is that unjust wars require concealment and just ones do not. He states it in the foreword and never departs from it: "Secret diplomacy is the resort of those who pursue unpopular policy and have reason to conceal their intentions." Against this he sets the Decree on Peace of October 1917 — "The Government abolishes secret diplomacy" — and draws the conclusion the whole book rests on: "Genuinely democratic policy must be open." He then makes the claim that a reader in 1972 could already check: "When after the war ended many secrets were revealed, it was discovered that the Soviet Union had done nothing in secret from its wartime allies."
The one secret agreement he concedes is one he defends. The Yalta decision that the USSR would enter the war against Japan was kept from the public for a year and then published; Deborin offers this as proof of the rule. It was in fact a secret protocol, signed at Yalta in February 1945 behind the backs of the Chinese government whose territory it disposed of. That he can present it as evidence of openness tells you what the word means here. Ernest Mandel, writing the Fourth International's own full-length account of the war fourteen years later, put the transaction the way Deborin cannot: the Soviet entry against Japan was made "in order to obtain assets which could influence the post-war arrangements in the Far East", and the assets held were South Sakhalin and the Kurils (The Meaning of the Second World War, Verso, 1986, ch. 16, "The Outcome"). Deborin's chapter and Mandel's describe the same instrument. Only one of them calls it a bargain.
Three books in this series have now been put to the same question, and each answered it differently.
Soviet Peace Efforts on the Eve of World War II (1973) was a collection of 350 documents that stopped on 1 September 1939, so that the Treaty of Non-Aggression of 23 August survived only at one remove — in a telegram from Tokyo and a reassurance to the Chinese ambassador. It falsified by terminus. Vilnis Sipols's Diplomatic Battles Before World War II (1982) reached the treaty and itemised it clause by clause — Articles I, II, III, ten years — and left the annex out; the word protocol occurs fourteen times in his book, every one of them an instrument the USSR proposed or signed openly. Oleg Rzheshevsky's World War II: Myths and the Realities (1984) does not contain the word protocol at all, in some ninety-two thousand words.
Deborin's book runs to roughly the same length as Rzheshevsky's. The word protocol occurs once. It is the instrument of German surrender signed at Rheims on 7 May 1945. Katyn, Bessarabia, Bukovina and deportation do not occur. Neither does Trotsky, purge, or 17 September.
But Deborin does something none of the other three does. He raises the question of the partition and answers it. Discussing Western reaction to the treaty, he writes that "West-German historian Kurt Assmann, for one, who endeavours to vindicate the nazi aggression and its abettors, swings out at the treaty and peddles the old lie about an alleged deal partitioning Poland."
The old lie. Not an omission, not a terminus, not a document left in the drawer: a positive denial, in the voice of a professional historian, in a book whose subject is the exposure of concealed agreements. The Secret Additional Protocol of 23 August 1939 divided Poland along the Narew, Vistula and San, placed Finland, Estonia and Latvia in the Soviet sphere and Lithuania in the German, and recorded Soviet interest in Bessarabia. The German copies were captured in 1945 and published in English by the US State Department in Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941 (1948), edited by Raymond Sontag and James Beddie — twenty-three years before this book was printed. Moscow's line, that they were a Western forgery, held until the commission chaired by Alexander Yakovlev reported and the Congress of People's Deputies condemned the protocols on 24 December 1989.
It is worth being exact about how Deborin's evasion differs from the standard one, because the standard description does not quite fit him. Writing in 1986, Mandel set out the charge in its usual form. The Pact, he wrote in ch. 2, "The Immediate Causes", "contained a secret protocol which, even before that conquest had commenced, implemented a fourth partition of Poland. Therewith Stalin gave the green light to Hitler's aggression, temporarily saving the Third Reich from the nightmare of a prolonged war on two fronts." And then the method: "Russian historiography continues to deny this — by keeping silent about the secret protocol." (Mandel dates the protocol to 27 August. It was signed on the 23rd; the error is his and should not be carried forward.)
Keeping silent is exactly what the three companion volumes do, and Mandel's sentence describes them without adjustment. It does not describe Deborin. He does not keep silent; he speaks, and what he says is that the thing is a fabrication invented by an apologist for Nazism. That is a harder position to hold and a more brittle one. Silence can be maintained indefinitely, because nothing in the surrounding text has to be consistent with it. A denial has to be defended, and the defence has to survive contact with the rest of the book.
Deborin's does not survive two pages.
What makes it collapse is that he supplies the refutation himself, twice, within thirty pages.
First, immediately after the sentence about the old lie, he quotes Pravda of 23 September 1939: "The Soviet Government received German assurances that the line formed by the rivers Tissa, Narev, Bug and Vistula would not be crossed." Second, describing the middle of September, he writes: "The Germans went beyond the line where they were to have stopped under a Soviet-German understanding. They crossed the Western Bug and San and entered the Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia."
There it is. A line of rivers, agreed with Germany in advance, at which German troops "were to have stopped" — inside Poland. Deborin needs this line, because it is the basis of his entire case that the Red Army moved in order to force the Wehrmacht back. He cannot have the argument without the agreement, and he cannot have the agreement without conceding the thing he has just called a lie. He calls Toynbee as a friendly witness in the same passage, quoting him that Stalin "had recovered for Russia much of the territory which she had lost in the days of her weakness" — an admission of territorial gain, offered as vindication.
Which is not to say that the case Deborin is defending has no substance in it. It does, and the hostile witness concedes most of it. Mandel grants the premise outright: "Considering the wavering (to say the least) of the French and British governments over military collaboration in the event of a German aggression against Poland, the Soviet government had every right to ensure its immediate safety in case of a German conquest of that country." He grants Deborin's point about the Polish government too, and more bluntly than Deborin dares: the Polish regime's refusal of Soviet military assistance, driven by "class hostility of the Polish landlords and capitalists towards the Soviet Union" and "class fear of the Red Army", "transformed the military negotiations between the Western allied general staffs and the Soviet government in the summer of 1939 into a farce" (ch. 10, "The Opening Gambit in Europe"). A reader who thinks the anti-Stalinist case rests on pretending the Anglo-French and Polish governments negotiated in good faith should read that chapter and abandon the idea.
The disagreement is about what follows. For Deborin, the bad faith of the others licenses the treaty and everything in it. For Mandel it explains Stalin's calculation without excusing its content: "Stalin preferred to ally himself with the likely victor rather than with the probable victim... By acting thus, he undoubtedly helped Hitler commence hostilities by invading Poland." The right to secure the USSR did not require a line drawn through Poland in advance, and it is the line, not the non-aggression treaty, that Deborin has to deny and cannot do without.
The chapter title promises the hardest section in the book, and for twenty pages it delivers a serious military narrative: Operation Himmler and the staged raid on Gleiwitz; the Schleswig-Holstein firing on Westerplatte and thirteen assaults repulsed; the mobilisation ordered only on 31 August, leaving a third of the Polish army unready; the counter-attack of the Poznań Army on the Bzura from 9 to 18 September, which broke two German divisions and pulled the strike force away from the capital; the defence of Warsaw from 8 to 28 September, its organisation by Stefan Starzyński, the workers' battalions formed from 5 September, the German entry into the ruined city on 1 October; Hans Frank's diary on the order "to devastate them mercilessly"; more than six million Polish dead. Deborin is not sneering at Poland. He is careful to separate the government, which he despises, from the population, whose resistance he documents from Polish sources including the London-published Polskie Siły Zbrojne.
And the Red Army is not in this section. The Soviet entry into Poland has been moved out of "The Polish Tragedy" into the section that follows it, which is titled "The First Nazi Retreat." The date 17 September appears nowhere. The Red Army does not invade Poland or partition it; it advances, and the Germans withdraw behind the agreed line, and this is presented — quoting the Soviet military historian D. Proektor — as "the first order of retreat issued by the Hitler Wehrmacht in the Second World War," and as kilometres that saved lives across Europe. The chapter heading tells you which country's tragedy is being narrated and which country's is not.
Here Mandel's second charge lands squarely, and this time without adjustment. Soviet historiography, he wrote, "draws a veil over Stalin's formal opposition to the survival of any Polish state", and the consequences "for the Polish people's attitude towards the USSR remain disastrous to this day" (ch. 2). The veil in Deborin is a chapter division. He has written twenty careful pages on the destruction of the Polish state, sourced partly from the London Poles' own official history, and has then placed the second army that entered Poland that month outside the chapter about Poland. The same movement in Mandel's telling reads: "Stalin too lent a helping hand by cutting off the retreat road for the Polish army when it finally decided to withdraw, and by occupying the Polish Ukraine, thereby adding fuel to Polish anti-Russian sentiment" (ch. 10). Mandel is not merely assigning blame differently. He is describing an event — a retreat route closed — that has no place at all in Deborin's account, because in Deborin's account the Red Army arrives after the fighting it might have affected, into territory the narrative has quietly emptied.
The same section then handles the Baltic and Finland by an elegant compression. The mutual assistance treaties are dated accurately — Estonia 28 September 1939, Latvia 5 October, Lithuania 10 October — and are said to have "prevented seizure of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania by Hitler Germany." What is not here: the ultimata of June 1940, the single-list elections of July, the admission of the three republics to the USSR in August 1940, the mass deportations of June 1941. The Baltic states enter the book as sovereign signatories and leave it as Soviet republics, with nothing in between. Finland gets a clause: the Soviet-Finnish war is the fault of "certain Finnish groups, but also their Western abettors." The Soviet attack of 30 November 1939, the shelling at Mainila that preceded it, the Terijoki government under Kuusinen, the expulsion of the USSR from the League of Nations on 14 December 1939, and Soviet dead running well past 126,000, are not mentioned. Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, taken on a Soviet ultimatum of 26 June 1940, are not in the book at all.
They were not omissions anyone else had to make. Mandel lists the same acquisitions in a single clause, as the frontier Stalin spent the first eighteen months of the German war trying to get Churchill to recognise: "the Soviet frontiers of 1941, i.e. recognition of what had been obtained through the Hitler-Stalin pact: the Baltic States, the Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia as well as Bessarabia and the Northern Bukovina" (ch. 17). The four territories Deborin either compresses or excludes are, in Mandel's sentence, one list with one origin. That is the whole disagreement in miniature: it is not that Deborin is unaware of the acquisitions — his own book records the treaties that began the process — but that he cannot let them be described together, because described together they name the instrument he has called a lie.
The strongest chapter is the third, on Barbarossa, and it contains the book's sharpest self-inflicted wound.
Deborin prints the German directive on concealing the Barbarossa preparations, which instructed that the eastern deployment "is to be portrayed as the greatest deceptive action in the history of wars, aimed at covering up final preparations for the invasion of Britain." He describes the Germans selling the USSR samples of tanks and aircraft as part of the cover. He notes that Ribbentrop's offer in November 1940 that the Soviet Union join the Axis was itself camouflage. And then he writes that despite all of it the deception failed, because Richard Sorge signalled from Tokyo on 15 June 1941 not only the strength and direction of the attack but its date: "The war will begin June 22".
The section is called "Perfidy and Surprise." Having established that Moscow was told the date a week in advance, Deborin never asks how the surprise happened. The answer is given entirely in terms of German advantages — a militarised economy, the resources of occupied Europe, combat experience, 190 divisions, superiority of 1.8 to 1 in men. He then quotes, approvingly, a TASS statement dismissing Western reports of Soviet troop concentrations as "a figment of the author's imagination," and presents the issuing of such denials as prudence. There is no Stalin who disregarded warnings, and no destruction of the Red Army's command in 1937–38, in which three of the five Marshals of the Soviet Union were shot, Tukhachevsky among them in June 1937. The words purge and NKVD do not occur in this book.
The answer Deborin will not write is given in a page of Mandel's second chapter, and it is worth setting the two side by side, because Mandel is not guessing at motives but describing military administration. "The Red Army's complete lack of readiness in 1941 was the direct result of Stalin's disastrous misunderstanding of the political situation in Europe and of Hitler's — i.e. German imperialism's — intentions in the coming war." Tukhachevsky, as First Deputy Commissar for Defence, had argued that German aggression would come in the East; Stalin "was convinced that if the Soviet Union behaved 'correctly' Hitler would not attack". Mandel then names the specific administrative acts: the possibility of near-term war with Germany "firmly suppressed" at the chiefs of staff war study conference of December 1940, and the "State Frontier Defence Plan 1941" issued that April, with which the USSR entered the war, committing the Red Army to hold the forward frontiers and paying "minimal attention to strategic defence". His summary of the two processes running against each other inside the Soviet Union is the sentence Deborin's chapter is built to avoid: Stalin's purges and diplomacy "decapitated the Red Army, disorganised the defences of the country, delivered Poland and Europe to Hitler, and facilitated the Nazi attack on the USSR", while industrialisation under the Plan "enabled the Soviet Union to survive in the end". Deborin has the second half of that sentence, at length and well. He does not have the first half, and the missing half is precisely what would explain the surprise he has spent a chapter establishing should not have occurred. Khrushchev's name does not occur. Neither does the phrase cult of the individual. Stalin appears ninety-odd times, almost entirely as a diplomatic actor at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam — competent, unremarkable, uncriticised and uncredited. This is the Brezhnev-era settlement made visible: not the genius-leader of 1948 restored, but the 1956 indictment quietly withdrawn, with the Party substituted for the man.
A reader who takes this book for worthless will be badly served, and will be caught out.
The central thesis — that Britain, France and the United States hoped to turn German expansion eastward, and that Munich was the operative act — is substantially sound and is not sustained by assertion. Deborin builds it from Western material: Feis, Michael Freund, the Documents on British Foreign Policy, the Parliamentary Debates, the memoirs of German commanders read in German. He dates the Anglo-German declaration to 30 September 1938 and the Franco-German to 6 December 1938, correctly, and reads them as what they were, guarantees against westward attack purchased at Czechoslovakia's expense. Historians who share none of his politics — Michael Jabara Carley in 1939: The Alliance That Never Was (1999), Geoffrey Roberts across his work on Soviet foreign policy — have argued a version of the same case from wider evidence.
It should be said that Mandel accepts this thesis only in part, and the qualification is instructive rather than damaging. He agrees that "some of the 'appeasers' played with the idea of diverting the aggressive dynamic of German imperialism against the USSR", but holds that they did so "for a short time" and abandoned it after the occupation of Prague in March 1939, once it was clear that a German conquest of Eastern Europe "would give him formidable strength to strike against the British Empire". Chamberlain's policy, on this reading, was "an illusory and foolhardy attempt to outmanoeuvre Hitler, not an acceptance of a Europe dominated by Berlin" — a calculation about rearmament timetables rather than a plan to aim Germany eastward, and the Chamberlain–Churchill quarrel "a conflict over the most effective way to preserve the Empire and to oppose Hitler: now or later" (ch. 2). Deborin's version is stronger and flatter than the evidence carries: he needs British policy to be a design, because a design is what justifies the treaty that answered it. What survives the correction is still substantial — that Munich was the operative act, that the guarantees of September and December 1938 were bought at Czechoslovakia's expense, and that London and Paris were not serious about a Soviet alliance in 1939.
His account of the Warsaw Rising of 1944 is more useful than Rzheshevsky's, who simply left it out. Deborin covers it, and the coverage is hostile: the Home Army leadership acted politically to forestall the Left, the Soviet government called it "a reckless and fearful gamble," and the failure is laid on the insurgents' refusal to co-operate. Read it against his own figures, though, and the section indicts itself. He records that Soviet aircraft flew "2,243 supply missions" — beginning on 14 September, six weeks after the rising began on 1 August, and after Soviet troops had reached the approaches to Praga on 31 July. More than 200,000 people were killed. The arithmetic is his.
Mandel's account of the same weeks, in ch. 15, "The Final Onslaught", disputes Deborin at the two points where Deborin's version is politically load-bearing. The first is who rose. The Armia Krajowa, Mandel writes, was "dominated by the social-democratic PPS rather than by bourgeois reactionaries" — not the class enemy of Deborin's telling, and the insurgents were "spurred on by the ambiguous appeals of Red Army commanders", a detail Deborin's narrative has no room for. The second is the halt: "Stalin blocked all help to Warsaw, letting the Germans do the dirty work of liquidating the Armija Krajowa he would otherwise have had to do himself." Mandel is not gentle with the rising's leaders either — he calls it "based upon a doubly-incorrect assumption", about Soviet help and about German weakness on the Vistula, and notes that Stalin had promised that help to Mikołajczyk on the first day and repeated it to Churchill by telegram on 15 August 1944. That the rising was a political act badly judged, and that Stalin let it be destroyed, are not competing findings. Deborin has the first and needs the second not to exist. The Red Army's halt at the Vistula, Mandel records, lasted five months.
The military and economic chapters are professional work. The account of the evacuation of industry eastward, the production figures, the partisan chapters with their named commanders and specific operations, the treatment of Bagration — these rest on the six-volume official History of the Great Patriotic War, cited on nearly every page, and on the Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal. They are Soviet in framing and largely reliable in substance. And the book's insistence that the Soviet-German front was the decisive theatre is simply true, and remains true.
Nor is Deborin wrong to be impatient with the school that treats the postwar map as a diplomatic gift. Mandel's answer to it is the same as his: "Was this outcome decided at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam? Was it, in other words, the product of diplomatic horsetrading, 'mistakes' or even 'betrayals'? To a large extent it was determined on the battlefield" — the division of Europe being "an inevitable result of the Soviet Union bearing the brunt of the war against Hitler" (ch. 16). When German politicians blamed unconditional surrender for the Red Army's arrival in Berlin, Mandel called it "pure demagogy", and pointed out that at the beginning of 1945 the Wehrmacht still had 147 divisions in the West and Italy against 185 in the East. Deborin, arguing against the same people in 1971, was arguing on this point for something true. Where the two part company is on what was decided by the bureaucracy that won. Mandel's Eastern Europe is remade from outside — "the victory of the social revolution conducted through a military-bureaucratic apparatus instead of authentic popular revolutions" (ch. 16), a "'revolution from above', with little or no significant popular revolution" imposed "through military-bureaucratic compulsion" (ch. 17). The "ugly political legacy" that bequeathed, Mandel writes, "has profoundly marked the post-war situation, not only in this part of Europe, but throughout the world". That legacy is the subject of Mandel's last three chapters and of none of Deborin's.
Note also what he does not falsify: the extermination camps. The foreword's opening target is Udo Walendy's Wahrheit für Deutschland (Vlotho, 1965) and the neo-Nazi collection Europa in Flammen, quoted denying that Dachau had gas chambers before May 1945. On Holocaust denial in the Federal Republic of 1971, Deborin was right, early, and better sourced than most.
Which brings us to why the book exists, and the answer is neither Washington nor Peking. Peking appears once, as a place the Japanese held; Mao is absent; the Sino-Soviet split has left no mark at all. The United States and Britain are attacked steadily but conventionally, for Munich, for the delayed second front, for the Rheims negotiations and the Bernadotte channel.
The live target is Bonn. West German historians are named, quoted and rebutted throughout — Assmann, Walendy, Tippelskirch, Görlitz, Jacobsen — and the foreword gives a periodisation of West German historiography, dividing it at about 1965 into a phase that blamed Hitler alone and a phase that exonerates Hitler too, with the National Democratic Party as the agent of the shift. The NPD, founded in 1964, had entered seven state parliaments and had come close to the Bundestag in 1969. This book was published in English in 1971 and reprinted in 1972: the years of the Moscow Treaty of 12 August 1970, the Warsaw Treaty of 7 December 1970 with its recognition of the Oder–Neisse line, the Four Power Agreement on Berlin of September 1971, and the Bundestag ratification fight of May 1972. Deborin's chapter on the new Poland quotes the July 1944 Manifesto of the Polish Committee of National Liberation on the return of the "Western lands, once seized by German conquerors."
That is the commission. This is a brief for the finality of the 1945 settlement in Europe, addressed to Western readers at the moment when the Federal Republic was being asked to accept it, and armed against the German revanchist right. It is détente-era work in the exact sense: the argument for the postwar borders had to be won in English, in front of an audience that was being told by a noisy minority in Bonn that the borders were provisional and the guilt was disputed. Deborin's case against that minority is strong. The price of making it was that the one Soviet document which the German right could quote against him had to be declared a fabrication.
It was not a price that had to be paid, and the demonstration is Mandel, who defends the Oder–Neisse frontier while conceding what Deborin cannot. The expulsion of eleven million Germans from East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, Poland and Czechoslovakia he calls "an indefensible act" — and immediately adds that it was "not just Stalin's, but an all-Allied, answer to the post-Versailles irredentism of the German minorities in Eastern Europe, as well as a precondition for the adoption of the Oder-Neisse frontier for Poland" (ch. 17, "The Aftermath"). That is a harder sentence to write than anything in Deborin, and it gives the revanchist right nothing, because it refuses the trade the right is offering — the trade in which admitting one crime obliges you to reopen the whole settlement. Deborin took the trade seriously enough to refuse the admission. A polemicist more confident of his ground would have conceded the protocol and kept the border.
It was made while the war was on, from the Soviet Union's own figures.
The breathing-space argument — Deborin's claim that the treaty gave "the Soviet Union a distinct gain in time" which "largely predetermined the favourable outcome" of the war — was answered by John G. Wright in "How Stalin Cleared Road for Hitler," Fourth International, vol. 2 no. 9, November 1941. Wright worked from Malenkov's report to the Eighteenth Party Conference of February 1941, printed in Pravda of 16 February 1941, which disclosed that the utilisation of Soviet cement capacity had fallen from 88 per cent in 1936 to 65 per cent in 1939 and 64 per cent in 1940, and that the timber industry was running at 41 per cent. Wright's conclusion was that "Soviet production had been not only stagnating but declining catastrophically throughout the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact." He followed it a month later with "Stalin's Pre-War Purge," Fourth International, vol. 2 no. 10, December 1941, tabulating from Pravda the commissariats reorganised between February and May 1941 — an average, he calculated, of about one a day through March — and noting that at the Conference itself six members of the Central Committee, Litvinov among them, fifteen alternates and nine members of the Auditing Commission were expelled for "incompetence."
The judgement can be argued with. The evidence is the Soviet party press, six months before Wright wrote. What cannot be argued is that the question Deborin's Barbarossa chapter refuses to ask had been asked publicly, from official sources, thirty years before he wrote.
Trotsky had written on the Pact within weeks of its signature, most fully in "The USSR in War" of 25 September 1939, collected in In Defense of Marxism; the argument split the Fourth International's American section and was conducted in public while the events were happening. And the specific charge Deborin calls "the old lie" was conceded in Moscow within two decades of this printing.
The mature statement of the case came in 1986, in Mandel's The Meaning of the Second World War, and it is the book to read against this one — not because it is the opposite of Deborin, but because it is not. Mandel too holds German imperialism overwhelmingly responsible for the war; too rejects A. J. P. Taylor's attempt to spread the guilt; too regards the Eastern Front as decisive and the Yalta-betrayal literature as demagogy; too grants the USSR the right to secure itself in 1939. He simply declines to buy any of it with a falsification. His formulation of how the purchase is normally made — that Russian historiography denies the protocol "by keeping silent" — turns out to describe three of the four Soviet volumes in this series exactly and this one not at all, and the exception is more revealing than the rule. Deborin was the only one of the four who thought the question worth answering. Answering it is what exposed him.
Take the Munich chapter, the military narrative, the economic chapters and the partisan chapters as the work of a competent historian using the best Soviet sources available to him, and do not dismiss them; the case against Chamberlain and Daladier assembled here is largely the case a serious historian would assemble now.
Then read the foreword and the section on the treaty together, in that order, and watch what happens. A man who has just written that democratic policy must be open, and that the Soviet Union did nothing in secret, denies the existence of a document, and then, needing its contents for his next argument, describes the river line it drew and the point at which the Germans "were to have stopped." He was not careless. He was a professional, and the seam is where the permission ran out.
Deborin published this under his own name and cited his own earlier Progress volume, The Second World War, in the footnotes. He was not an anonymous committee. The chapter he could not write is the one the book is named after.