The central claim of this book is true, and it should be conceded at the outset, because everything else about the book depends on what is built on top of it.
Rzheshevsky's case is that the Soviet-German front was the decisive theatre of the Second World War and that Western popular history has systematically shrunk it. He states it in figures: the Eastern front "tied down up to 70 per cent of Nazi Germany's divisions"; "Out of every four soldiers of the Hitler Wehrmacht an average of three were engaged in the fighting on the Eastern front and only one on the Western"; the Western allies destroyed 176 divisions, "or under one-third of the total of routed divisions of Nazi Germany and her allies"; and "German casualties on the Soviet-German front constituted more than 73 per cent of its total losses in the Second World War." These proportions are broadly right, and they are still right in the current literature. So is the accompanying claim about the American contribution — that lend-lease "amounted to only 4 per cent of Soviet wartime production" — in the aggregate, at least, and Rzheshevsky supports it with Western witnesses rather than Soviet assertion. He quotes Harry Hopkins in Moscow in May 1945 saying that the Soviet defeat of Hitler "had been done by the heroism and blood of the Russian Army," and Alan Clark's judgement that Western aid was "marginal, not critical," and a Time-Life history conceding that in the winter of 1941–1942 "it was the Russians, and they alone, who bore the brunt of the German aggression."
A Western reader in 1984 who thought the war had been won at El Alamein and Normandy needed this book, or something like it. That the reader's own historiography had earned the correction is the strongest card Rzheshevsky holds, and he plays it well.
He was, by the standards of the Progress list, a serious man. Oleg Aleksandrovich Rzheshevsky was a professional military historian at the Academy of Sciences, a specialist in the wartime alliance and in Western writing about the war; after 1991 he was among those who published Soviet diplomatic records of the Anglo-Soviet negotiations that could not have been printed while he wrote this. The scholarship on display here is not fake. He reads Andreas Hillgruber and Gerhard Weinberg in German and English, cites the British Cabinet papers in the Public Record Office by file number, uses Léon Noël's 1979 Warsaw memoir and André Beaufre's account of the 1939 military talks, quotes Alexander Werth, Telford Taylor, Michael Howard and Gabriel Kolko. He distinguishes between Western historians he considers honest and those he does not. Whatever else this book is, it was written by somebody who had read the other side.
The date on the spine is 1984, and the book announces its occasion in its last chapter and its conclusion. It quotes the CPSU Central Committee plenum of February 1984 from Pravda of 14 February. It lists what "The Reagan Administration which took office in 1981" has done: the MX, the neutron warheads for Lance, the Trident boats, the B-1, and "completed the testing of new nuclear-missile systems — Pershing-2 medium-range missiles and cruise missiles — and began deploying them in Europe." It reprints, at length, the 1949 American contingency plan Dropshot, stage by stage, down to the 300 atomic bombs in thirty days.
That is the commission. This is a book about 1939–1945 written for the euromissile crisis, published in English on the eve of the fortieth anniversary of victory, and aimed at the Western European peace movement, which in 1983–84 was the largest mass movement in Western Europe and the most important audience Soviet foreign policy had. Its argument is a syllogism: the Soviet Union bore the war; therefore the Soviet Union wants peace; therefore the "myth of a Soviet threat" is imperialist propaganda; therefore oppose the deployments. The first premise is true, and the book is honest about it in a way that makes the rest go down more easily. The final chapter is titled "The New Balance of Forces and the Myth of the Soviet Threat." Afghanistan, where the Soviet army had then been fighting for four years, appears in this book only as a place Hitler wanted to capture after Barbarossa.
The companion volume in this series, Soviet Peace Efforts on the Eve of World War II, falsified by terminus: it printed 350 documents and stopped on 1 September 1939, so that the Treaty of Non-Aggression of 23 August and its Secret Additional Protocol survived only at one remove, in a Japanese press report and a reassurance to the Chinese ambassador. A document collection can do that. A book whose entire declared subject is the correction of Western myths cannot. Rzheshevsky has to reach the Pact, and he does.
Here is the whole of it. "In a situation which had taken such a menacing turn for the USSR the Soviet government decided to accept Germany's proposal to sign a non-aggression treaty." It was a "forced measure" which enabled the USSR "to gain almost two years of respite for strengthening its defences, and to split up the anti-Soviet front of the imperialist powers." That is the argument, and as far as it goes it is a real argument, made by non-Soviet historians too. What is not here is the date, the signatories, and the Protocol.
The word protocol does not occur in this book. Not once, in some ninety-two thousand words about the origins and conduct of the Second World War, written by a specialist, in the year 1984. It is not denounced as a forgery, which was the standard Soviet position and would at least have constituted an argument. It is not mentioned. The State Department had published the German copies in Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941 in 1948; Rzheshevsky elsewhere shows himself perfectly willing to answer Western documentary publications he dislikes. Here he does not answer.
The gap is made conspicuous by what surrounds it. This book contains two set-piece denunciations of spheres-of-influence diplomacy. It reports that at the Berlin talks of November 1940 the Germans offered the USSR a share of the Axis programme, and that "the Soviet delegation firmly rejected the proposal of the Nazi leaders," refusing even "to discuss the Nazi programme of 'delineation of the spheres of influence'." And it devotes several pages to Churchill's percentages proposal of 9 October 1944, quoting the Soviet minute to show that "Churchill's contention that Stalin had consented to such a partition is far from truth." A book that twice makes the refusal to divide Europe into spheres the proof of Soviet good faith cannot mention the document by which Europe was divided into spheres. So it does not.
The consequences follow. The Red Army's entry into Poland on 17 September 1939 is not narrated. In the section headed "Western Allies Betray Poland," the German invasion is described in detail down to the encirclement of Warsaw on 10 September, and then: "Early in October all combat operations on the territory of Poland ceased." The event is present only as an accusation to be rebutted — the West German official history is scolded for writing "about an alleged Germano-Soviet attack on Poland in September 1939," and Solidarity is accused of interpreting "the liberation of Western Byelorussia and the Western Ukraine as Soviet annexation." What happened is given in a single sentence, and it is a sentence about restitution: "In 1939–1940, this historical injustice was corrected, and the people of Western Byelorussia, the Western Ukraine, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina rejoined the peoples of the USSR."
The Winter War is handled in a footnote. "In November 1939, the reactionary government of Finland, prodded by the imperialist powers, initiated an armed conflict" — Finland is the aggressor; the Soviet attack of 30 November, the shelling at Mainila that preceded it, the puppet government installed at Terijoki, the expulsion of the USSR from the League of Nations on 14 December, and Soviet losses of something over 126,000 dead by the most-used Russian figures and higher by others, are absent. In the main text the war appears as an administrative act: "The signing of a peace treaty which ended the Finnish-Soviet armed conflict in 1940 strengthened the security of Leningrad and the northwestern borders of the USSR."
The Baltic states enter in the passive voice. The Supreme Soviet in August 1940 "acceded to the request of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to be admitted to the USSR," their peoples having found "salvation from capitalist oppression and fascist menace" in what the book calls voluntary accession. The ultimata of June 1940, the single-list elections of July, the deportations of June 1941: absent. So is the word deportation altogether.
And then there is Katyn, where the book does not omit and does not evade, but argues at length, and is simply and knowingly wrong. Rzheshevsky devotes a section of the chapter "Historians vs. History" to "the murder of 11,000 Polish army officers who had been massacred by the Nazis in the autumn of 1941, in Katyn Forest near Smolensk." The charge against the NKVD was "lifted bodily out of a forgery" put about by Goebbels in spring 1943 to split the alliance before Kursk. He quotes the Soviet denial in Pravda of 16 April 1943, Stalin's letter to Churchill alleging "contact and collusion" between Berlin and the Sikorski government, sceptical questions from The Times of 28 April 1943, and at length the findings of the Burdenko commission as entered at Nuremberg: "the time of the shooting was autumn 1941"; the Germans used "a pistol shot in the nape of the neck." He notes that Alexander Werth reported the Poles "had been murdered with German bullets."
Every element of this is now known to be false, and the falsity was reconstructed from Soviet archives. The Politburo ordered the shooting of the Polish prisoners on 5 March 1940 on a memorandum from Beria; some 21,857 officers, police and officials were killed in the spring of 1940 at Katyn, Kalinin and Kharkov; Gorbachev acknowledged NKVD responsibility on 13 April 1990 and the execution order was published in 1992. Two things should be said about the section as it stands. First, the German ammunition proves nothing: German-manufactured pistol cartridges were widely available in the USSR, and the point was made against the Soviet case at the time. Second, and more telling for a scholar of Rzheshevsky's competence, the Burdenko findings were indeed submitted at Nuremberg as Soviet exhibit USSR-54 — and the tribunal, having heard the evidence, left Katyn out of its judgment. He cites the volume. He does not mention the outcome.
What is absent altogether is as revealing. There is no Trotsky in this book, and no Trotsky in its name index. There is no purge of the Soviet officer corps in 1937–38, in which three of the five Marshals of the Soviet Union did not survive; the words repression and unprepared do not appear. There is a table of the correlation of forces on 22 June 1941 and a chapter on "the factor of surprise," but no question is asked about why the surprise was possible, no mention of the warnings that were disregarded, and no mention of the TASS communiqué of 14 June 1941 dismissing rumours of war. The disaster of 1941 is attributed entirely to German numbers and German treachery. Stalin appears in these pages as a correspondent of Churchill and Roosevelt and as the man who annotated a report on German aircraft; he is never a cause of anything that went wrong. Nor is there any account of how the governments of liberated Eastern Europe were formed. The Warsaw Rising of August 1944 is not in the book.
Finally, the cost. "The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union took a toll of more than 20 million people killed." That was the official figure from 1961 until the Gorbachev period; the state commission of the early 1990s put total Soviet war dead at about 26.6 million, of whom perhaps 8.6 to 11.4 million were military, and the range is still argued. The book that most insists on the scale of Soviet sacrifice was understating it by a quarter, because the true figure implied questions about how the war had been conducted.
Not everything unwelcome here is falsification, and the distinction matters. On lend-lease the aggregate proportion is defensible; what the chapter avoids is composition. Roughly four hundred thousand American trucks and jeeps — a figure the book itself gives — meant that the Red Army of 1944 moved on Studebakers, and the same is true of aviation fuel, explosives, field radios, railway rolling stock and canned rations. A supply that is four per cent of everything can be decisive if it is the four per cent you cannot make. On the second front the book's complaint is legitimate: the Western allies did undertake a landing in 1942 and did not deliver it, Churchill did suspend the Arctic convoys in July 1942, and Harriman's memoirs are quoted accurately on Roosevelt's hope of keeping American ground forces off the continent. The delay is not in dispute. Whether it was deliberate is contested — and, as we shall see, one of the most hostile readers Rzheshevsky could have had thought it was.
Two years after this book appeared in English, Verso published Ernest Mandel's The Meaning of the Second World War (1986). Mandel was the best-known Marxist economist in Western Europe and a leader of the Fourth International — that is, of the movement Soviet historiography had spent fifty years insisting did not exist except as a police fiction. His book is short, argued from the same Western literature Rzheshevsky read, and it is the closest thing there is to a controlled experiment: the same war, the same decade, the same intended audience of the European left, written from the tradition Stalinism suppressed. Read side by side with Myths and the Realities it does something more useful than refute it. It concedes Rzheshevsky's case where the evidence supports it, and convicts him precisely where he is silent.
Take the silence first, because Mandel names the technique. In chapter 2, "The Immediate Causes" (pp. 22–34), he sets out the Pact in a single paragraph that begins by granting the Soviet government its defence. "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." That is Rzheshevsky's own argument, put by a Trotskyist, without sarcasm. And then: "But the Hitler-Stalin pact 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. Russian historiography continues to deny this — by keeping silent about the secret protocol." (Mandel's next clause misdates the document to 27 August 1939; it was signed on the 23rd, and the slip is his, not his source's.) He adds: "Likewise, it draws a veil over Stalin's formal opposition to the survival of any Polish state."
The sentence is worth reading twice, because it is a description of a method rather than a complaint about a conclusion. Denial by keeping silent. It is what Rzheshevsky does, and it is not the same thing as the older Soviet line, which called the protocol a forgery and could at least be argued with. Mandel, writing in Brussels with no access to Soviet archives, was able to say in 1986 what the archives confirmed in 1992 — and he did not need the archives, because the shape of the omission was itself the evidence. That is the standard against which this book must be read. It was met, in public, by a contemporary, in a book on the same shelf.
The same paragraph closes on the consequence Rzheshevsky cannot admit: "The consequences of this cynical realpolitik for the Polish people's attitude towards the USSR remain disastrous to this day." Chapter 10, "The Opening Gambit in Europe" (pp. 99–105), spells out what "the liberation of Western Byelorussia and the Western Ukraine" looked like from the other side of the Bug: "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." Mandel's judgement of the calculation is one line: "In these circumstances, Stalin preferred to ally himself with the likely victor rather than with the probable victim." And in chapter 17, "The Aftermath" (pp. 159–168), the territories Rzheshevsky says "rejoined the peoples of the USSR" by the correction of a historical injustice are described flatly as "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."
Chapter 2 also supplies the missing chapter of Rzheshevsky's 1941. Where this book explains the catastrophe of 22 June by German numbers and German treachery, Mandel writes that 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," and that "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." Chapter 5, "Strategy" (pp. 55–65), attributes the state of the armed forces to "Stalin's criminal purge of the Red Army, which compounded the effects of the bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy and society," and disposes of the retrospective claim that the retreats of 1941–42 had been a plan: "At the end of the war crude attempts were made to present the Red Army's defeats of 1941–42 as the products of a strategy of calculated retreat, deliberately drawing the Wehrmacht into the Russian interior only to destroy it in a series of counteroffensives. There is no substance whatsoever in such claims." Rzheshevsky does not make that particular claim. He makes the deeper one — that there is no question here to answer.
On the spheres of influence, Mandel simply reports what Rzheshevsky denies. Chapter 16, "The Outcome" (pp. 150–158): "At the Moscow Conference of October 1944 Churchill proposed to Stalin that the Soviet bureaucracy and British imperialism enjoy equal influence there: 50%–50%" — Yugoslavia — and Greece was the case where the bargain held, "despite Stalin's compliance with Churchill's demand that it be completely assigned to the British sphere of influence." Nor is the Warsaw Rising missing from Mandel, as it is from this book. Chapter 15, "The Final Onslaught" (pp. 139–149), gives the rising its causes, its two miscalculations and its outcome, and one sentence on the Soviet decision: "And 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."
Now the other side of the ledger, which matters more than it may look. On the claim Rzheshevsky exists to make, Mandel is not merely in agreement but more emphatic. The whole post-war settlement, he writes in chapter 16, was not made at the conference table: the division of Europe "was clearly contrary to long-term interests of British and American imperialism. Yet it was an inevitable result of the Soviet Union bearing the brunt of the war against Hitler." He treats the standard Western complaint that Eisenhower and Montgomery handed Germans to "Soviet totalitarianism" in three words — "This is pure demagogy" — and answers it with the fact that a large German army was fighting in the West to the last, citing Diana Shaver Clemens for 185 German divisions on the Eastern front at the beginning of 1945 against 147 in the West and Italy. That figure is less lopsided than Rzheshevsky's three-in-four, and it is drawn from the very end of the war, when the proportion had swung furthest west; the two are not in conflict, and neither historian is inventing.
On the second front Mandel goes past Rzheshevsky rather than short of him. Chapter 11, "The Unfolding World Battle" (pp. 106–112), makes the delay a deliberate policy and says so in terms no Progress editor would have dared print in reverse: Britain and America offered material aid "to ensure that the USSR would bear the brunt of German aggression without collapsing under it," and "the delay in the opening of the Second Front, real difficulties notwithstanding, was motivated by this long-term objective: to let Germany and the Soviet Union exhaust one another." The Western allies "could choose when and where to engage Germany, and their choice was governed more by political, than military, considerations. The Soviet Union, by contrast, enjoyed no such luxury." And on lend-lease, the phrase is "the Soviet people paying in blood for the relatively modest food and military hardware aid programme from the West." Chapter 12, "Towards the Climax" (pp. 113–121), on Molotov's fruitless journeys of 1942: "it was made clear to Molotov that the Red Army must fight alone — or go under — at Stalingrad."
Mandel also credits the thing a Cold War reader was least willing to credit. The Soviet Union recovered after 1942, he writes in chapter 5, "because the tremendous increase in its industrial potential and productive reserve created by the October Revolution and the planned economy" made recovery possible — and he draws the contrast with the collapse of Tsarist Russia in the First World War.
So the tradition that convicts the silence concedes the substance, and concedes it harder. That is the reason to read the two books together, and it disposes of the defence this book was written to invite: that the omissions are the price of telling a truth the West would not hear. They were not the price. Mandel told the truth about the Eastern front and the second front and the planned economy without omitting anything, and he had no state behind him, no archive, and no print run of this size.
Trotsky wrote against the Pact within weeks of its signature, most fully in "The USSR in War" of 25 September 1939, and the Fourth International argued the question in public through the crisis it caused in its own ranks. Forty-five years later the argument was still being made where this book was aimed.
Chapter Four of Myths and the Realities addresses the Western peace movement. That movement's own press answered it. International Viewpoint no. 79 of July 1985 carried Jacqueline Allio's report on the European Nuclear Disarmament conventions and the reception given there to "the very 'official' Soviet Committee for Peace," whose attempts to win the conference round "were a dismal failure, particularly since the authorities in the 'socialist' countries had refused to allow independent peace movement supporters visas to come to the convention." Enquiries about peace activists imprisoned in the East were met with the answer that "They are hooligans." The same piece quotes the Hungarian dissident János Kis warning the convention against any bargain in which "the western peace movement would be prepared to leave the eastern part of this continent to its fate," and East German activists insisting that the aim was "to establish contact between the equal rights and the peace movements in East and West Europe." Disarmament, that is, was not the property of the state that had suffered most.
On Katyn the answer came from the people the book accuses. International Viewpoint no. 83 of September 1985 reported the rotating hunger strike led by Anna Walentynowicz, the Lenin Shipyard worker whose sacking had touched off the Gdańsk strike of August 1980, in the church at Bieżanów near Kraków, and the demonstration of 22 July 1985 at which the strikers "paid homage to the thousands of Polish soldiers killed in Katyn by the Soviet political police at the beginning of the Second World War." That was printed in the year this book was circulating in English, by the movement this book calls "the ideological mentors of the Polish counter-revolution."
The admissions came from Moscow soon enough, and this series has traced them elsewhere: the Soviet press conceding by 1988 that the Pact was a crime, the Congress of People's Deputies condemning the protocols on 24 December 1989, Gorbachev on Katyn in April 1990.
Read the second and third chapters for what they are: a competent military historian's account of the Eastern front, with figures that hold, aimed at a Western readership that had genuinely been taught a lopsided war. Read the survey of Western historiography as an unusually well-informed guide to what one side of the Cold War was reading on the other. And then read Chapter One, and the Katyn section of Chapter Four, as an object lesson in a specific technique: not lying about the numbers, which were the author's professional competence and were correct, but placing them where they will do the work of the things that cannot be said.
The distance between the two is the measure of what the apparatus cost a man who could count. Rzheshevsky lived to see the archives opened, and worked in them. The book he was commissioned to write in 1984 is the one printed here.