Sunday, May 02, 2004

POLITICALLY CORRECT HISTORY UNDERMINED

Richard Raack is an historian who has used the old Soviet archives freed up by the collapse of the Soviet Union to examine the politically correct claims about Stalin made by Western historians. He is scathing about how wrong their conclusions can now be shown to be. But he notes that Western historians just do not want to know about the new findings. Political correctness still dogs Cold War history teaching in the West -- partly because most historians learned their craft during the Vietnam era when declining standards of scholarship combined with massive growth of university enrolments -- and also because most historians read only English language sources.

Yet the new evidence from the former Soviet archives says that Stalin was not on the defensive when faced with Hitlerism, a myth still taught. For all practical purposes he was an expansionist Communist, a "Trotskyite", and was planning his own surprise attack to the West circa 1941. Hitler beat him to the punch. There is a long article by Raack pointing all that out here and he has a book here. Summary of the book:

"The Nazi-Soviet "nonaggression" pact of August 1939 was in truth a mutual aggression pact against small countries, which could not be admitted by the Soviets even in their glasnost phase. They rationalized Stalin's attacks as the establishment of a defensive position against the Germans, an apologia prominent in much Western revisionist scholarship about the cold war's beginnings. This careful writer dispels such views by examining Communist Party archives and boldly claims his study will "superannuate countless earlier histories." The operating thesis is that Stalin's ambitions as a world leader were grander than mere self-defense: as an orthodox Leninist, he sensed that 1939 was the time to reignite the international proletarian revolution by means of the chaos attending the coming war..."

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