Progressive revision of the principal results of the WWII represents as a very dangerous sign. Never before the endeavors to depict Hitler and Stalin as equally responsible for unleashing the war have been so obstinate, purposeful and bluntly hostile towards Russian people and Russian state…
No doubt that the propagandistic identification of Stalin as a totalitarian-style leader is aimed to justify the secret diplomatic maneuvers made by the West in the late 1930s to provoke German-Soviet conflict. The appeasement policies and permanent British and French concessions to Berlin eventually prompted the aggression of the Nazi monster. Following a series of military triumphs in Europe, on June 22, 1941 Nazi Germany invaded Russia and started realizing Operation Barbarossa supposed to defeat and break down the USSR. Another top secret Nazi plan Ost proposed to ‘depopulate the barbarian country’ turning the survivors into lunatic manpower serving to the German ‘masters’.
Most likely the liberal hawks among historians and sovietologists ‘specialized’ in Stalin’s period are preparing basis for a new blitzkrieg, now without bombings and tank attacks. Today Hitler’s strategic schemes are being realized using new media technologies, manipulations of facts and senses, demonization campaigns against Soviet leaders, first of all Stalin, being portrayed as ‘war criminals who avoided Nuremberg’.
The brainwashing is going on in a systematic, comprehensive, aggressive manner. Principal intellectual centers elaborating contemporary version of Generalplan Ost are located in the United States and the UK. They obviously do not suffer any shortage in resources. The allegation that the USSR was a totalitarian state equally responsible for the outbreak of World War II with Nazi Germany is being routinely knocked, hammered, drummed into the heads of Americans, Europeans, Asians and even citizens of the post-Soviet countries.
They want Russia as the successor of the USSR to admit equal responsibility with Nazi Germany for the onset of the global drama. Apparently the consent of the new Russian elites to ‘de-Stalinization’ of the Soviet history would eventually lead to enormous and totally unfair compensation claims from the ‘occupied’ countries. The West believes that concessions and capitulation – habitual stereotype behavior of the Russian ruling class since Gorbachev – are inevitable now as well. They are convinced that the Russian elite’s private financial considerations would outweigh the national interests of the country again.
The anti-Stalin rhetoric by the troops of historians, political scientists and commentators inside Russian generously nurtured by Western donors already dominates the public discourse. They insist on ‘Stalin’s guilt to be expiated’, his ‘criminal accord with Hitler’, ‘Eastern Europe occupation’, ’40 million of repressed/assassinated’ in the USSR. I remember a surprised Chilean journalist saying to me once: ‘If I believe everything they talk about Stalin, Pinochet comparing to him would represent a sample of a righteous humanist.’
Collecting materials for my book about prominent Soviet intelligence agent Iosif Grigulevich who was stationed in South America in 1940-1946, I spent a lot of time reading war-time newspapers in libraries of Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago de Chile and Caracas. These sources irrefutably testified that for Latin Americans Stalin used to be a symbol of Soviet heroic resistance to Hitlerism and a beacon of social progress and historical optimism. In that epoch, even Stalin’s fiercest opponents could not think of likening him to Hitler.
Communists were indeed the staunchest fighters against fascism at the time. That is why US intelligence networks were seeking contacts with the leaders of communist parties in Latin America to engage them in uprooting the fascist underground there. Stalin approved the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 to strengthen Soviet Union’s ties with the Allies. He voiced for the dialog and trust-building in the post-war period, but the West responded with Churchill’s notorious Fulton address which marked the beginning of the Cold War. At that moment, Stalin was branded as an enemy of the Western civilization, and what we witness today is essentially the same approach and the same perception.
