Stalin och sanningen
"Hej Per-Anders,
Sistlidna månad var ett falsifikat från 1939 ute och valsade i medierna, med anledning av att det förflutit 70 år sedan pakten Sovjet-Tyskland. På Svenska Dagbladets ledarblogg upptäckte jag en artikel av Claes Arvidsson. Han skrev om hur Stalin några dagar före den 23 augusti 1939 ha informerat Politbyrån om skälen att ingå ett avtal med Hitler.
Arvidsson visade sig vid förfrågan ha hämtat uppgifterna från nätet, närmare bestämt den tidigare prestigefulla radiostationen BBC. På deras hemsida kunde man således läsa en artikel av en ryss, Kretjetnikov som låtsades hänvisa till ?politbyråns protokoll?. Vad ingen av dessa herrar kände till var att ?dokumentet? var ett fransk-språkigt trofédokument som tyskarna tagit i Paris 1940, och ryssarna i Berlin 1945. I detta fransk-språkiga alster kunde man således läsa att Stalin fått med Hitler på att Sovjetunionen skulle få Rumänien och Bulgarien i ?sin inflytelsesfär?, och därför hoppades dirigera Tyskland in i ett långvariigt krig mot västmakterna. Och mycket annat nonsens stod i det dokumentet.
Efter att först att informerat sagde ledarskribent på Svenska Dagbladet (http://blogg.svd.se/ledarbloggen?id=15284 ), skrev jag följande till BBC News:
Dear Sirs,
I would like to bring your attention to an article published by BBC News the other day ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8212451.stm
It is not an historical fact, as the BBC News article states that "The records of the politburo meeting held on 19 August 1939 show..."
The article is actually referring to a falsification, the so-called "Stalin's speech at the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party on 19 August 1939". The real records of the Politburo (preserved in the Russian State Archives of Political and Social History, RGASPI, in Moscow) from that day contain no speech by Stalin at all. The agenda for that day shows that there was no meeting on foreign policy matters.
The real background to BBC News story is a since long circulating forgery in various forms. A so-called "Politburo speech by Stalin on 19 August 1939" was first set in motion already in Autumn 1939 by the French Havas news agency. It was, not surprisingly, denied at the time by TASS agency. However, in the 1950s, a well-known German historian, Eberhard Jäckel tore to pieces the attempts by other historians to use this "source" as an explanation to Stalin's motives for concluding the Pact with Hitler. After that publication, no serious scholars in the West have quoted the "speech" when writing on Soviet foreign policy.
Some twenty years ago, the story took a new turn. In the early 1990s, two Russian historians, Bushueva and Doroshchenko, set in motion a supposedly Russian original of this Stalin speech, allegedly discovered by them in the so-called Special Archives (Osobyi Arkhiv) in Moscow. This archive is presently part of the State Military History archive, but was at the time a separate unit with mainly trophy archives, captured in Berlin and other cities after the Red Army's victory of Germany in 1945.
In those trophy archives were also kept the French foreign ministry and military intelligence archives, which in turn had been captured by the Germans after their victory over France in 1940. (Most of those materials have since been restituated to France in the mid-1990s.)
The Russian historians published their "findings" in the journal "Novyi Mir" and then in a collection of articles "Drugaia Voina" (ed. By Yurii Afanasiev). What these Russian publicists failed to underline was that the document was actually a French Intelligence Report from 1939, written in French, purportedly being "a trustworthy agent's report" to the Deuxième Bureau (the French foreign intelligence service). There were no other commentaries made on this document, which I have had the opportunity myself to scrutinize and to excerpt during a research stay in Moscow.
It was unfortunate, and an un-scholarly procedure, that these Russians pretended to have found an original speech by Stalin, not a badly written document in French that already from a linguistic point of view might be rejected as a fraud, written far from Moscow and Communist Russia.
Therefore, their procedure has lured several Western historians to believe that there actually exists a note taken at a Politburo meeting, with also some representatives of the Communist International present, on the eve of the Soviet signing of the non-aggression pact with Germany. Since the "Politburo speech" is nowadays sometimes referred to even in serious British and American books on Stalin's war with Hitler, it is explainable that the journalists at BBC honestly believe that there actually exists a record of Stalin's speech.
However, other scholars and archivists have searched the relevant archives in Russia, but no trace of "Stalin's 19 August Politburo speech" has been found. This latest round of a 70-year old fraud has been demasked in scholarly journals by experts on Soviet foreign policy, such as Gabriel Gorodetsky ("Die Welt" and "Le Monde Diplomatique, in 1996 and 1997 respectively) and Sergei Sluch ("Otechestvennaia Istoria, 2004, no 1).
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) might therefore consult historians with proper knowledge of the pre-history of the Second World War, and on this precise matter of Stalin's arguments, consequently publish their own rejoinder to a baseless article in this respect!
Lennart Samuelson
Associate professor in Economic History
Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden
Phone: +44 - 733 725 919
Du får hemskt gärna blogga om detta ärende! Dessutom kan jag tillägga, att en engelsk professor emeritus berättade för mig att han som 14-åring mycket väl mindes hur Stalins dementi av detta tal ? vilket som sagt spreds i Paris av Havas Nyhetesbyrå, och slogs upp stort i den brittiska pressen för att visa vilken usling Stalin var ? men att ingen då förklarade var Stalin dementerade. För en gångs skull hade den blodige diktatorn anledning att håna de västeuropeiska kommentatorerna.
Självfallet hade Stalin och Molotov och andra diskuterat fram och tillbaka i Moskva, med såväl den brittisk-franska som den nazityska delegationen, om olika villkor för att ingå en allians.
Men varför sätter BBC, och Svenska Dagbladet (i god tro, förstås) en gammal historieförfalskning i omlopp i nådens år 2009?
Bästa hälsningar,
Lennart Samuelson"
Jag kan bara hålla med Lennart. Varför sätter så många så stor tiltro till myter och konspirationsteorier? I SMB gör vi i alla fall vårt bästa för att ta myterna av daga.
