THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Colonel S. N. Kovalyov’s essay on the origins of World War II (mentioned here and with Russian text available through here )is an excellent example of the pitfalls in attempting to draw history into contemporary politics by going after vague and undefined falsifiers.

One pitfall is that trying to score political points makes you screw up your facts, and thereby look dumb. The claim in Kovalyov’s article that stirred up public controversy is that Poland produced the war by failing to accept Hitler’s perfectly reasonable demands in the fall of 1938.

What Kovalyov misses are two salient facts. First, Hitler’s allegedly reasonable demands for Danzig and an extraterritorial connection across the Polish corridor to East Prussia came in the immediate aftermath of some other allegedly reasonable demands for Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. Hitler’s request to the Poles is hardly as innocent and pure as Kovalyov makes it seem, and the Poles were quite correct to see the threat behind the superficially limited demand.

Second, Kovalyov points out that it is only after the Poles’ final refusal of German demands on 26 March 1939 that Hitler denounced the 1934 German-Polish non-aggression pact. What Kovalyov fails to note is that this Polish refusal came ELEVEN DAYS after the German invasion and annexation of rump Czechoslovakia. This provided such a clear and unequivocal demonstration of the true nature of Hitler’s supposedly reasonable and limited demands that even Neville Chamberlain picked up on it. Kovalyov fails to mention this obvious piece of context.

Kovalyov also suggests that the Soviets had no choice but to occupy the Baltics, or else face the prospect of the Nazis doing it instead. That’s a reasonable argument, and people could certainly discuss its merits. But when Kovalyov says that the Baltics joined the Soviet Union “by request of the governments and parliaments of these states absolutely voluntarily,” my response is “pull the other one.”

(For non-native English speakers who might be reading this, that idiom means “that argument is obviously ridiculous, and would only be convincing if I were stupid.”)

The second pitfall of going after falsifiers of history as Kovalyov does is that it is pushing on an open door. His bigger claim is not really about Poland, but instead that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was the only reasonable choice for Stalin in summer 1939. The Western allies had made it abundantly clear, especially at Munich, that they would rather do anything than fight the Germans, and the Poles refused to even consider allowing Soviet troops passage to get the Germans.

Anyone who has even the smallest familiarity with Western literature on the origins of World War II would reply to Kovalyov, “Yes, of course, almost everyone who’s looked at 1938 and 1939 would agree with you that the Western allies gave Stalin no reason to trust them to fight Hitler. You make Hitler look like a good guy to prove THAT?”

The third pitfall of torturing the historical record is that you get caught. Given that Kovalyov’s article has been pulled from the Ministry of Defense’s website, and that his attacks on Poland and the Baltic States and partial rehabilitation of Hitler will win no friends in Europe, he has to be a little worried about a posting to scenic Kamchatka.

I have never met Kovalyov nor read anything else he’s written. That said, I get the sense that he set out to score some points on Poland and the Baltics. To do that, though, he had to make Hitler seem reasonable and statesmanlike, which doesn’t fly with a lot of Russians who might otherwise be quite happy with his stance.

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