Themes and Issues
Falsifiers pointedly ignored Soviet relations with Germany, making no attempt to directly counter or deal with the documents published in Nazi–Soviet Relations. Rather, the main theme of the booklet is Western culpability for the outbreak of war in 1939. It argues that "Western powers" aided Nazi rearmament and aggression, including that American bankers and industrialists provided capital for the growth of German war industries, while deliberately encouraging Hitler to expand eastward. It depicted the Soviet Union as striving to negotiate a collective security against Hitler, while being thwarted by double-dealing Anglo–French appeasers who, despite appearances, had no intention of a Soviet alliance and were secretly negotiating with Berlin.
Falsifiers casts the Munich agreement, not just as Anglo–French short-sightedness or cowardice, but as a "secret" agreement that was a "a highly important phase in their policy aimed at goading the Hitlerite aggressors against the Soviet Union." Falsifiers also included the claim that, during the Pact's operation, Stalin rejected Hitler's offer to divide the world, without mentioning the Soviet counteroffer to Germany's offer to the Soviets to join the Axis. The parties never reached agreement on Axis entry. Stalin's account in Falsifiers was repeated in Soviet historical texts until the Soviet Union's dissolution. Regarding Soviet–German relations after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Falsifiers main theme frames Soviet actions as a legitimate attempt to build up an "Eastern front" to defend against inevitable Nazi aggression.
Falisifiers characterization of Western policy as anti-Communist, anti-Soviet, and pro-Nazi had been a prominent theme of Soviet propaganda before the Second World War, and such rhetoric more vigorously reemerged during the Cold War.
Read more about this topic: Falsifiers Of History
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