Setting the Scene

Abstract

The forty years which followed the outbreak of war in 1939 have been years of historiography: forty years in which there has grown up in Britain what one can only describe as a historical industry, on the origins of the Second World War. It is interesting that there is no such industry in the United States. It is also remarkable how little work has been done so far in France to parallel the work that has been done in Britain on the period of appeasement; while the Soviet Union’s historians have not been allowed to change their minds at all over the intervening period. It is true that in the 1960s there was a movement among Soviet historians which argued that in the light of the de-Stalinisation process they ought to be able to say things about Stalin’s judgement which were somewhat less than reverential; but the members of this group were out-manoeuvred by their old-style Stalinist colleagues, and most of them are now out of a job or in exile. Their most prominent member, V. Nekrich, is in the West. What happened to their assistants, their graduate students and so on, we of course don’t know. The only thing one could say now about the Soviet historians is that they are today allowed to admit — in front of Western audiences at least — that there were other participants in the Second World War on the Allied side, apart from the Soviet Red Army.