The speech by Stalin of August 19, 1939, was obtained by the French Havas agency from Moscow by way of Geneva from an “absolutely reliable source.” It was published as early as 1939 in volume 17 of the Revue Du Droit International.6 Remarkably, the authenticity of the speech is disputed with extraordinary zeal by Stalinist propagandists and their blind adherents right up to the present day. However, in an interview under the hypocritical headline “A Mendacious Report from the Havas Agency” in the official party newspaper Pravda on November 30, 1939, Stalin himself denied the speech.The mere fact that Stalin felt personally and immediately compelled to publish an official denial reveals the extent to which he felt he had tipped his hand.7 Only in extraordinary cases did Stalin ever allow himself to consent to personal interviews.
Viktor Suvorov has proved that the authorities of the Soviet Union, such as members of the Central Committee, marshals, generals, professors, academicians, historians, and ideologists, have wracked their brains, and, with truly ardent zeal, have attempted to prove for fifty years that no meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee ever took place on this particular August 19 at all. The whole tissue of lies finally collapsed on January 16, 1993 in a single day, when Stalin’s biographer Professor Volkogonov confirmed in Izvestia “that a meeting had indeed taken place on the date in question, and that he himself had held the minutes in his hands.”
The historian Ms. T. S. Bushueva, during the course of a scholarly evaluation of Viktor Suvorov’s books, which had been distributed in editions of millions of copies, found the text of the speech by Stalin. The speech, which had long been known, was discovered in the secret depths of the former Special Archives of the USSR, apparently prepared by a member of the Comintern. She made it available to the Russian public for the first time in the periodical Novyi Mir in December 1994.9 This epoch-making speech by Stalin is also contained in the published edition of the minutes of he conference of the “Memorial” society held on April 16, 1995, in Novosibirsk. It has been analyzed and commented upon in detail by the historians T.S. Bushueva and I. V. Pavlova, as well as by Professor V. L. Doroshenko.
6. When on July 16,1996,in the daily newspaper Die Welt, Carl Gustaf Ströhm published a strikingly accurate report on the contents of the speech given by Stalin on August 19, 1939,the international apologists for Stalin immediately considered themselves provoked. It was the task of one of their spokesmen, Gabriel Gorodetsky, to rescue the endangered Stalinist version in the new era. Gorodetsky is the Director of the Cummings-Institute for Russian History at the University of Tel Aviv and was also one of the organizers of the conference held between January 31 and February 3, 1995, in Moscow. In the columns of Die Welt on August 31, 1996, Gorodetsky launched a counterattack in which he claimed that the speech by Stalin of August 19, 1939, was a falsification by the French secret service, but in so doing, he became immediately mired in so many contradictions that his arguments were destroyed. For example, he referred to December 23, 1939, as the exact date of the French falsification, forgetting that Stalin published his official denial in Pravda on November 30, 1939,i.e., twenty three days before the text of the speech by Stalin would therefore have to have been known to the French secret service at a much earlier time. Another momentous blunder that entirely destroys Gorodetsky’s credibility is that he claims that the secret additional protocol was only discussed for the first time at the end of September 1939 during Ribbentrop’s second visit to Moscow. Whereas a facsimile of the full text of the “Sckretnyj Dopolnitel’nyj Protokol” (Secret Additional Protocol) on territorial annexation, signed by Molotov and Ribbentrop in Moscow on August 23, 1939, had even been printed by Wemer Maser in Der Wortbruch, pp. 48f. Gorodetsky confuses the Secret Additional Protocol to the Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939, with the Secret Additional Protocol to the Border and Friendship Treaty of September 28, 1939, which, for an expert, is rather astonishing and is hardly excusable. The desperate situation of the Stalin apologists today and the methods to which they resort in their confusion were also revealed by H.-E. Volkmann, who appeared in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit on June 3,1997 as “Research Director of the Military History Research Office of the Bundeswehr,” In this capacity, he published a full-page article on the “Legend of the Preventive War” with an attack on the former Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, General Heinz Trettner. In doing so, he merely demonstrated that he is not familiar with the very numerous German and Soviet source documents, or with the international research situation. His shabby argumentation is an attempt to show that Hitler planned aggression, which, of course, is no longer a problem in contemporary research. Academically, the real question relates to the war of conquest prepared by Stalin that Hitler pre-empted rather by accident. Volkmann’s rather incompetent article raises the question of whether the article is an attempt to mislead on ideological grounds, or whether it is quite simply the result of ignorance. Volkmann, who trivializes the Lenin-Stalin system of despotism at every opportunity, is also mentioned by Rüdiger Proske, Wider den Mißbrauch der Geschichte,pp.16,34, 61, as weil as Professor Dr. jur. Gerhard Eiselt,“Diehistorisch-politische Ausemdersctzung ”
Joachim Hoffmann, Stalin's War of Extermination (Castle Hill Publishers, Paperback Edition 2015), Pp. 28-29
