Volume 35, Number 18 · November 24, 1988
The Other Russian Army
By Gordon A. Craig
Die Geschichte der Wlassow-Armee
by Joachim Hoffmann
Freiburg: Verlag Rombach, 468 pp., DM32
General Wlassow: Russen und Deutsche zwischen Hitler und Stalin
by Sergej Fröhlich, revised and edited by Edel von Freier
Cologne: Markus Verlag, 403 pp., DM39.80
Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and Émigré Theories
by Catherine Andreyev
Cambridge University Press, 251 pp., $34.50
As Gorbachev consolidates his power in the Soviet Union, there are signs that glasnost may be beginning to have a liberating effect upon Soviet historiography. Names and topics that have long been taboo are beginning to creep into print. Not so long ago, a senior historian writing in the pages of Pravda admitted that Leon Trotsky was not the enemy of the Revolution and socialism that he had been described as being for the past sixty years, and went on to give a not uncritical account of his ideas and to praise him for 'not breaking, as many others did, before Stalin's dictatorship.' In August, in the official newspaper of the Communist youth organization, Komsomolskaya Pravda, a five-column article by the military historian V.M. Kulish attacked the myths surrounding the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, pointing out that it was not a defensive ploy, as Party doctrine has held. Instead it was a naive attempt by Stalin to make a permanent alliance with Germany, which succeeded only in giving Hitler a free hand in the West and then making the Russian campaign a one-front war, with dreadful consequences. Commenting on this, and on Kulish's further charges that Stalin's obsessive hatred of the German Social Democrats and his orders to the Communists to attack them rather than the Nazis helped bring Hitler to power in 1933, Frederick Starr wrote in The Washington Post, 'The Kulish article attests to a new readiness in Moscow to pull even the most horrifying skeletons from the national closet.'
Review, 4766 words
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