Stalin's Speech of 5 May 1941 and the Apologia for an Offensive War: The USSR on the Eve of War with Germany: Policy Through the Prism of Propaganda

Abstract

The recent and ongoing debate in the mass press concerning the intentions and the nature of specific actions by the Soviet leadership toward Germany on the eve of the Great Patriotic War more and more highlights the necessity of studying the aspects of the problem connected with the use of sources.The shortage of sources, to a considerable extent predetermined by the very nature of the issues that concern researchers, of course, constitutes one of the weakest aspects of this topic in present-day historiography. The scholarly press has more than once expressed concerns both about the importance of making unknown documents available for circulation and about the obstacles (not the scholars' fault!) constantly encountered in retrieving new sources from state archival repositories.Expansion of the source base for research also entails attention to issues such as the representativeness of new categories of materials and "the hierarchy of relations" within the entire corpus of documents under review. In connection with this, considerable interest attaches to the attempts by V.A. Nevezhin and M.I. Mel'tiukhov to draw readers' attention to their analysis of sources that reflect, to a certain extent, the "general line" of the party and English translation 0 1997 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text 0 1995 by the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of History, and the author. "Rech' Stalina 5 maia 194 1 goda i apologiia nastupatel'noi voiny," Otecheshrennaiu istoriiu, March-April 1995, no. 2, pp. 53-69. Vladimir Aleksandrovich Nevezhin is a candidate of historical sciences and a research associate at the Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences.