Thread by @akoz33

I promised earlier to translate most of Alexei Sobchenko, Victor Suvorov and Mark Solonin talk on what happened on the 13th of June 1941. It will take several threads and I am not sure when I will finish but today seems to be a good time to start.

Sobchenko: The subject of our meeting is the 13 June 1941. Victor Suvorov, please explain why we are discussing the 14 of June and not 19th or 14th.
Suvorov: Under Stalin the history of WWII was not written.

The war ends, all archives get closed, and the war is presented as a collection of certain heroic deeds, how 28 Panfilov’s Guardsmen stopped, at first they stopped, at first they wanted, if 28 then it means 56 tanks but the chief editor of “Red Star” got rid of 2 tanks,

so 28 Panfilov’s guards stopped 54 German tanks. They stopped these tanks and all died. Then the number was reduced and reduced and now it has become 18 tanks. From where did they take this. number 18 tanks? Well, they divided 54 by 3.

In addition we had Alexander Matrosov, who threw himself on a machine gun, the hero of Krasnodon, and finally Egorov and Kantariya hoisted the red flag over the Reichstag.

This was the history of the war. Generals, admirals and marshals were officially forbidden to write war memoirs. History of the war does not exist, and there are no memoirs.

And then comrade Stalin left this world and it was immediately followed by a fight for power, and they kill Beria, and then to the top rise Khrushchev and Zhukov,

Krushch was also a kind of beetle ("zhuk" means beatle), so two beetles rise and they decide after all to write the history of the war, that is, that Stalin was stupid but two great men, Khrushchev and Zhukov made up for it.

But soon Khrushchev got rid of Zhukov and now they begin to write a 6 volume history in which, of course, Krushchev is on all the most important fronts, he rallies the troops, sends them into battle and points the direction.

And this was being prepared for the 20th anniversary of the victory.
The first volume came out in 1961 and the second also in 1961 and all 6 were supposed to appear by the 20-th anniversary of the victory.

But Khrushchev never saw it as they deposed in in 1964. Before that, there was the 20th Congress in 1956, officially to approve the 6th 5-year plan, which was approved, they would have approved it anyway without the Congress,

but in reality they called this Congress in order to expose the crimes of Stalin. And they exposed a lot. When the Congress was finished, the guests returned home, but all the Soviet delegates were ordered to remain.

Oficially the Congress was over but they all met and comrade Khrushchev read his famous speech, in which he told a lot bad things about comrade Stalin, including about his most idiotic conduct in the last months and weeks and days before the German invasion.

Khrushchev reminded everyone something that was forbidden under Stalin, that is, on the 14th of June 1941 there appeared a statement by TASS that Germany abides as strictly as the Soviet Union by the terms of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact and that the rumours about

approaching invasion by Germany against the Soviet Union are clumsy propaganda manufactured by forces hostile to the Soviet Union and Germany, who want to cause a quarrel between them.

The 20th Congress applauded the words of comrade Khrushchev and from this time it became customary to lough at this TASS statement and its author. The point is only one person could give an order to publish a statement that Germany has no desire to attack the USSR.

Sobchenko: In the entire Soviet history it never happened that the Soviet Union announced that America does not wish to attack us or…
Solonin: loughs.

A personal comment from me: we actually had the Polish translation of those two published volumes of the history of WWII in my home in Poland and I remember reading them sometime in the 1960s. I think Khrushchev was still in power, so I must have been 10 years old. I remember

talking to my father about it, who laughed at this. I remember that this was the first time I read about the catastrophic Soviet defeat at Kharkiv (one of Manstein's masterpieces). According to the history Khrushchev guessed everything and tried to warn Timoshenko but for some

reason, which I can't remember anymore, either because of Stalin or Timoshenko, he was ignored. My father only loughed and call the whole book a pack of lies. He remembered the Kharkiv disaster still from the war and that's how I knew about it. It was never mentioned before this

book was published and neither afterwards, so probably Khrushchev had some reason to bring it back, and Brezhnev, who in subsequent Soviet accounts won WWII single-handedly had no such reason.