During preparations for the 65th anniversary of our victory in the Great Patriotic War, the number of statements on this subject increased considerably in mass media, including Military-Historical Journal, one of the oldest Russian publications. One of them, namely, the article by Yu. Nikiforov "Scientific Hypothe-sis or Irresponsible Verbiage?", will be discussed below.

According to the author until recently promoters of historical knowledge did not openly attack the main symbols of social memory of people about extremely hard years of the Great Patriotic War, when the Soviet people and its Armed Forces defeated Nazism. However, in recent years in a number of works by foreign and Russian authors we observe gross distortions of the truth of the actual state of things and attempts to belittle the significance of our Great Victory. Such examples are plentiful.

Thus, in the recently published extensive book Patriot-ic History of the United States, in the chapter with a symbolic title "The Wonderful Time of Democracy, 1941-1945", the American writers L. Schweickart and M. Allen mentioned the following major events that had happened at the end of the first half of the 20th century:

"September, 1939: Hitler invades Poland, and the World War 11 breaks out in Europe.

1940: Germany defeats French and British military forces in France. France capitulates and is subjected to occupation. Norway is occupied. The battle for England.

December 7, 1941: Japan attacks Pearl Harbor*.

1942: The United States and Britain disembark troops in North Africa. Jimmy Doolittle bombs Tokyo (February). The battles in the Coral Sea (May) and near the Midway Islands** (June).

1943: The allies start bombing Europe, defeat the Germany African Corps and occupy Sicily and Italy (July).

1944: Invasion of France (June 6). Liberation of Paris (August); landing of troops on the Philippines and the battle in the Gulf of Leyte (October).

* The US naval base on the Hawaiian Islands,-Ed.

** In the north-western group of the Hawaiian Islands.-Ed.

1945: Germany capitulates (May), landing on Ivogima and Okinawa Islands. Testing of atomic bomb. Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 and 9); Japan capitulates.

1946: Marshall Plan*, setting-up of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization."

Is there any need to make comments on this so-called "history"? As a matter of fact, the cold war is over, and the authors could well mention, among the mega-events of the first half of the 20th century, the treacherous attack of Germany on the USSR (June 22, 1941) and also the major battles in its territory, since they did not forget Norway.

Over the last twenty years a considerable amount of historical literature was published in Russia, which is not aimed to enrich, supplement and update social memory, but, on the contrary, to destruct it. For that matter our television displays exceptional eagerness and often distorts the most important events of our history. In particular, it actively offers to our society variants of "new interpretation of history" and revision of the established views related to the causes of unleashing the

* George Marshall-an American general, advocate of the cold war and arms race, chief of the General Staff, State Secretary of the USA.-Ed.

World War II and beginning of operations in the territo-ry of the USSR.

Viktor Suvorov*, the author of sensational books Ice-Breaker, "M Day" and others (published in Russia since 1992), is the most odious figure, which is closely associ-ated with an undisguised falsification of military activi-ties. Though a lot of works have been published, which disclose complete bankruptcy of his theories based on forged reasoning, nevertheless, the initiative to over-throw "totalitarian myths", but actually to form new ones, was taken up by a number of his followers.

It pertains also to the book by A. Osokin Great Mystery of the Great Patriotic War: A New Hypothesis of the Out-break of War (M.: Vremya, 2007), in which he expounds "an incredible version of the real causes and sources of unleashing military operations, which turns over all for-mer concepts", in a word, "that very truth, which has been kept from us (as well as from the whole mankind) up to now".

The essence of A. Osokin's "discovery" consists in the following: it turns out that in line with the secret agree-ments between Stalin and Hitler, the Red Army troops made preparations together with the Wehrmacht for a joint attack on Great Britain. Thus, they had to proceed in special trains to the territory of Germany to take part in a massive landing operation on the British Isles. However, the Fiihrer changed his mind after he got assurances from Churchill in the spring of 1941, that the British Armed Forces would participate in an attack on the USSR, and he preferred to defeat his unlucky eastern "ally", taking advantage of its unprecedented credulity and blindness.

Such an extravagant idea is presented in the book as a scientific hypothesis, supported, according to the author of the foreword A. Vladimirov, by "almost exhaustive information" and "scrupulous documentation". But it is in vain to find any specific sources on the pages of the book. In this respect, A. Osokin surpassed even V. Suvo-rov, as the latter at least brings forward various quotations and stresses all the time, that their "content testifies in favor of his "version". A. Osokin makes a shameless statement: "Direct documentary facts of joint German-Soviet plans of the operation against Great Britain and its colonies in the summer of 1941 were not found up till now and perhaps will never be found".

As in the case of V. Suvorov, the reasoning of A. Oso-kin is based on the postulate of "impatient attitude of Stalin to the reported facts, testifying to the preparation of Hitler to attack the USSR". Suvorov, Osokin and oth-ers did not try to substantiate this postulate, taken from some works of Soviet historians of the 1960s-1970s or "to reassess" it, as they needed it just as an axiomatic statement.

Therefore, they allegedly find some "enigmatic" facts, which can be explained in terms of soundness of their new "hypothesis". For example, on June 22, 1941, the soldiers of the 27th maintenance battalion of the 24th division of the 11th army of the Baltic Special Military District received sleeveless shirts and trunks instead of undershirts and underpants. According to A. Osokin, it testified to the fact that they were prepared for partici-pation in a landing operation against Great Britain, and

* Viktor Suvorov is a pen-name. His real name is Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun.-Ed.

Stalin took care of "the Red Army soldiers and com-manding officers to look adequately in the eyes of the local population when passing through Europe."

Using any excuse for his guesswork, A. Osokin at the same time ignored the well-known facts and documents, which could at once stop the unrestrained flight of his imagination. This also refers to the explanation of the causes of the Red Army defeat in the initial period of operations. The annotation to the book reads: "None of the versions made public up to now" provides "clear answers" to the existing questions, and "the mystery of the first day of the Great Patriotic War is not solved until now". Then the reader is offered a ludicrous description of the viewpoints already available in some historical lit-erature. Thus, the author tries to prove that all previous-ly known variants are only opinions or "versions", which are equally ill-founded and therefore equal in their pretensions to truthfulness.

Worked out and coordinated by several generations of Soviet (now Russian, Byelorussian and Ukrainian) historians, the ideas of the pre-war development of the Soviet state, the foreign and home policy of the Stalin leadership, and the causes of defeats of the Red Army at the beginning of the war are also only one of "the versions" among others (according to A. Osokin-eight in all).

In fact, there are no analogous "versions" regarding these events in historiography, and discussions of experts in the pre-war period, including those about the causes of the unsuccessful beginning of the war for the Red Army, are held within a limited framework at the dispos-al of researchers.

But if any author asserts that his work expounds a "scientific hypothesis", he has no right to ignore the methods and ways worked out in science to separate the grains of truth from the "weeds" of conjectures and fan-tasies. It seems improbable that A. Osokin does not know that any historical reconstruction is founded on sources, otherwise no talk about concrete facts of the past is possible.

The "hypothesis" suggested by A. Osokin not only fails to meet these requirements, but openly ignores the documentary evidence accumulated by now, and there is not a grain of truth in his description of the eve of the Great Patriotic War. In other words, the version laid down in his book cannot be in any way called a scientif-ic hypothesis. It is just fantasies, which falsify the real events.

Yu. Nikiforov, Scientific Hypothesis or Irresponsible Verbiage?, Military-Historical Journal, No. 5, 2008

Prepared by Yaroslav RENKAS