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Declassified WWII-era Documents Published In Moscow
20.08.2009
MOSCOW. Aug 20 (Interfax-AVN) - A Moscow publishing house has brought out a collection of declassified documents on developments in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania shortly before and during World War II.
"The Baltic States and Geopolitics, 1935-1945," published by Ripol Klassik in an edition of 2,000, contains documents that "show evolution in criteria used by statesmen in leading countries of the anti-Nazi coalition to assess the role of that region from the point of view of counteracting the aggressive policy of Nazi Germany, guaranteeing security for the Soviet Union and protecting the national interests of the United States, Britain and the USSR," historian Lev Sotskov, who put together the collection, says in a preface to it.
The documents, declassified by Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), record conclusions by influential politicians and points made by them that "are interesting from the standpoint of objective study of motives and secret mechanisms for making key political decisions for the sake of the main purpose, destruction of Nazism," Sotskov says.
The text of the documents published in the collection preserves the style and spelling of the originals, he says.
Ripol Klassik says the collection will enable the readers to make their own assessment of the situation in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania before and during World War II and to find out "the hidden motivation for many of the political aspects of the division of European territories by what were the leading world powers at that time - the USSR, the United States, and Britain.