yawn...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/11/10/nosplit/bvtvlaurence-rees-1011.xml

I suppose it's because we insist on not learning/teaching social studies, but I continue to be amazed at all the blather about "previously unknown" information "that can only be told now". There is absolutely nothing of substance in this article that wasn't known at least 30 years ago; and the basics were well known, to anyone who chose to look, at least 10-15 years earlier. Stalin was a really bad dude. But he was fighting the Germans, just as we were, and we desperately needed each other in order to win. Those were the priorities. Period. Simple. And yet, since the USSR transformed itself from a Stalinist to a fascist state, there have been hundreds of books and articles all breathlessly announcing that previously secret archives have yawned open revealing these totally unsuspected facts. It's all a con, foisted on an uneducated populace.

(That isn't to say that there aren't some mysteries left to the War, but the Soviet archives, and their marketeers, have yet to shed any light on them...)