Izvestia published Viktor Medvedchuk's article “Ukrainian Syndrome. Anatomy of a modern military confrontation, where Putin's Ukrainian ally is trying to accuse the West of unleashing a Russian-Ukrainian war. According to him, the origins of the conflict should be sought in the behavior of the United States after the end of the Cold War: they did not seek to create a “new just world”, but tried to turn the countries of the former Eastern bloc into their colonies, for which they provoked ethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe. As an example of the self-exposing of the treacherous Americans, Medvedchuk quotes from Bill Clinton's speech at the meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on October 24, 1995:
“Using the failures of Soviet diplomacy, the extreme arrogance of Gorbachev and his entourage, including those who openly took a pro-American position, we achieved what President Truman was going to do with the Soviet Union with the atomic bomb.”
That's just the existence of this speech by Clinton is highly questionable. Her English "original" can be found online:
Using the blunders of Soviet diplomacy, the extreme arrogance of Gorbachev and his entourage, including those who openly took a pro-American position, we achieved what President Truman was going to do with the Soviet Union through the atomic bomb.
But the sources of the quote are exclusively Russian, and it is difficult to call them sources: a post on the page of a certain “All-Russian Creative Movement Russian Lad” on the VK social network and a comment by one of the users under the nickname cedar to an article on the website of the online publication “Military Review”. Moreover, “Russian Lad” gives a link to a post in the “Mirror of History” community, where the speech was published in Russian, and even with the disclaimer “ATTENTION! This information has not been confirmed." No American source has this phrase, nor does it mention that on October 25, 2005, President Clinton spoke at a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Medvedchuk could have taken this quote from the university textbook by Alexander Barsenkov and Alexander Vdovin “History of Russia. 1917-2004" (its later editions are called "History of Russia. 1917-2007" and "History of Russia. 1917-2009"). This textbook at one time caused a considerable scandal. In an article by historian Nikita Sokolov and sociologist Anatoly Golubovsky "What history teachers are taught", published in the journal Art of Cinema, it was said :
“We look at the text and find that its authors deeply despise historical science. Because they do not know that some time ago the formational and civilizational models, which at the beginning of the 20th century claimed to be a scientific hypothesis, were rejected by strict science. Their claim to become a scientific theory has not been confirmed by any scientific research. And all this went a long time ago to the side of the road, to grandmothers who husk seeds at the entrance. <…>
It turns out: we have a scientific hypothesis <Marxist formational concept of history. – The Insider >, faith in which is "shaken". And the authors are looking for a new faith. This is the most monstrous thing that exists here. They are uninventive or, as it is now fashionable to say, “uncreative”, they are trying to create a new faith from the ruins of a civilizational approach, from some scraps of Huntington, who was no longer taken seriously twenty years ago. Political scientists argue about it, but historians have long ceased to be interested in it. All this should not be related to the textbook, but it is all built on this. <…>
For the authors of the "textbook for teachers" there are no previous studies of history. For example, they cite Stalin's speech of August 19, 1939, allegedly at the Plenum of the Central Committee, which was a sensation during the years of perestroika, when it was suddenly discovered: "If we accept Germany's proposal to conclude a non-aggression pact with her, she will, of course, attack Poland , and the intervention of France and England in this war will become inevitable. Under these conditions, we will have many chances to stay away from the conflict, and we will be able to hope for our advantageous entry into the war” (p. 271). But already six years ago a fundamental study by Sergei Sluch was published, published not just anywhere, but in the journal Domestic History (2004, No. 1). Sergei Zinovievich quite correctly proved that this speech was a fake. If historians do not know this, then they are not professionals.”
Many critics have pointed out that the textbook distorts facts in favor of ideology. Journalist Zoya Svetova titled her article about the textbook in The New Times magazine “A specific story. A textbook as a manual on xenophobia. Economist Irina Yasina called the textbook "a course for a young fighter for a Russian nationalist." The deputy director of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Historical Sciences Vladimir Lavrov, stated in Rossiyskaya Gazeta:
“The book is replete <…> with errors. And they are not accidental, since an anti-historical goal is visible – to justify Stalin's crimes, presenting them as inevitable costs on the way to a brighter future. To do this, the authors use dubious data and outright fakes, distort and manipulate historical facts. You can't justify it otherwise."
In 2010, the Academic Council of the Faculty of History of Moscow State University convened an expert commission, which evaluated the textbook as follows:
“The textbook (ed. 2010) is based on a large factual material that gives an idea of the life of our country over the past century. The textbook reflects the problems that, after perestroika, became the subject of special attention – the problem of the Russian people, the collapse of the USSR, dissidence, etc. The book is provided with a list of sources and literature, a name index. Some of the chapters are well written.
However, the work causes a number of critical remarks of the source study, methodological, conceptual, methodical, ethical plan.
Along with scientifically confirmed facts, the book uses unverified data gleaned from journalism and various unreliable sources. Controversial assumptions are contained, partly belonging to the authors themselves, and partly borrowed uncritically from other works. The authors, as a rule, do not make reservations about the presence of other points of view, debatable provisions.
There are many factual inaccuracies in the textbook, which testify to the professional negligence of the authors. There are inaccurate statistics taken out of the context of the quote. Often there is a selection of facts and quotations for a priori schemes and estimates.
There are no more authoritative sources of quotes from Clinton's speech on the net. Even assuming that the speech was classified in the United States, it is completely incomprehensible how it could then become known to the authors of the textbook and why its original is nowhere to be found.
