History may be written by the victors, but in the cold war the losers' tails have retained a powerful sting. The newly opened archives of the Soviet Union are exposing the secrets of the communist world - and in the process casting the conventional wisdoms of western history in a new light.
The archive on the Korean war is one such example. The war was unique - the only "hot" war of the cold war period directly involving all the superpowers. The three-year conflict, from 1950 to 1953, cost at least two million lives and set the tone for the apocalyptic tension that only broke in 1990.
For four decades, historians have been embroiled in dispute over the Korean war, unable even to agree who started it. Traditionalists believed the war was Stalin's prelude to world domination, and that North Korea's leader, Kim II Sung, was Stalin's puppet, ordered to start the war to confront the west. Other historians, labelled "revisionists", said it started as a civil war, and it remains an open question whether North or South Koreans attacked first. At the time, and for the next 40 years, Moscow denied any involvement, and the Soviet Union's true role was kept secret even from the Russian public.
The opening of the state archives has provided an opportunity to compare the theories of every historian of the period over the past 40 years. Some now have egg on their faces.
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