Just before the outbreak of World War II on the Polish-German frontier, the Soviet Union concluded a non-aggression pact with Hitler’s Germany that included a large slice of Polish territory and a free hand in the Baltic for Soviet expansion (only the early Finnish success prevented total Soviet domination of the eastern Baltic region). The current Russian government is conducting a public relations (propaganda) campaign to recast this pact as being unexceptional diplomatic activity by attempting to cast Britain, France, and all the other countries that had active diplomatic arrangements with Germany as being “just the same” as the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Wikipedia sums up the fate of the two chief diplomats:

Translation of the Russian caption for this image:
People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs of the USSR V.M. Molotov signs a friendship and border treaty between the USSR and Germany. Among those present: I.V. Stalin, translator of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs V.N. Pavlov, German diplomat G. Hilger (“truncated” version of the photograph of M. Kalashnikov distributed on the net)
Photograph attributed to Mikhail Mikhaylovich Kalashnikov (1906-1944) via Wikimedia Commons.

The Pact was terminated on 22 June 1941, when Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union (thus as well executing the ideological goal of Lebensraum). After the war, von Ribbentrop was convicted of war crimes and executed. Molotov died aged 96 in 1986, five years before the USSR’s dissolution. Soon after World War II, the German copy of the secret protocol was found in Nazi archives and published in the West, but the Soviet government denied its existence until 1989, when it was finally acknowledged and denounced. Vladimir Putin, while condemning the pact as “immoral”, has also defended the pact as a “necessary evil”, a U-turn following his earlier condemnation

Ribbentrop arrives at Moscow airport, August 1939.
Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

Arthur Chrenkoff explains why we should vigorously resist this attempt to “normalize” Molotov-Ribbentrop:

1. While the shameful Western appeasement of Hitler, culminating in the infamy of Munich, allowed the Reich to bloodlessly dismember the sovereign and democratic Czechoslovakia, neither Great Britain nor France participated in or benefited from Germany’s cannibalism of this “faraway country of which we know little”. The difference is that while the West remains ashamed of Munich (a name which quickly become synonymous with a craven sell-out), a few years back, Russia’s culture minister Vladimir Medinsky called the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact “a great achievement of Soviet diplomacy”.

2. Unlike all the other agreements signed with Germany during the 1930s, it was the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact that green-lit the armed German aggression and led to the outbreak of the deadliest war in human history. It’s difficult to blame Germany’s neighbours or countries threatened by the Soviet Union (like Poland, Romania and the Baltic states) for trying to stay on Germany’s good side. It was naive and in any case it didn’t work in the end, as they all later found out to their detriment and downfall. Soviet Union, on the other hand, not only climbed into bed with Nazi Germany but it fully and enthusiastically consummated this marriage of convenience.

3. Unlike other agreements cited above, thanks to the “secret protocols” attached to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, the Soviet Union was both a co-aggressor in and a co-beneficiary of the start of World War Two. Stalin has relatively bloodlessly acquired the by-then (mid-September) almost defenseless eastern Poland (subsequently incorporated into Belarussian and Ukrainian Soviet Republics; these historically Polish areas remain today parts of Belarus and Ukraine), Bessarabia from Romania (incorporated into the Moldovan Soviet Republic), the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, as well as being given a free hand in the invasion of Finland, a country which otherwise might have counted on German friendship and support. All these aggressive territorial gains were the consequence of the Ribbentrop-Molotov division of Eastern Europe between the Reich and the Soviet Union into the respective spheres of interest, soon confirmed as the “facts on the ground” by Wehrmacht and Red Army.

4. While Britain and France, their empires and their allies, fought Germany for almost two years after September 1939, first through the period of the “phony war”, then through the Blitzkrieg in the West and the Battle of Britain, the Soviet Union remained a de facto Nazi ally, continuing to cooperate in security matters and supplying Germany with food and raw materials. Grain trains were still rolling west across the border with the Reich as Wehrmacht was launching Operation Barbarossa in the morning of 22 June 1941. During the period of Nazi-Soviet cooperation, Germany conquered Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia and Greece. Soviet exports helped to feed and build up the German war machine before it was unleashed against the West in 1940; German troops surging into the Low Countries walked on their stomachs (to borrow from Napoleon) full of bread baked from Russian wheat or were carried on the tanks and trucks made with Russian coal and ores. Never forget that for Russia, World War Two – or the Great Patriotic War as it is called there – begins only in June 1941, not September 1939, as it does in all Western history books.

5. It’s true that the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was partly defensive in nature as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, aiming to postpone the inevitable armed clash between the two rival totalitarianisms and in the meantime give Russia some essential breathing space to build up its army and strategic reserves (the top leadership of the Soviet armed forces was decapitated by Stalin during the purges in 1937-8, leaving them even more unprepared to face Germany than would have otherwise been the case). But as I pointed out above, it was also offensive and directly benefited Stalin’s territorial ambitions while it lasted. In some ways, the legacy of the pact lives on in the shape of Poland’s post-war borders, which have nothing to do with its thousand-year history. This is the real #TruthAboutWWII and this is why the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact remains singled out in the infamy of the interwar European democracy.