Pact that set the scene for war |
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The 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact is controversial even today, with historians divided over its importance. In the first of a series of articles marking the outbreak of World War II 70 years ago, the BBC Russian Service’s Artyom Krechetnikov and Steven Eke analyse the significance of a treaty that helped set the scene for war.
Signed on 23 August 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was accompanied by a secret protocol that detailed the reshaping of Europe’s map. Substantive talks on forming a political alliance between Nazi Germany and the USSR had begun that month. They built on earlier discussions aimed at boosting economic co-operation, and were accompanied by military and even cultural co-operation in the form of exchanges of high-profile delegations. The pact was signed by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Russian counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, in Moscow. It led to the carving-up of Poland between Nazi Germany and the USSR, as well as the annexation by the USSR of eastern Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and northern Romania. The western parts of Ukraine and Belarus, formerly Polish territory, were also incorporated into the Soviet Union. At that point, believe some historians, a war in Europe became unavoidable. Why Russia signed the pact Soviet historical approaches currently in favour with Russia’s modern-day leadership suggest the treaty:
The records of the politburo meeting held on 19 August 1939 show that Stalin believed that war with Germany could be avoided, should the USSR form an anti-Nazi alliance with Britain and France. But, he warned, „the subsequent development of events after that would be unfavourable to the Soviet Union”. He told his colleagues that Germany was prepared to offer the USSR „complete freedom of action in the three Baltic countries”, and hinted that Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary would be ceded to the USSR as a „zone of influence”. At the same time, talks between the USSR, Britain and France over a co-ordinated response in the event of an attack by Nazi Germany, floundered. Britain and France would not acquiesce to a key Soviet demand, namely that Soviet troops be allowed free passage across Poland. Falsified history? One of the most enduringly controversial aspects of the pact was the Soviet policy to deny the existence of the secret protocol.
The policy built on Stalin’s written rejection of claims relating to Soviet-Nazi co-operation, published in 1948 and known as The Falsifiers of History. It was only in the late 1980s, the era of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms, that the Soviet government admitted the truth. The West never accepted – and viewed as illegal – the incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union. Certainly, many people from the Baltic states made their own feelings clear when, on 23 August 1989, more than two million of them linked hands along the entire length of their countries’ eastern borders to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the pact. The leading British historian, Orlando Figes, described the pact as „a constant thorn in Russia’s relations with neighbouring European states”.
He suggested it continued to underpin the perspective in those states of post-war Soviet oppression. The respected Polish-Belgian author Leopold Unger referred to the pact as the „most cynical operation of the World War II, and the founding document of the post-war Soviet empire in Europe”. Russian state archives do not allow historians unfettered access to the documents detailing Nazi-Soviet co-operation. In early August, Russia’s normally secretive SVR (foreign intelligence service) issued a rare statement asserting that the USSR had „had no other option than to sign” the pact. The ultimate blame, it claimed, lay with Britain and France, for scuppering the tripartite negotiations in the summer of 1939. This statement came just weeks after the Russian defence ministry published an essay by a high-ranking official, in which it was suggested that Poland was ultimately responsible for World War II, by refusing to acquiesce to „legitimate” Nazi territorial demands. Revisionist analysis? Does the appearance of such views suggest that a revisionist analysis of the pact is becoming widespread in the Russian establishment?
And is this linked to current, apparently official, efforts to rehabilitate Stalin as a „great statesman” – even if his victims are also recognised? Alexander Dyukov, a young Russian historian who claims Soviet repression has been systematically exaggerated, wrote: „Attempts to compare or equate Hitler’s regime with the USSR destroy the single historical focal point – our victory in the war – that holds together our society.” Mark Solonin, a liberal historian, takes a very different view. „In one short act, Stalin threw Europe into mayhem, and abandoned the Franco-British bloc, whose leaders had already promised Poland security guarantees, to the maniac in Berlin,” he wrote. „After the signing of the pact, he fell into a state that can only be described as foolhardy bravery. „A European war became unavoidable. It began precisely one week after the signing of the pact.” Russia increasingly maintains that the pact was a strategic document, driven primarily by considerations of self-defence. It strongly rejects the idea that Soviet collusion with the Third Reich was a factor in the destruction of Europe that soon ensued. |
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The pact is the most cynical operation of the World War II 
German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact
Written byThe Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica
The terms of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact were briefly as follows: the two countries agreed not to attack each other, either independently or in conjunction with other powers; not to support any third power that might attack the other party to the pact; to remain in consultation with each other upon questions touching their common interests; not to join any group of powers directly or indirectly threatening one of the two parties; to solve all differences between the two by negotiation or arbitration. The pact was to last for 10 years, with automatic extension for another 5 years unless either party gave notice to terminate it 1 year before its expiration.
To this public pact of nonaggression was appended a secret protocol, also reached on August 23, 1939, which divided the whole of eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Poland east of the line formed by the Narew, Vistula, and San rivers would fall under the Soviet sphere of influence. The protocol also assigned Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland to the Soviet sphere of influence and, further, broached the subject of the separation of Bessarabia from Romania. A secret supplementary protocol (signed September 28, 1939) clarified the Lithuanian borders. The Polish-German border was also determined, and Bessarabia was assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence. In a third secret protocol (signed January 10, 1941, by Count Friedrich Werner von Schulenberg and Molotov), Germany renounced its claims to portions of Lithuania in return for Soviet payment of a sum agreed upon by the two countries.
The public German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact caused consternation in the capitals of Britain and France. After Germany invaded Poland from the west on September 1, 1939, Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east on September 17, meeting the advancing Germans near Brest-Litovsk two days later. The partition of Poland was effected on September 29, at which time the dividing line between German and Soviet territory was changed in Germany’s favour, being moved eastward to the Bug River (i.e., the current Polish-Soviet frontier). The Soviets soon afterward sought to consolidate their sphere of influence as a defensive barrier to renewed German aggression in the east. Accordingly, the Soviet Union attacked Finland on November 30 and forced it in March 1940 to yield the Isthmus of Karelia and make other concessions. The Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia were annexed by the Soviet Union and were organized as Soviet republics in August 1940. The Nonaggression Pact became a dead letter on June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany, after having invaded much of western and central Europe, attacked the Soviet Union without warning in Operation Barbarossa.
The Soviet Union’s borders with Poland and Romania that were established after World War II roughly follow those established by the Nonaggression Pact in 1939–41. Until 1989 the Soviet Union denied the existence of the secret protocols because they were considered evidence of its involuntary annexation of the Baltic states. Soviet leaders were initially unwilling to restore prewar boundaries, but the transformations occurring within the Soviet Union in the early 1990s made it virtually impossible for Soviet leaders to combat declarations of independence from the Baltic states in 1991.
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GERMAN-SOVIET NONAGGRESSION PACT
GERMAN-SOVIET NONAGGRESSION PACT
On August 23, 1939–shortly before World War II (1939-45) broke out in Europe–enemies Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union surprised the world by signing the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, in which the two countries agreed to take no military action against each other for the next 10 years. With Europe on the brink of another major war, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) viewed the pact as a way to keep his nation on peaceful terms with Germany, while giving him time to build up the Soviet military. German chancellor Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) used the pact to make sure Germany was able to invade Poland unopposed. The pact also contained a secret agreement in which the Soviets and Germans agreed how they would later divide up Eastern Europe. The German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact fell apart in June 1941, when Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union.
GERMANY’S AGGRESSION IN EUROPE STOKES FEARS OF WAR
On March 15, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, breaking the agreement it had signed with Great Britain and France the year before in Munich, Germany. The invasion jolted British and French leaders and convinced them that Adolf Hitler, the German chancellor, could not be trusted to honor his agreements and was likely to keep committing aggressions until stopped by force or a massive deterrent.
In the previous year, Hitler had annexed Austria and had taken the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia; in March 1939, his tanks rolled into the rest of Czechoslovakia. It appeared that he was determined to undo the international order set up by the Treaty of Versailles, the 1919 peace settlement that ended World War I (1914-18). (The treaty, which required Germany to make numerous concessions and reparations, was highly unpopular with Hitler and his Nazi Party.) It also seemed that Hitler was planning to strike next against its neighbor Poland. To block him, France and Britain pledged on March 31, 1939, to guarantee Poland’s security and independence. The British and French also stepped up diplomatic engagement with the Soviet Union, trying to draw it closer by trade and other agreements to make Hitler see he would also have to face Joseph Stalin if he invaded Poland. But Hitler already knew the Soviets would not stand by if he tried to occupy Poland–an act that would extend the border of Germany right up to the Soviet Union. He also knew France and the Soviets had concluded a defense alliance several years earlier–a treaty that gave Stalin an additional reason to fight Germany if it ventured into Poland and triggered France’s pledge.
It was clear during the tense spring and summer of 1939 that little, if anything, could be taken for granted. In May, Germany and Italy signed a major treaty of alliance, and Hitler’s representatives had begun conducting important trade talks with the Soviets. Just two years prior, however, as Laurence Rees notes in “War of the Century: When Hitler Fought Stalin,” Hitler had called the Soviet Union “the greatest danger for the culture and civilization of mankind which has ever threatened it since the collapse of the … ancient world.”
HITLER AND STALIN RETHINK THEIR POSITIONS
Through the spring and summer of 1939, Hitler stepped up his demands on the Polish government in Warsaw, and pushed for allowing Germany to reclaim the port city of Danzig (a former German city internationalized by the Treaty of Versailles). Hitler also wanted to put a stop to the alleged mistreatment of Germans living in the western regions of Poland. At the same time, he advanced his plans for attacking Poland in August 1939 if his demands were not met. However, Hitler’s fervor for a war with Poland made his generals nervous. They knew Stalin’s purges of his military commanders in 1937 and 1938 had seriously weakened the Soviet army, but the Germans were leery of a campaign that could easily lead to the nightmare faced in World War I–a two-front war, in which they would be fighting Russians troops in the east and French and British troops in the west.
To avoid such a scenario, Hitler had cautiously begun exploring the possibility of a thaw in relations with Stalin. Several brief diplomatic exchanges in May 1939 fizzled by the next month. But in July, as tensions continued building across Europe and all major powers were feverishly casting about for potential allies, Hitler’s foreign minister dropped hints to Moscow that if Hitler invaded Poland, the Soviet Union might be permitted some Polish territory. This caught Stalin’s attention. On August 20, Hitler sent a personal message to the Soviet premier: War with Poland was imminent. If Hitler sent his foreign minister to Moscow for a vitally important discussion, would Stalin receive him? Stalin said yes.
THE GERMANS AND SOVIETS MAKE A DEAL
On August 22, 1939, German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893-1946) flew from Berlin to Moscow. He was soon inside the Kremlin, face-to-face with Stalin and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov (1890-1986), who had been working with von Ribbentrop to negotiate an agreement. (The Soviet minister is also the namesake for the incendiary device known as a Molotov cocktail.) Ribbentrop carried a proposal from Hitler that both countries commit to a nonaggression pact that would last 100 years. Stalin replied that 10 years would be sufficient. The proposal also stipulated that neither country would aid any third party that attacked either signatory. Finally, the proposal contained a secret protocol specifying the spheres of influence in Eastern Europe both parties would accept after Hitler conquered Poland. The Soviet Union would acquire the eastern half of Poland, along with Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia.
During the Kremlin meeting, Ribbentrop several times telephoned Hitler, who was nervously awaiting news at his country estate in Bavaria. Finally, in the early hours of August 23, Ribbentrop called to say that everything had been settled. As Ian Kershaw notes in “Hitler: 1936–1945: Nemesis,” the German chancellor was ecstatic. He congratulated his foreign minister and said the pact “will hit like a bombshell.” It neutralized the French-Soviet treaty, which would reassure Hitler’s generals, and cleared the way for Germany’s attack on Poland.
AFTERMATH
The public part of the Moscow agreement was announced with great fanfare on August 25, 1939, the day Hitler had planned to launch his “blitzkrieg” (quick, surprise attacks) strike east into Poland. Earlier this same day, however, Great Britain and France, knowing the Nazi-Soviet agreement was pending, reacted by formalizing their pledge to Poland in a treaty declaring each would fight in Poland’s defense if it were attacked.
Hitler was incensed by this counterthrust but quickly cancelled his order for the invasion. Then, in a wild gamble that France and Great Britain would not meet their treaty obligations to Poland, and knowing he had nothing to fear from the Soviet army, Hitler ordered his troops to strike east into Poland on September 1, 1939. Two days later, on September 3, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany. World War II had begun. And less than two years after that, Hitler scrapped his pact with Stalin and sent some 3 million Nazi soldiers pouring into the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.
Four years later, with no hope of a German victory in World War II, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. On May 8, the Allies accepted Nazi Germany’s surrender.
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The Nazi-Soviet Pacts: A Half-Century Later
The Nazi-Soviet Pacts: A Half-Century Later
Early on August 22, 1939, the world was startled to learn from an announcement in the Soviet press that German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop would arrive in Moscow on the following day to sign a nonaggression pact. Equipped with instructions from Adolf Hitler authorizing him to sign both a treaty and a secret protocol that would enter into force as soon as signed by the two countries (rather than when ratified later), Ribbentrop left for Moscow that evening. At the airport, the German delegation was met by deputy commissar for foreign affairs, Vladimir P. Potemkin, who earlier that year had declined an invitation to meet with British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax.
Stalin and Molotov, the commissar for foreign affairs, held several conversations in the Kremlin with Ribbentrop and the other German diplomats. During the night of August 23-24 an agreement was reached on all points; the pact and a secret protocol were signed; a celebration party followed in which the participants drank toasts to each other, to German-Soviet friendship and to the absent Hitler.
II
The nonaggression pact, which was published, provided that Germany and the Soviet Union would not attack the other or assist any third power at war with the other, thereby assuring each of the neutrality of the other party should either decide to attack a third country. They promised not to join groups of powers directed against the other and to settle by peaceful means all differences that might arise between them. The pact was to last for ten years and then an additional five years unless a notice of termination were given a year before its expiration.
Immediate effectiveness also applied to a secret protocol attached to the published treaty and governed by a special agreement to ensure its secrecy-an agreement that the Germans maintained until the end of the Third Reich and that the Soviets are only now considering breaking. This protocol provided that Finland, Estonia and Latvia were to be in the Soviet sphere of interest; Lithuania, enlarged by the Vilna area then in Poland, was assigned to Germany. Initially, Germany wanted to divide Latvia between the two powers at the Daugava (Dvina) River; on Soviet insistence, Latvia was quickly turned over entirely to the Soviet Union. As for Poland, with the exception of the Vilna area signed over to Lithuania for inclusion in the German sphere, it was to be partitioned along the line of the Pissa, Narev, Vistula and San rivers. This line divided the core area of Polish settlement within prewar Poland, and the two powers agreed to review at a later time the question of whether or not a rump Polish state would suit their convenience. And during Ribbentrop’s second visit to Moscow on September 28, 1939, Germany accepted a Soviet proposal whereby the territory between the Bug and Vistula rivers, together with a small piece of Polish territory in the north, would be traded to Germany in exchange for Soviet control of the bulk of Lithuania. In effect, this agreement left the question of any Polish state in the tender hands of the Germans.
Further south, the original partition scheme of August 23 provided that the Soviet Union could prosecute its interest in Bessarabia-which Russia had taken from its ally Romania in 1878 only to lose it after World War I-while the Germans declared their complete political disinterest in southeast Europe. It is now known that Ribbentrop was authorized to go even further and agree to Soviet control of Istanbul and the Straits, but Stalin evidently did not ask for this.
The new agreements worked out on September 28 also included a friendship treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union (which was later supplemented by a boundary protocol), a confidential agreement on the exchange of populations across the borders separating the Soviet and German spheres in eastern Europe, a secret protocol to the effect that neither would tolerate Polish agitation concerning territory seized by the other, and several exchanges covering major extensions of the economic agreement that had been signed between the two countries on August 19. These latter agreements were designed to help the Germans break the British wartime blockade by assisting in acquiring raw materials that could then be shipped across the Soviet Union. While these arrangements to support the German war effort were kept secret, the two powers publicly called for an end to the war which, now that they had divided Poland between them, served no further purpose in the opinions of Berlin and Moscow. It is, of course, essential to recall that between Ribbentrop’s two trips to the Soviet capital, the partners of the Nazi-Soviet pact had both attacked Poland; their friendship, in Stalin’s phraseology, had been „cemented with blood.”1
III
As is already clear from the description of the text of the August agreements, they provided the Germans with a green light for an attack on Poland and were so interpreted by all at the time. Unlike prior nonaggression pacts signed by the Soviet Union, this one contained no provision that it would become invalid if either party attacked a third country.2 Furthermore, the agreements assured the Germans that if England and France honored their promise to go to war on Poland’s behalf, the disappearance of the hated Polish state would provide a common border with Russia; this would be a friendly Russia, committed to helping Germany break the British blockade. From the Soviet Union itself, Germany could draw on supplies of oil, grain and nonferrous metals needed for the conduct of war against the western powers; across the Soviet Union, Germany would be able to obtain other important raw materials from the Near East, East Asia and possibly the western hemisphere. Above all, Germany could concentrate all its forces, after the quick defeat of Poland, on the western front.
For the Soviet Union-well informed by its espionage network that the German attack on Poland, when it came, would be a preliminary step to an attack by Germany in the west-the agreement appeared to provide insulation from what was already being referred to as the „Second Imperialist War.” The agreement also provided great accretions of territory, the disappearance of the Polish state, which the Soviets hated as much as the Germans did, and an encouragement to Germany, which had drawn back from war in 1938, to launch a war with the western powers that Stalin assumed would weaken both parties equally, satisfying Soviet belief in „the need for a war in Europe.”3 In addition, the pact assured the leaders in Moscow that Japan, whose troops had just been defeated by the Red Army in clashes at Nomonhan on the border between Manchuria and Outer Mongolia,4 would not dare attempt a new attack on East Asian territories belonging to or controlled by the Soviet Union.
For Poland, the pact clearly meant total isolation in the face of what looked like an imminent German attack. Though not immediately apparent to the Polish government, it also meant that any hope of holding out against German troops in eastern Poland during the winter of 1939-40 could not be realized, because the Soviet Union would invade Poland from the east and seize the territory allocated to it by the secret German-Soviet agreements.
For Great Britain and France, the pact meant that all their hopes of a multifront war against Germany were dashed. In pursuit of those hopes, drawn from a belief that a powerful Germany could most likely be defeated only by a combination of allies, they had made a long series of concessions to the Soviet Union in lengthy negotiations during the summer of 1939; for example, the proposal that a Soviet declaration of war on Germany would be contingent on a prior declaration of war by Britain and France. Until August London had postponed signing an alliance with Warsaw in the hope that one with Moscow could be arranged. Now that this possibility was clearly excluded, the treaty with Poland was rushed to signature on August 25. Determined to go to war at the next instance of German aggression if it were resisted, the British government hoped that an obvious and public stand might still deter Germany from war. In a special letter to Hitler, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said that London would go to war with or without allies; he warned both Hitler and Benito Mussolini that once the war started it would not end after any defeat of Poland but would be continued until Allied victory.
For the French, as for the British, the pact dashed any hopes of assistance from the Soviet Union against the German menace. The various French schemes advanced in the winter of 1939-40 for attacking the Caucasus oil fields and for aiding the Finns in their defense against Soviet attack, while occupying the Swedish iron mines along the way, can be seen in part as a reflection of the disappointment and anger in Paris.
For Japan, the pact was a traumatic experience, partly because the Japanese had been involved in fighting with the Soviet Union and wanted help from their German Anti-Comintern Pact partners, which would now not be forthcoming, and partly because they imagined themselves still involved in negotiations with Berlin and Rome for an alliance against Moscow. The government in Tokyo fell in the face of what looked like a humiliating diplomatic reversal, but successor cabinets in Japan failed to draw long-term conclusions from the way Germany had treated them.
For fascist Italy, which had been among the first of the major powers to develop good relations with the Soviet Union, the Germans appeared to have gone rather far, but at the time Mussolini was not prepared to argue the point. Like the Germans, Italy’s leaders had considered the Anti-Comintern Pact as directed primarily against England, and this reinforcement of anti-British forces could only be welcome to Rome.
The United States had been the last of the major powers to recognize the Soviet regime. It had done so in part as a counterweight to possible aggressors in Asia or Europe. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who did not share the then common belief in the great strength of the French army, had tried hard to warn Stalin of the dangers of aligning the Soviet Union with Germany, pointing out in the summer of 1939 that a Germany victorious in western Europe would then be a menace to all other countries, including the Soviet Union and United States. As these warnings fell on deaf ears in Moscow, Washington could only observe the outbreak of war in Europe in sadness. It would adopt a policy for keeping out of that war opposite from the one followed by the Soviet Union. Instead of helping Hitler, the United States would assist his foes.
IV
How had the agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union come about? Why had the two powers, which for years had made numerous nasty comments about each other in public, worked out secret agreements to partition eastern Europe between them? What led them to call jointly upon the other nations of the world to accept this division, which ended the independence of Poland as well as Czechoslovakia, most of which Germany had swallowed and whose permanent demise the Soviet Union had legally recognized just before invading Poland? The motives of the two partners were different, and we are far better informed on those of the Germans; the motives for each must therefore be examined separately.
With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Germany began following a policy that called for the establishment of a dictatorship inside the country, the massive rearmament of a racially aware population and, thereafter, a series of wars to secure land on which the German population could feed itself and grow ever larger. It was obvious from a look at the map that most of Europe’s agricultural land lay in the east, primarily in the Soviet Union. In the official doctrine of the Nazi state, the peoples living there, most of them of Slavic stock, were racially „inferior.” By what Hitler considered an extraordinary stroke of good fortune for the Germans, these people were now ruled by even more inferior and incapable Jews who had come to power as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution-a revolution in which the at least minimally capable old Germanic ruling class of Russia had been replaced by total incompetents.
Hitler believed that the seizure of vast land masses from the Slavic people would be a simple matter and that the inhabitants of the conquered areas could be easily displaced or murdered; before this could be done, Germany’s position in Europe had to be strengthened. In particular the French, whose army stood perilously close to Germany’s most important industrial area, the Ruhr, had to be crushed, and the British, who could obviously not be separated from them, had to be driven off the continent. The war against the west could, it was believed, be won most easily from a base that included Austria and Czechoslovakia under German control, and these states had accordingly been absorbed into Germany as preliminary steps.
During the years when the Germans were rearming and moving first against Austria and then Czechoslovakia, all soundings from the Soviet Union to improve relations were waved aside. There was, from the perspective of Berlin, nothing that Moscow could do for them under these circumstances. In internal affairs, Germany’s Communist Party had once assisted the Nazis in destroying the Weimar Republic by targeting the Social Democratic Party as the main enemy, but now the Communist Party was itself the target of the regime’s destructive fury. In the field of rearmament, the Soviet Union had provided the German Republic with the opportunity for secret work in the areas prohibited to Germany by the Versailles Treaty of 1919: armored warfare, poisonous gases and air warfare. The new government in Berlin, however, was carrying out its rearmament program on a vastly greater scale and increasingly in the open so that secret facilities in the Soviet Union were no longer of any special use. As for the building up of a huge blue-water navy, then under way or being planned for war against Britain and the United States, that was a field in which the Soviet Union had never been of assistance to Germany.
In the diplomatic field, there similarly had been nothing in Berlin’s eyes that the Russians could have done to help during the years 1933-38. Neither Austria nor Czechoslovakia had a common border with the Soviet Union, and in its preparations for seizing Austria and attacking Czechoslovakia, Germany ignored the Soviet Union entirely. Under these circumstances, the repeated efforts made in Berlin by Stalin’s special representatives for the purpose of warming German-Soviet relations were invariably ignored. In the winter of 1938-39 this situation began to change.
Germany had planned to attack Czechoslovakia in 1938, expecting to annex that country as the result of an isolated war. But that project did not work out as Hitler had intended; the very device by which he had hoped to isolate his victim from outside support-the presence of over three million Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia-ended up involving Germany in negotiations that ceded to Germany the territory on which the Sudeten Germans lived. To his subsequent regret, Hitler had drawn back from war and had settled for the ostensible rather than the real aims of German policy.5 Thereafter, he plotted to seize the rest of Czechoslovakia after a „decent interval” while preparing for war with the western powers, which he now intended to launch in the near future. Such a war, in his opinion, would require a quiet eastern border and the subordination of the two eastern neighbors, Hungary and Poland.
In the winter of 1938-39, this aim was attained with regard to Hungary but not with regard to Poland. The litmus test was joining the Anti-Comintern Pact. After much hesitation, Hungary took this symbolic step of obeisance to Germany, but Poland simply would not agree to it. The leaders of Poland were as anticommunist as anyone in Europe, but they were not about to give up the revived independence of their country without a fight. On all other questions they were prepared to make some compromises, but formal obeisance to Berlin was out of the question. It took Hitler a while to recognize that Warsaw meant what it said, but once he realized that the Polish regime would not subordinate itself to the whim of Berlin, he decided that a preliminary war against Poland would be necessary before Germany attacked the west, unless, of course, the western powers joined Poland.
It was in this context that the German picture of relations with the Soviet Union changed. The Soviet Union had a long common border with Poland as well as a long tradition of hostility. A partition of Poland with the Soviet Union appeared to offer a number of advantages to Germany: it would isolate Poland for a quick attack; it might deter Britain and France from aiding Poland and going to war against Germany until the latter picked its own time to attack them; it would open the way for Germany to acquire much needed materials from and across the Soviet Union, thereby invalidating any blockade of Germany even before it was instituted.
The prospect of an alignment with Moscow looked even more attractive to Berlin at a time when it was having difficulty recruiting other allies for the coming war with Britain and France. The Italians eventually agreed to sign an alliance, the so-called Pact of Steel of May 1939, but the Germans recalled that Italy had urged a compromise in 1938 and had, at the time of signing the alliance, made it clear that several years of peace were needed to prepare Italy for the confrontation with the west. Germany’s other major prospective ally, Japan, did not want an alliance against the west at all. Engaged during prior years and again during 1939 in border clashes with the Soviet Union, Japan wanted an alliance against that country, not against Britain and France who, in their eyes, were likely to be supported by the United States. Here was an ally who wanted to march in the wrong direction; an alliance with the Soviet Union looked like a much better prospect to Hitler.
Since Hitler believed that the attack on the west was the difficult but necessary prelude for the subsequent simple and fast attack on the Soviet Union, concessions could easily be made to Moscow. Whatever the Soviets wanted, they could get, including a few things they did not even ask for. These calculations were based on the assumption that once Germany had won its big war in the west, it could take back everything given away in the east-and more. The real question was not, therefore, the terms on which an agreement might be reached but whether the Soviet Union would be prepared to arrive at an agreement in the time frame within which the Germans were working and whether they would provide assurances of economic support as well as the diplomatic aid Germany wanted.
It was from this position that Berlin examined the soundings from Moscow in 1939 and interpreted Stalin’s speech of March 10, 1939, and the replacement of Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov by Molotov in early May as signs of Soviet seriousness. The vast publicity attendant upon negotiations by the Soviet Union with Britain and France left the Germans in some doubt as to whether their secret talks with the Soviets would really produce an agreement, but the very fact that their own negotiations were being kept secret and that an economic agreement was being worked out combined to make the prospects look good. In order to create a common border, the disappearance of the smaller countries between the two powers was an inviting prospect for Berlin, and ending the independence of these countries by partition with Moscow was acceptable, with the exact terms and demarcations being of no special importance. Here was the chance for Germany to secure its eastern border while fighting a war in the west, and if an agreement with the Soviet Union provided this condition, all the better. But, of course, once the agreement with the Soviets had served its purpose of shielding a German victory over Britain and France, then the campaign in the east against the Soviet Union would follow, hampered neither by the paper barrier of the non-aggression pact nor by the need to keep large forces in the west.
If this was Hitler’s perception, it was one that in its essentials was supported enthusiastically by others in the upper levels of Germany. Many of the diplomats had long believed that good relations with Russia, whatever its government, would be good for Germany (though a few were sufficiently alarmed by the prospect of a German-Soviet agreement to warn the United States). The German military leaders could hardly contain their eagerness for war against Poland and welcomed anything that might lead to that happy event. The prospect of a one-front war made the agreement with the Soviet Union all the more desirable. A few old Nazi Party members were affronted by the tie to the center of communism, which Nazi propaganda had long pictured as the great enemy, but such rumblings had no impact on German policy. For a short time, Berlin was willing to sign an agreement with Moscow.
V
On the Soviet side, a different ideology by a different route led to the same result. Assuming that the capitalist world would remain united against the Soviet state, and incapable for ideological reasons of comprehending the special nature of the Nazi state, Stalin had repeatedly approached the Germans for some agreement that would assist them in turning against what he perceived to be the capitalist imperialist rivals of the Third Reich. A war between Germany and the western powers looked to the Soviet leader like the best prospect for both the safety and the future expansion of Soviet power. Repeated rebuffs by Berlin did not discourage Stalin from making more approaches. In 1938, when it looked as if war might break out over a German attack on Czechoslovakia, a country with which the Soviet Union had a defensive alliance contingent on France honoring its alliance with that country, the Russians took a public stance in support of Czechoslovakia while privately declining any opportunity to assist that country. The fact that the Germans funked at war-by contrast with the Japanese who had thrown themselves into war with China without encouragement from anyone-made it look in 1939 as if an agreement with Germany might have the effect of encouraging that country to take the plunge.
In this context, Stalin believed that negotiations with the western powers for an agreement, accompanied by plenty of publicity, might induce the Germans to come to a settlement and to go forward with their plan for war against Poland and the west simultaneously or in sequence. From what evidence we have, it would appear that three factors required clarification in Soviet eyes:
-whether the Germans were serious about an agreement, an issue all the more important to Moscow because in January 1939 the Germans had aborted an economic mission to them under circumstances that left the Soviets both mystified and annoyed;
-whether or not the Germans were prepared to make the concessions that Stalin wanted in terms of territory in Poland;
-whether the Germans saw the need for the disappearance of the independent states of eastern Europe in essentially the same way as Stalin did.
As Stalin subsequently explained to the British ambassador, „the U.S.S.R. had wanted to change the old equilibrium. . . . England and France had wanted to preserve it. Germany had also wanted to make a change in the equilibrium, and this common desire to get rid of the old equilibrium had created the basis for the rapprochement with Germany.”6
The negotiations showed the Russians that the Germans were indeed serious about sharing eastern Europe by division with them, contrary to the position of the western powers who hoped to preserve the independence of the countries there. From Stalin’s point of view, therefore, it was a matter of stringing along the western powers in public by steadily increasing Soviet demands, a procedure to put pressure on the Germans to raise their offers to the Soviets in private. When Hitler wrote Stalin a personal letter asking him to receive Ribbentrop promptly, the Soviet leader realized that the time had come to take final action. Further stalling would force Germany to postpone an attack on Poland since good campaign weather in eastern Europe was coming to an end. By that time Moscow had already signed a long-term economic agreement with Berlin-a clear sign that the Soviet Union had no intention of joining Britain and France. Now was the moment to receive the German foreign minister and hammer out the details of an agreement. The „old equilibrium” would indeed disappear.
VI
Once the agreement of August 23, 1939, and its secret protocol had been signed, Germany felt free to go to war with Poland. And, after some last-minute efforts to separate that country from its western allies, Germany attacked. Since Hitler intended to strike in the west after beating Poland, it did not appear especially important to him whether the war with France and England came immediately or was postponed. The key point was to obtain a peaceful border in the east for a subsequent campaign in the west, and here was his chance to get it. Once it became certain that the western powers would stand by Poland, he did not even wait out the extra day his own timetable allowed. Acting on the lessons he had drawn from the Munich agreement, Hitler was worried that someone might arrange a compromise at the last minute and cheat him out of war, as had happened in 1938. Now was the time to strike-and the sooner the better.
Immediately following Germany’s attack on Poland, Hitler urged the Soviet Union to seize the territories assigned to it, and he was somewhat unhappy that Stalin did not move sooner. But once the Soviet Union had signed a truce with Japan, it moved quickly against both Poland and the Baltic states. Since the Lithuanians had refused German pressure to join in the war against Poland, they were traded to the Russians for portions of central Poland, as already mentioned; thus the two partners of the pact worked out the details of dividing eastern Europe. When the Russians ran into trouble in their attempt to impose their will on Finland, Germany supported the Soviet position, while communist parties in western Europe were ordered by Moscow to do what they could to undermine resistance to the Germans. The Soviet Union provided vast quantities of raw materials to Germany under the trade agreement and did what they could to support the German navy’s war against Allied shipping. In exchange, the Germans delivered some machinery and naval equipment to Russia.
As the war continued in 1940, the cooperation between the two partners appeared to go well. The Soviet Union assisted Germany in its strike at Narvik in the Norwegian campaign and was delighted by the German victory there. Germany’s triumphs in the west during May and June of 1940 were made possible, on the one hand, by the pact with the Soviets, which enabled Germany to concentrate its forces on one front at a time when it was not yet exhausted, as it had been by the time the Soviets signed a separate peace in the First World War. On the other hand, these triumphs enabled the Soviets to end the vestiges of independence still left to the Baltic states,7 to put renewed pressure on Finland and to annex not only Bessarabia but a substantial additional piece of Romania as well.
What Stalin did not realize, or would not believe, was that by this time Germany was already planning an attack on the Soviet Union, an attack Hitler originally scheduled for the fall of 1940. Soviet action against Finland and Romania provided Germany with allies on the two flanks of the coming front. As friction mounted, the Soviet Union expressed a willingness to join the Tripartite Pact signed by Germany, Italy and Japan in September 1940, but the Germans were not interested. Neither growling nor pleading by the Soviets had any influence on Berlin. The acceleration of Soviet deliveries of supplies to Germany from its own stocks or across its territory from the Far East had no more effect on German policy than the simultaneous acceleration of American deliveries to Britain (with the passage of the lend-lease program) affected Hitler’s assurance to Japan that Germany would go to war with the United States if Japan got into such a war as a result of the latter attacking Britain. The German government went to war with others on the basis of its calculations, not on the policies of those it planned to strike.
The bloody fighting that began with the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, pointed up the terrible miscalculations made by both parties to the Nazi-Soviet pact. The Germans would discover that heading east before finishing the war in the west was a dangerous step. They would learn the hard way that their beliefs about the inferiority of Slavs and the weakness of the Soviet Union were delusions derived from the false doctrines of racial determinism. At least a few Germans would also learn that the establishment of a tier of independent states between Germany and the Soviet Union at the end of World War I had been an enormous advantage, not a disadvantage, for Germany. And along with the great blessing in the Versailles Treaty of maintenance of German unity, it had been destroyed by the Germans themselves.
The Soviet leadership was similarly deluded by its own ideology. Just as many Germans had believed in the racial inferiority of the east European peoples, Stalin appeared to have believed in the Marxist-Leninist nonsense about fascism as the tool of monopoly-capitalism struggling for markets, investments and raw materials-a view that left no room for an independent Nazi ideology of racial agrarian expansionism. The shocked surprise with which the Soviet leadership met the German attack-when their own intelligence had warned them, when the British had warned them and when the Americans had provided them with the outlines of the German invasion plan-has to be understood, in my judgment, as the triumph of preconceptions over reality. In 1927, when there had been no signs of an invasion of the Soviet Union, there was a war panic in Moscow. Now that all the signs were in place with innumerable warnings, what should not be could not be.
What made the Soviet miscalculation so horrendous was, of course, that by the time Stalin realized that Chamberlain and Roosevelt were correct in their belief that Germany could be defeated best by an alliance of powers, the Soviets had helped the Germans drive the Allies out of northern, western and southern Europe, leaving the Soviets alone with them on the continent in the east. Millions and millions of Soviet citizens would lose their lives over this disastrous miscalculation; only the incredible endurance of a suffering civilian population, the bravery of the Red Army’s officers and soldiers and the diversion of German manpower and resources to an escalating war against the western powers allowed the regime to survive.
VII
During and after the war, the Soviet Union offered a variety of new explanations for signing the pact. Official Soviet statements originally depicted the pact as an instrument of peace, but this line was abandoned after June 1941. It was also asserted that the western powers were about to make a Munich-type agreement with Germany, a somewhat curious line of argument that had to be abandoned in the fall of 1939 when the Soviet Union urged them to make peace with Germany on the assumption that both Poland and Czechoslovakia were to disappear.8 Other public arguments, then and later, asserted that the western powers would not make sufficient concessions to the Soviet Union, a point that has to be interpreted in terms of Stalin’s own belief that ending the independence of the countries of eastern Europe was in the interest of the Soviet Union as well as Germany. The Soviets also claimed afterward that Russia’s expansion westward provided an additional buffer against a German invasion, though the events of 1941 would show that the shift from the old defended border to a new one weakened, rather than strengthened, the ability of the Red Army to hold off the Germans.
Until recently Soviet publications have either ignored the existence of the secret protocol of August 23, 1939, or denounced it as a forgery. This question has arisen in face of renewed and ever more open agitation for a greater degree of autonomy in the Baltic states-perhaps real independence-and an entirely new situation in Poland. A new look at the events of August 1939 has major current political relevance.
There cannot be any doubt that the documents that record the partition of eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are authentic. The originals were deliberately destroyed by the Germans but only after they had been microfilmed along with many other important documents.
Perhaps a new perception of the past will enable the Soviet Union to see the secret protocol as part of a mistaken and adventurous policy by Stalin-a policy that cost Russia the most horrendous losses, and for which the country had not properly prepared. As Europe moves into a new phase, perhaps the Soviets as well as the Germans may come to see that allowing the peoples living between them to enjoy a real independence can contribute to the security of all countries.
1 Stalin to Ribbentrop, Dec. 22, 1939, quoted in Roman Umiastowski, Russia and the Polish Republic, 1918-1941, London: Aquafondata, 1945, p. 182.
2 It may be worth noting what Maxim Litvinov said on this subject at a speech given to the League of Nations on September 14, 1935: „Not every pact of nonaggression is concluded with a view to strengthening general peace. While nonaggression pacts concluded by the Soviet Union with its neighbors include a special clause for suspending the pact in cases of aggression committed by one of the parties against any third state, we know of other pacts of nonaggression which have no such clause. This means that a state which has secured by such a pact of nonaggression its rear or its flank obtains the facility of attacking with impunity third states.” (Quoted in Jane Degras, ed., Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, 1939-1941, Vol. 3, London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1953, p. 145.)
4 There is now an excellent study of this conflict; Alvin D. Coox, Nomonhan: Japan against Russia, 1939, 2 Vols., Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985.
6 Sir Stafford Cripps to the Foreign Office, July 16, 1940, Public Record Office, FO 371/24846, f. 10, N 6526/30/38. The document is quoted with permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
8 It has been suggested at times that Moscow reacted to the news of talks in London between the secretary of the Department of Overseas Trade, Robert S. Hudson, and a German official, Helmuth Wohlthat. Since we now know that the Soviet decision to sign a long-term trade agreement with Germany preceded those talks, that theory must be discarded regardless of how the Hudson-Wohlthat talks are interpreted. In view of the information available by that time, the author called attention to this point in the preface to the second printing of his Germany and the Soviet Union 1939-1941, Leyden: Brill, 1972, p.vi.
Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and the USSR (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact)
Features & Opinion
Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and the USSR (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact)
Topic: Vladimir Putin visits Poland
Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the USSR (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact)
19:18 20/08/2009
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939. It has been called a major factor in the outbreak of World War II, and determined the fate of the Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Western Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Moldavians.
As a result of this pact, these nations were incorporated into the Soviet Union. Despite the Soviet Union’s disintegration in 1991, the pact still determines many geopolitical realities in modern Europe.
According to the non-aggression pact, the Soviet Union and Germany pledged to “refrain from any violence, any aggressive action, and any attack against each other, either individually or together with other states.” Moreover, the two sides promised not to support coalitions of other countries that may take action against the parties to the agreement. This was the death of the idea of “collective security” in Europe. It became impossible to curtail actions of the aggressor (which Nazi Germany would later become) by concerted effort of peace-loving countries.
The pact was signed by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and his German counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop. The pact was supplemented with secret additional protocol, which delimitated the Soviet and German spheres of influence in Eastern Europe in the event of “territorial rearrangement.” This rearrangement was not long in coming. The pact was ratified by the USSR Supreme Soviet within a week of its signing. The deputies were not told about the secret additional protocol, which were never ratified. On the day after the pact’s ratification, September 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland
http://www.istorik.ru/library/documents/molotov_ribbentrop/
In full accordance with the secret protocol, the original of which was found in the archives of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee in the mid-1990s, German troops did not invade Poland’s eastern regions, populated predominantly by Byelorussians and Ukrainians, or the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Subsequently, Soviet troops entered these territories. On September 17, 1939, Soviet troops marched into Poland’s eastern regions.
Relying on left-wing political forces in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, from 1939 to 1940 the Stalinist leadership established control over these countries. As a result of an armed conflict with Finland, which was also listed in the protocol as part of the sphere of Soviet interests, the USSR annexed part of Karelia and areas adjacent to Leningrad (now St Petersburg) from that country.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1940-1945) wrote in his memoirs that the signing of the pact between Berlin and Moscow meant a failure of British and French diplomacy. These countries failed either to direct Nazi aggression against the USSR, or turn the Soviet Union into their ally before the outbreak of World War II. Although the Soviet Union gained two years of peace and considerable additional territories along its Western borders, it did not benefit from the pact unequivocally. As a result of the pact, Germany avoided a war on two fronts from 1939 to 1944, routed Poland, France and several small European countries one after another, and had an army with two years of combat experience at its disposal for attacking the USSR in 1941. Many historians believe that Nazi Germany benefited more from the pact. (Sovetskaya istoriographiya, RGGU Publishers, 1992).
The pact’s political assessment
The main text of the non-aggression pact was an about face in Soviet ideology, which had previously strongly denounced Nazism. However, it did not go beyond the established practice of international relations on the eve of World War II. Poland, for instance, also signed a similar pact with Germany in 1934. Other countries signed or tried to sign such pacts as well. But the secret protocol to the pact was undoubtedly contrary to international law.
On August 28, 1939, the sides signed an explanation to the additional secret protocol, which delimitated spheres of influence “in the event of the territorial and political rearrangement of regions that are part of the Polish state.” The Soviet sphere of influence included Poland’s territory to the east of the Pissa, Narew, Bug, Vistula, and San rivers. This line approximately coincided with the so-called Curzon Line, which was supposed to delineate Poland’s eastern border after World War I. Apart from Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia, the Soviet negotiators expressed interest in Bessarabia, which had been lost in 1919. They received a satisfactory answer from the German side to the effect that Germany was “totally uninterested politically in these regions.” Subsequently, this territory became part of the Moldavian SSR in the USSR. (For more details, consult the book “1939: uroki istorii,” Institute of World History at the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1990, p. 452).
The provisions of the secret protocol, drafted by the Stalinist leadership together with Hitler’s associates, were obviously illegal. This is why both Stalin and Hitler preferred to conceal this document both from the world public, and, with the exception of very narrow circles within the government, their own people and authorities. The existence of the protocol was concealed in the USSR up to 1989, until a special commission on the political and legal evaluation of the pact, set up by the Congress of Soviet People’s Deputies, presented the congress with evidence of the pact’s existence. Having received this evidence, in its resolution on December 24, 1989, the congress denounced the secret protocol, emphasizing that together with other Soviet-German documents, this protocol “had become invalid since Germany’s attack on the USSR, that is, since June 22, 1941.”
While recognizing the immorality of this secret agreement between Stalin and Hitler, it’s impossible to consider the pact and its protocols outside the context of the then military and political situation in Europe. According to Stalin’s plan, the pact was supposed to become a response to the policy of appeasing Hitler, which Britain and France had been conducting for several years with the aim of setting the two totalitarian regimes at loggerheads, and turning Nazi aggression primarily against the USSR.
By 1939, Germany had returned and had remilitarized the Rhine region, had fully reequipped its army in violation of the Versailles Treaty, had annexed Austria, and had established control over Czechoslovakia. After Hitler, the latter’s territory was claimed by Hungary and Poland and they received parts of Czechoslovakia’s territory. This was largely the result of the policy of the Western powers. On September 29, 1938, the prime ministers of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy signed an agreement in Munich on the partitioning of Czechoslovakia, which was called in Soviet history the “Munich conspiracy.”
On March 22, 1939, the Wehrmacht troops occupied the Lithuanian port of Klajpeda (its German name was Memel), and before long Hitler endorsed a plan for Poland’s occupation. Therefore, the frequent attributions that World War II was triggered exclusively by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, do not conform to reality. Sooner or later, Hitler would have attacked Poland even without the pact. During 1933-1941, the majority of European countries were trying to come to terms with Nazi Germany, thereby encouraging Hitler’s seizure of other territories. All the great European powers, such as Britain, France, and the USSR, were holding talks with Hitler until August 23, 1939. (For more details about the talks in Moscow in the summer of 1939, consult the book “1939: lessons of history,” pp. 298-308).
By mid-August, the multipartite talks entered a decisive phase. Each side was pursuing its own goals. By August 19, the the Anglo-French-Soviet talks deadlocked. The Soviet government agreed to receive German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Moscow on August 26-27. In a personal message to Stalin, Hitler asked him to agree to Ribbentrop’s arrival on August 22 or August 23 at the latest. Moscow agreed, and the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union was signed 14 hours after Ribbentrop’s arrival. http://www.rian.ru/society/20080505/106556830.html
Moral assessment of the pact
Immediately after its signing, the pact evoked criticism from many participants in the international communist movement, and representatives of other left-wing parties. Unaware of the existence of secret protocols, they viewed the pact as a conspiracy with Nazism, the worst form of imperialist reaction. The agreement was unthinkable for the proponents of left-wing ideology. Many scholars even believe that the pact started the crisis of the communist movement by aggravating Stalin’s mistrust of foreign communist parties, and contributing to his decision to disband the Communist International in 1943.
After the war, realizing that the pact was undermining his reputation as the world’s number one fighter against Nazism, Staling did all he could to justify it in Soviet and world historiography. This task was made more complicated when the Americans, who had captured Germany’s west, found German documentation, leading them to assume that the pact might have been supplemented with secret protocols.
Therefore, a “historic document,” entitled “Falsifiers of History” was drafted in 1948 with Stalin’s participation (many scholars believe that Stalin was its author). Its provisions laid the foundations for the official interpretation of the events of 1939-1941, which remained immutable until the late 1980s.
The essence of this “document” came down to the explanation that the pact was a “brilliant” step by the Soviet leaders, which allowed them to exploit the “inter-imperialistic contradictions” between bourgeois Western democracies and Nazi Germany. Without its signing, the USSR would have ostensibly become a victim of the “crusade” of the capitalist countries against the worlds first socialist state.
The provisions of this “document” could not have been questioned in the Soviet Union even after Stalin’s death. In Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev’s times, Stalin’s name in text books for schools and colleges was increasingly replaced with the words “the national leadership” or “Soviet diplomacy.” (Source-Soviet Historiography, RGGU Publishers, 1992).
This approach existed until Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the late 1980s when the participants of the first Congress of USSR People’s Deputies demanded disclosure of the circumstances surrounding the signing of the pact, which largely contributed to the incorporation of a number of regions into the Soviet Union.
On December 24, 1989, the Congress of the USSR People’s Deputies, which was the supreme body of state authority in the USSR at that time, adopted a resolution “On the Political and Legal Assessment of the Soviet-German Non-aggression Treaty of 1939.” The resolution officially denounced the secret protocols as the “act of personal power,” which in no way reflected the “will of the Soviet people who are not responsible for this conspiracy.” It emphasized that “Stalin and Molotov conducted talks on the secret protocol with Germany while keeping it from the Soviet people, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and the entire party, the Supreme Soviet, and the Soviet government.”
http://www.lawmix.ru/docs_cccp.php?id=1241
http://www.rian.ru/society/20080505/106556830.html
The consequences of this “conspiracy” are still being felt to this day, poisoning relations between Russia and the nations affected by the protocols. The Baltic countries see these events as a prelude to the “annexation” of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Based on these events, their politicians make far-reaching conclusions about relations with today’s Russia, and the status of ethnic Russians in their countries. The latter are characterized as “occupiers” or “colonizers.”
In Poland, the secret protocols are used to justify the efforts to put Nazi Germany on the same moral plane with the Stalinist regime. In this context, some politicians are discrediting the memory of Soviet soldiers, and even express regret that Poland and Nazi Germany did not set up a coalition for a joint attack against the USSR. This supposition is morally unacceptable if only because none of the 600,000 Soviet soldiers, who sacrificed their lives for Poland’s liberation from the Nazis, knew anything about the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Pactul ribbentrop-Molotov 