The anniversary of the end of the Second World War has, as is now routine, resurrected the subject of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact of 23rd August 1939.
The subject was even brought up during Putin’s press conference with Merkel on 10th May 2015. Here is what Putin said:
“Concerning the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, let me draw your attention to the historical events, when the Soviet Union… It is not even so important who was in charge of diplomacy at the time. Stalin was in charge, of course, but he was not the only person thinking about how to guarantee the Soviet Union’s security. The Soviet Union made tremendous efforts to put in place conditions for collective resistance to Nazism in Germany and made repeated attempts to create an anti-Nazi bloc in Europe.“All of these attempts failed. What’s more, after 1938, when the well-known agreement was concluded in Munich, conceding some regions of Czechoslovakia, some politicians thought that war was inevitable. Churchill, for example, when his colleague came back to London with this bit of paper and said that he had brought peace, said in reply, ‘Now war is inevitable.’“When the Soviet Union realised that it was left to face Hitler’s Germany on its own, it acted to try to avoid a direct confrontation, and this resulted in signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In this sense, I agree with our Culture Minister’s view that this pact did make sense in terms of guaranteeing the Soviet Union’s security. This is my first point.“Second, I remind you that after the Munich Agreement was signed, Poland itself took steps to annex part of Czech territory. In the end, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the division of Poland, they fell victim to the same policy that they tried to pursue in Europe.”
The relevance of this pact both to Russia’s celebration of the Soviet victory in the Second World War, and to the international situation today, is not obvious, given that today’s Russia is not the USSR and Putin is not Stalin.
However it constantly gets brought up, especially by East European politicians who, out of hostility to Russia, seek to apportion blame equally between Germany and Russia for the start of the Second World War.
That claim is false. It is Putin’s version that is correct, as a simple statement of the facts shows.
The facts are very simple and straightforward and are well-known, and problems of interpretation are (or should be) few.
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