The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a non-aggression treaty between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, signed on 23 August 1939. Officially it was a non-aggression treaty with a term of 10 years. But the true significance of the pact lay not in its public part.

The secret protocol

Attached to the treaty was a secret protocol, drawn up in two languages — German and Russian. The protocol came with a map on which lines marked the division of the spheres of influence between the two totalitarian states in Eastern Europe. The map bore the signatures of Stalin and Ribbentrop.

Under the protocol, the Soviet Union received a sphere of influence over Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, eastern Poland, and Bessarabia. These arrangements effectively became a plan for the division of Europe, which both sides began to carry out within a week — starting with the attack on Poland.

The “Golden September”: liberation or occupation

The execution of the secret protocol gave rise to a separate Soviet myth — of the “Golden September” of 1939, supposedly the liberation of Western Ukraine and Belarus. The chronology leaves no room for this version: on 1 September Nazi Germany attacked Poland, on 17 September Stalin’s USSR did; this was precisely how World War II began^[4]. Germany took the west of Poland, the Soviet Union the east: Hitler and Stalin divided an independent state under the pact they had just signed^[5].

So “liberation from the Polish lords” was in reality an attack on an independent state and its occupation, not a liberation^[6]. And, crucially, the justification itself is recognizable. The thesis about “protecting the oppressed Russian-speaking population” word for word repeats the argumentation of Nazi Germany: what Hitler said in 1938 about the Sudetenland (Germans supposedly persecuted by the Czechs) later sounded verbatim with regard to Crimea and the Donbas^[7]. One rhetorical template — “we are protecting our own” — twice served to cover the seizure of someone else’s territory.

”Munich came first”: examining the argument

A common argument of Kremlin propaganda holds that the Western powers themselves handed Czechoslovakia over to Hitler at Munich in 1938, so the pact was merely a forced response. This is a manipulation that equates things of different natures. The Munich Agreement was a mistaken attempt at appeasement — a concession to avoid a great war. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a treaty for the division of Europe between two dictatorships^[1]: the Munich deal did not lead to the outbreak of the war, while the pact led to it directly^[2].

Stalin’s contribution to Hitler’s rise to power began even earlier. Before the Reichstag elections German communists and social democrats traditionally went together, but on Stalin’s personal order the communists went separately — the social democrats were declared “lackeys of capitalism.” The split of the left-wing electorate gave Hitler his chance, and he took it^[3].

The reaction of Soviet society

For Soviet people the pact came as a shock. For years official propaganda had portrayed Nazism as the chief enemy and cultivated hatred of fascism. And suddenly — a treaty of friendship with that very enemy.

Yet the people were silent. In a totalitarian state open protest was impossible. As Pushkin wrote in “Boris Godunov” — “the people are silent.” This formula precisely describes the reaction of Soviet society.

The propaganda about-face

Propaganda performed a swift about-face. Whereas Nazism had previously been condemned as absolute evil, after the signing of the pact Vyacheslav Molotov declared at the official level: “Nazism is an ideology. How can one fight an ideology?” This phrase captured the cynicism of the Stalinist regime, which turned ideological principles into an instrument of the current political conjuncture.

The “preventive strike”: why it does not exonerate Hitler

A separate — and opposite — myth is promoted by Viktor Suvorov (Vladimir Rezun) and Mark Solonin: namely, that the USSR was itself preparing to attack Germany, so the Wehrmacht’s strike on 22 June 1941 was preventive, a forced act of self-defense. Here a precise distinction is needed between two things that propaganda deliberately merges: the fact of Soviet preparation for an offensive and the motive of the German attack.

That Stalin was preparing an offensive in the summer of 1941 is by now an almost undisputed thesis. It was put forward as early as the late 1980s by the defector intelligence officer Rezun (under the pseudonym “Viktor Suvorov”) in the book “Icebreaker,” analyzing indirect data^[9]. It was later confirmed by academic — and, what is more, Russian — scholarship: Mikhail Meltyukhov in his work “Stalin’s Missed Chance” (2000) analyzed the available documents minute by minute, and Aleksandr Gogun in the book “The Mistake of 1941” (Kherson, 2021) sums up: the dispute has narrowed only to the approximate date of the planned Soviet strike — 6 or 15 July 1941^[10].

But it does not follow from this that the German attack was “preventive.” A preventive strike is a strike to forestall an enemy whose plans you know. But German intelligence did not know the Soviet plans: the references to a “Soviet threat” in the German note were merely a justification for its own aggression — the Germans in fact guessed at random, and at the Nuremberg trial they were unable to substantiate their claims with documents^[8]. The chronology adds the decisive touch: Hitler signed the “Barbarossa” directive (a plan for an aggressive war against the USSR) on 18 December 1940 — that is, earlier than the Soviet offensive plan was drawn up^[11]. Both dictatorships were preparing to attack each other, but Germany took the decision to attack independently and in advance, without any knowledge of the Soviet preparations. That is why the thesis of a “preventive war” is not a justification but yet another substitution: Stalin’s real preparation for an offensive does not turn Hitler’s attack into self-defense.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact remains one of the most telling examples of collusion between two totalitarian regimes, one that directly led to the outbreak of World War II and to the tragedy of millions of people in Eastern Europe.