Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

molotov-ribbentrop-pact

The non-aggression treaty signed between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany on 23 August 1939, one week before the German invasion of Poland. Its secret protocol divided Eastern Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence. It enabled the simultaneous Soviet and German invasions of Poland and the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states.

The pact — named for Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and his German counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop — shocked the world because it joined two states whose ideologies were explicitly hostile to each other. For Stalin, the agreement bought time: the Soviet military was weakened by the purge of its officer corps, and a war with Germany in 1939 would have been catastrophic. The secret protocol assigned Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and eastern Poland to the Soviet sphere; western Poland and Lithuania initially to Germany. Within days, Germany invaded Poland from the west; the Soviet Union invaded from the east on 17 September 1939, occupying approximately half of Polish territory. The Baltic states were incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. The pact enabled Hitler to fight a one-front war in 1939–40, conquering Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, and the Low Countries before turning on the Soviet Union in June 1941. Communist parties worldwide, which had spent the 1930s building anti-fascist coalitions, were abruptly required to reverse course and describe the war as an imperialist conflict between capitalist powers — a position they maintained until Germany invaded the Soviet Union and the party line reversed again.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is a case study in the consequences of great-power calculations made without regard for the peoples affected. The secret protocol divided Eastern Europe between two totalitarian states, each of which then proceeded to murder, deport, and suppress the populations it acquired. The Soviet denial that the secret protocol existed — maintained until 1989, when Gorbachev acknowledged it — was itself a form of ongoing aggression against the truth of Baltic and Polish history. The pact’s political legacy includes its use by contemporary Russian nationalists to establish the Soviet Union’s moral equivalence with Nazi Germany — a comparison that has genuine historical substance for the populations of the occupied territories, whatever its limitations as a general framework for understanding the Second World War.