It is common knowledge that the post-war global configuration was defined by the key players of the antifascist coalition during the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam Conferences. It is based on the unconditional capitulation of Germany and the victory of the allies. The fascist Germany was condemned as the side guilty of unleashing the war and launching the aggression against other countries, and the SS as well as all other Nazi formations – as criminal organizations. The 1975 Helsinki Treaty confirmed that the outcome of World War II and the resulting country borders are not subject to change.
Over the recent years, we have seen all off the above being challenged. Nazi organizations are revived in an undisguised form and the followers of collaborationist Gen. Vlasov and Ukrainian nationalist leader Bandera, SS veterans and various Nazi are extolled in a number of countries, as the brand of literature justifying and praising fascists and collaborationists proliferates and the monuments to those who fought against fascism are being demolished.
Amidst this new informational war which originated in the West, the OCSE Parliamentary Assembly passed a resolution equating Nazism and Stalinism. The European Parliament is pushing to proclaim August 23 – the date of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – the pan-European day of commemorating the victims of Stalinism and Nazism. Even though formally Russia’s delegation voted against the resolution at the PACE, Russia's Parliament and Foreign Ministry did surprisingly little to prevent the developments which constitute an offense to the memory of the Great Victory.
The informational aggression against Russia's past is meeting with unduly sluggish resistance. Strangely, even the Russian Government's Rossiyskaya Gazeta published a paper by V. Dymarsky who expressed complete solidarity with the PACE resolution. As for the liberal camp in the Russian media, it is actively playing on the side of those who attack the country's history.
I am deeply convinced that any judgment concerning the run-up to World War II - the signing of the Soviet-German Non-aggression Treaty in particular - must be based on an analysis fully taking into account the complexity of the international politics situation in that epoch. Stalin's turn towards Germany in 1939 was by no means an isolated event.
The range of options open to the Soviet Union was fairly limited, and the world's first socialist country had to cooperate with those who were prepared to respond to its offers. Broad cooperation with Germany commenced already in the 1920ies. In 1934 the Soviet Government took a number of diplomatic steps aimed at building the relations with the new German leadership, the goals being to guarantee an extent of security to the USSR and to prevent the Baltic countries and Poland from being drawn into Germany's orbit. However, no serious reaction from Berlin followed at the time.
Germany harbored completely different aspirations. As it became known after World War II, Hitler told League of Nations Commissar K. Burchard in Danzig: “Everything I am doing is directed against Russia. If the West is stupid enough not to understand this, I will have to embrace a compromise and initially attack the West. After this I will bestow all of my forces on the USSR. I need Ukraine to be sure that nobody will be able to make us starve, as it happened during World War I”.
For a while, Hitler's plans remained disguised. His decision to attack Poland was made in April, 1939 and could not be affected by the signing of the Soviet-German Pact which took place later. What Hitler needed was a real triumph over Poland that would impress others. He wrote: “What will happen in the case of a war against Poland will overshadow the Huns. A powerful German onslaught is necessary to demonstrate to the countries in the East and South-East, using Poland as an example, what the present cost of arguing with Germany and provoking it to resort to military force is”.
Details of the Soviet negotiations with Great Britain and France on preventing the war in Europe are well known. Western democracies were not interested in a serious partnership with the Soviet Union in the name of precluding the German aggression. In fact, as it became clear after the signing of the Munich Agreement, they did all they could to appease Germany and to channel its aggressiveness to the east.
It is a significant fact that in late August, 1938 German generals Bec, von Witzleben and others jointly with the ground forces headquarters chief Halder made an attempt to prevent getting Germany involved in a pan-European war and organized a conspiracy to arrest Hitler immediately upon his signing the order to attack Czechoslovakia. They notified the British and French leaderships of the plan, but, blinded by the hate towards the USSR, those simply did not react. Instead they signed the Munich Treaty with Hitler and thus forced Czechoslovakia to surrender without putting up any resistance. As a result the conspirators had to drop their plan.
Moreover, even if any agreements with Great Britain and France had been signed by the USSR, no transformation of the general situation was likely to follow. Earlier, the USSR and France did enter into an agreement to help out Czechoslovakia, but in 1938 Paris withdrew from it by signing the Munich Treaty.
Western democracies had absolutely no intention to protect Poland. US Ambassador to London J. Kennedy held that Poland had to be abandoned and the fascists were to be allowed to accomplish their objectives in the east. He said that a conflict between Germany and the USSR would benefit the entire West. US Ambassador to Berlin H. Wilson also regarded Germany's aggression against the USSR paralleled by the West's unannounced nonintervention if not by direct consent as the optimal scenario.
Poland also made a considerable contribution to the cause of neutralizing the efforts aimed at curbing Germany's aggression. It signed a declaration in 1934 which bored the first hole in the European collective security system. When in 1938 the Soviet Government indicated it was ready to side with Czechoslovakia in the case of German aggression, Poland's Ambassador to Paris Lukasiewicz told his US counterpart W. Bullit that a religious war between fascism and Bolshevism loomed on the horizon and that in case the Soviet Union intervened on Czechoslovakia's side Poland would be ready to fight against the USSR together with Germany.
An array of documented data shows that Poland was eager to side with Germany, both in the process of partitioning Czechoslovakia and in the conflict with the USSR. Irrespective of circumstances, the Polish government refused to grant the Red Army the right of passage via the Polish territory in the case of German seizure of Czechoslovakia, while otherwise the Red Army had no way of joining forces with its potential allies.
Poland relied entirely on the British and French military guarantees, but when it did come under German attack on September 1, the declaration of war by Great Britain and France remained nominal as they never moved over the Maginot line. Western liberal democracies simply sacrificed Poland, but somehow this fact has flown below the radar of the PACE.
The Soviet Union stayed away from the military developments till September 17. Only at the last moment, when the Polish Government abandoned its nation and left the country, the Red Army forces were dispatched to the territories of West Belarus and West Ukraine to prevent their seizure by Germany and to regain the regions illegal taken by Poland in 1920.
Former British Prime Minister Lloyd George wrote to the Polish Ambassador in London in September, 1939 that the Russian army had moved into the territories not belonging to Poland but annexed by it by force following World War I. He maintained that the difference between the two developments was getting increasingly obvious for the British and French public opinion and that it would have been a folly to equate them. This folly is exactly what we are currently witnessing.
At the time when the tensions between the USSR and Great Britain reached the highest level, W. Churchill nevertheless said in a radio address that the presence of the Russian army on the line in Poland was absolutely necessary to secure Russia against the German threat, and that in any case the taking of the positions created the eastern front Germany did not dare to attack.
In terms of the international law, the right of the USSR to these territories was confirmed by the 1945-1947 treaties. As for the Baltic counties and Romania, it is even clearer that the deployment of the Soviet forces on their territories was not an aggression as it was preceded by intense talks which ended with the agreement of the governments of the countries to the solutions in bilateral relations offered by the USSR.
It makes sense to examine certain cases in the histories of other countries in the context. In 1942 the US forces landed in Morocco without consulting the local sultan or the Vichy Government with which Washington maintained diplomatic relations. The US command invoked strategic considerations to justify the move - the absence of consultations was explained by the need to act unexpectedly. When Iran faced the fascist threat in 1941, Great Britain and the US jointly decided to dispatch their troops to the country's territory.
Recently it became commonplace to allege that the “deal” between Stalin and Hitler gave the latter full freedom of maneuver, factored into his decision to attack Poland and his ability to rout France in 1940, and generally had a lot to do with the fact that World War II did begin. On May 5, 2005 the Polish Parliament requested that the Russian leadership condemn Stalin for supporting Hitler in the 1939 war against Poland. Extrapolating the trend we should expect to be asked to apologize for making the Nazi Fuhrer commit suicide.
The II Congress of the USSR Supreme Soviet stated in 1989: “The Congress endorses the view of the Commission that the Treaty with Germany was signed under critical international circumstances marked with the escalation of the peril of fascist aggression in Europe and the rise of Japanese militarism in Asia and pursued the objective of diverting the threat of war from the USSR... The Congress believes that the content of the Treaty constituted no departure from the international law and the negotiating practices common during likewise settlements”. However, the Congress nevertheless condemned the secret protocols which were a part of the package and defined the spheres of interests of the parties to the Treaty. The latter condemnation was in fact completely groundless as the entire process of creating a European collective security system was derailed by the time of the signing of the Treaty, and Hitler actually got the green light for an onslaught east much earlier as the result of the 1938 Munich Treaty. In reality, the Munich Treaty made the USSR - in the name of its own security - sign the non-aggression pact with Germany.
Until the summer of 1941 a fundamental threat was presented by the secret talks between Great Britain and the US. British Foreign Secretary E. Halifax visited Hitler and Himmler. Chamberlain actually paid three visits to Hitler. Yet, neither of the high-ranking British envoys chose to come to Moscow.
It is indicative that Hermann Göring and Chamberlain were to meet in London on August 23, and the meeting was canceled only due to Ribentrop's arrival to Moscow. Without signing the Non-aggression Pact with Germany the USSR would have been confronted with the threat of having to fight parallel wars in the west and in the east, in both cases with extremely strong adversaries. Fighting raged at the Khalkhyn gol – notably in the summer of 1939 – as the USSR had to repel the Japanese aggression.
In other words, by the summer of 1939 the dilemma facing the Kremlin was to either remain totally isolated while Hitler, directly or indirectly encouraged by the West, was about to strike east, or to sign the Non-aggression Pact with Berlin to win time for preparing the defense against the imminent aggression. The solution made by Stalin 70 years ago – in August, 1939 – under the extremely challenging circumstances was absolutely right from the standpoint of the national interests of the USSR, both diplomatically and strategically. Later the signing of the Pact with Germany helped to reach the agreement on neutrality with Japan.
The war would have broken out without the Pact with Hitler as well, but in this case the Anglo-Saxon powers would have accomplished their objective to achieve dominance in Europe by forcing Germany and the USSR to weaken each other.
Without the Pact, the USSR would have been confined to its borders while accepting the fact of the total seizure of its western neighbors - Poland and the Baltic countries - by Germany. The German army would have gained better starting positions for the attack against the USSR than it eventually had by 1941, and the latter would have to start fighting with Germany not in 1941, but much earlier.
As for the secret protocols allocating spheres of influence to the countries signing the Pact, the scheme was not a Soviet invention. Secret negotiations between Great Britain and Germany produced deals of the same type. The August 25, 1939 Anglo-Polish Treaty also included a secret addendum by which, in particular, Lithuania was bracketed with the sphere of interests of Poland, and Belgium and Holland – of Great Britain. In August, 1938 Latvia and Estonia signed secret deals on border guarantees with Germany. The Yalta agreements between Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt on the division of Europe and the 1945 agreements with Truman were also kept secret for years. Secret addenda to the 1951 US-Japanese security treaty are still in effect, etc.
The conclusions stemming from the above is that the 1990 resolutions of the USSR Supreme Soviet, passed under the dictate of the Gorbachev-Yakovlev group, which criticized the 1939 Soviet-German Pact and its secret protocols, are absolutely unfounded. The resolutions were passed in the atmosphere of total intellectual confusion, under pressure from the West and unchecked influence of the Perestroika leaders.
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Gen. Makhmut A. Gareev holds degrees in military science and history. He is the President of the Academy of Military Science of the Russian Federation.
