August 23, 1939
With Josef Stalin looking on, German and Soviet foreign ministers sign non-aggression pact.The Truth About the Soviet German Non-Aggression Pact of August 23rd 1939 and Its Secret Protocol
Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov with German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop
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.
The starting point is that Stalin had no plans in the spring or early summer of 1939 to attack Poland, and had no territorial claims against Poland.
Hitler by contrast did. In fact not only did Hitler plan to attack Poland, but he was resolved to do so.
At the end of March 1939 he told General Brauchitsch, the head of the German army, that he would attack Poland if Poland did not surrender Danzig to him.
On 3rd April 1939 he gave a formal directive to his generals to prepare plans to do so.
On 28th April 1939 he denounced his non-aggression pact with Poland and threatened Poland publicly in a speech to the Reichstag, saying he would cease to look for a peaceful settlement with Poland if Poland did not give him Danzig and did not abandon its alliance with Britain.
On 23rd May 1939, in a secret speech made to the top German leadership in his office in the New Chancellery, he put the issue beyond any further doubt, making his decision to attack Poland absolutely clear.
There is no instance of Hitler committing himself to attack a country and then failing to do so. Hitler would have attacked Poland in August 1939 whether Germany had agreed a Non-Aggression Pact with the USSR or not. Perhaps the only thing that might have deterred him was a formal alliance between Poland, the USSR and the Western powers.
That however did not happen, and the story of the diplomacy that preceded the signing in Moscow on 23rd August 1939 of the Non-Aggression Pact shows why.
In the event of a German attack on Poland, Britain and France were committed by the guarantees they gave Poland in March 1939 to come to its defence.
The only outstanding issue in the diplomacy leading up to the war was therefore whether Britain, France and Poland would be able to ally themselves with the USSR to defeat or deter Germany.
The need for such an alliance was obvious and was explained by Winston Churchill to the House of Commons in a speech he gave on 3rd April 1939:
“To stop here with a guarantee to Poland would be to halt in No-man’s Land under fire of both trench lines and without the shelter of either…. Having begun to create a Grand Alliance against aggression, we cannot afford to fail. We shall be in mortal danger if we fail…. The worst folly, which no one proposes we should commit, would be to chill and drive away any natural co-operation which Soviet Russia in her own deep interests feels it necessary to afford.”
The story of the diplomacy of 1939 is that “chill and drive away” co-operation with the USSR is precisely what the Western Powers did.
An alliance with the USSR against Hitler ought to have been a straightforward matter given the intense hostility between the USSR and Nazi Germany and Soviet efforts throughout the 1930s to forge an alliance against Nazi Germany.
Conditions however for forging such an alliance had never been worse than they were in the spring of 1939.
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http://russia-insider.com/en/history/truth-about-soviet-german-non-aggression-pact-23rd-august-1939-and-its-secret-protocol
Instead of Stalin and Nazis, it is Obama and Iranians. 
