The Non-Aggression Treaty between Nazi Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, known colloquially as Molotov-Ribbentrop Pactis undoubtedly a key piece in the context prior to the Second World War and at the same time one of the pacts most controversial in history.
This mutual non-aggression pact signed by the USSR and Germany has been the subject of numerous and different interpretations, most of them without the necessary historical rigor, as is customary today.
The ‘official’ version is mainly based on equating fascism with communism, presenting Hitler and Stalin as ‘anti-Western’ peers and blaming them, equally, for the outbreak of the conflict. This version, from a minimum historical accuracy, is plain and simple stupid, with few weighty arguments, being in fact a construction created under any serious analysis that hides behind a fort contempt for political ideas (communists) and therefore, as we have already commented, it is an analysis without any historical value. Said comparison, whose inspiration is frankly political, was built in the heat of the Cold War and was based, mainly, on clichés, lies or ‘half-truths’.
Niccolò Machiavelli, an Italian philosopher and writer considered to be the father of modern political science, argued that, in politics, actions alien to our common sense are often necessary to defend the society created by the state, a political line popularly summed up as «The end justifies the means«. This line was followed by the government of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during Stalin’s mandate (1922-1953), perhaps the most controversial government in contemporary history, carrying out innumerable acts morally questionable to defend the revolution, condemnable by some, defendable by others.
One of these was the said non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, signed on August 23, 1939. Personally, I am not going to comment on whether it was really justified or not, but I will try to explain the reasons that they did and led to the USSR to sign it.
In 1938, Nazi Germany had recently annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, following its expansionist ideology, an expansionism that began to worry the USSR and the other Western powers. As a result of the fear of another possible war, England and France met with the German and Italian governments in Munich on September 30, 1938, accepting that Germany would annex Czechoslovakia, in exchange for not touching Poland. a negotiation in which the Soviet government was totally excluded.
This exclusion was taken as a act of hostility, especially after Britain and France rejected a proposal for an anti-fascist alliance put forward by the USSR shortly before. The signing of these agreements in September 1938 left the Soviets with the prospect of facing Nazi expansion alone and was seen as an advance of a future German-British-Italian-French alliance to destroy the USSR and its revolution. Many historians argue that Western democracies tried, from the beginning, leave the Soviet Union alone, and that you are, at the same time, pushed the Germans eastward, hoping that Hitler would fulfill his promise to liquidate communism, so that, at the same time, they would remain outside of a possible German-Soviet conflict. We find numerous examples that confirm this; The refusal to sign an anti-fascist alliance, excluding the USSR from important pacts such as the one in Munich (1938), little or no involvement to create a system of collective security and put an end to the Nazi-fascist threat that the USSR requested or public comments such as that of Harry Truman, the future president of the United States, who said this in an interview in 1941. “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we must help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we must help Germany, and in this way let as many as possible be killed…”
For their part, the governments of London and Paris, overwhelmed by their staunch hatred of communism and fear of another conflict, they did not want to see the danger that Nazi-fascism represented at that time, even for themselves.
Little confidence in Western ‘democracies’ and the growing fascist threat in Europe were not the only problems facing the Soviet government. Relations between the Japanese Empire and the USSR were also getting worse by the minute. In 1936, Japan and Germany (and later Italy, Spain and Hungary along with more countries) signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, where the great blocs based on fascist doctrines in Europe and one of the most important countries in the Asian context, imperial Japan, they promised to take measures to safeguard themselves from the ‘threat’ of the Communist International or Comintern, led by the Soviet Union. In other words, isolate the USSR internationally.
In addition, Japan, in the same way as Germany, was in the midst of an expansionist project, having already conquered Korea and China, with its troops stationed on the borders of Siberia and Mongolia (allies of the USSR). In addition to the constant fear of a war against Japan, the tensions with countries such as Finland, Lithuania, Estonia or Latviawho had extensive relations with Nazi Germany, they were also climbingwith a large number of Red Army units stationed on said borders.
On the other hand, the incomprehensible hostility of the western democratic powers towards the Republic during the Spanish War of 1936-1939, did nothing more than confirm the suspicions that Stalin previously had. The Soviet leader drew from the Spanish conflict a series of conclusions that would mark, later, future decisions regarding the German ‘problem’. Stalin concludes, among other things, that democracies are more anti-communist than anti-fascist, that they are not trustworthy and, above all, that they are weak. During the Spanish War, the Soviet leader constantly stresses that his help is temporary and insists that the Republican government get help from Western democracies to confront fascism, not his own. Once the refusal of these to form an anti-fascist coalition in the Spanish conflict was verified, added to the pact of England, France, Germany and Italy in the Munich Agreements (previously cited), Stalin, already thinking of an eventual – and probable – invasion German, sees the only option to seek a tactical alliance with Nazism.
Faced with this context, this pact became, little by little, their only possible way out that would not go through their direct annihilation, given the threat of a war that was getting closer and closer. They faced tensions with the Nippon Empire and the possibility of a war on two fronts (Germany and Japan), confrontations with Finland, Estonia, Latvia…, some Western democracies with which they could not trust and, without forgetting us, the Nazi threat- fascist and that of an already inevitable war.
At the same time, from the German point of view, the non-aggression treaty would also serve to protect their eastern flank. On the one hand, I would get to focus all its military power against the Western powers and at the same time avoid fight on two fronts, since they obviously had no intention of keeping the Munich Agreement and Poland would at some point be attacked and annexed, under the immobility of Great Britain and France with their sweet idea of ”keeping the peace”.
Finally, on August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the non-aggression pact, known as the “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact-“, in honor of the Foreign Ministers of both countries. Germany could annex Poland, in return for withdrawing its support from Japan, Finland and the Baltic States, along with the condition that the USSR would recover its eastern part of the territories of the Polish Statehistorically Belarusians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians, caught up in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919. It is important to note that, even with the non-aggression pact with Germany signed, the Soviet government never had illusions. Marshal Zhukov, among others, defended that he himself did not free the USSR from being attacked or attacked: “At no time did I hear Stalin reassuring words in relation to the Non-Aggression Pact…”, affirmed the Marshal. After August 23, however, the USSR was still willing to continue negotiations with Great Britain and France, but these countries they refused to do it again. The pact totally surprised the British and French governments, who would later declare war on Germany after the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 and would find themselves embroiled in a conflict that from the outset they had tried to avoid.
The USSR, on the other hand, was objectively smarter in this regard, acting very carefully to avoid being dragged into a conflict that it did not seek or want and waiting more than two weeks to recover the territories of Poland. This strategy also allowed the Soviet Union focus their forces and defeat the Japanese in Mongolia, forcing them to sign another non-aggression pact (which would later be decisive when Germany broke the Pact and invaded the USSR). The pact served to send a message to Western ‘democracies’, which had tried to isolate the USSR, but more importantly, the non-aggression pact gave an important and vital time, not only in the construction of the war machine, but above all for the ordering of the army, together with the subsequent transfer in 1941 of the industry to the farthest part of the front, thus preparing for the future conflict and tension with Germany. Although later the German invasion caused great losses, they were able to recover and four years later defeat fascism. Probably, without the preparation time that the pact gave the USSR, the German army would have conquered Moscow during the first months of the invasion and eventually annihilated the entire nation.
The anti-fascist coalition, meanwhile, only became possible after Nazi Germany defeated and occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Finally, these defeats made the US and England see the threat that Nazi-fascism represented for them and enabled the formation of such a coalition. The tensions between the alliesbut, they never disappeared. Throughout the war, both in the plans that were forged during the conflict and later during the postwar period, the ambiguous attitude towards the USSR and the differences between Western countries ceased to exist.
In summary mode, we have seen the reasons that led the Soviet Union to sign the non-aggression treaty, a controversial pactdefended by some, questioned by others, but which undoubtedly helps us to analyze how difficult and complicated the geopolitical relations between the different…