Defending the indefensible - Vladimir Putin on the Nazi-Soviet Pact

This week, in a meeting with young historians in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a rather startling statement.  In a discussion of 'falsifications of history' (an old Soviet favourite) and national bias, he stated not only that the Nazi-Soviet Pact had been in line with the then current "methods of foreign policy", but moreover that the Pact had not been so bad - "What is bad about it that the Soviet Union did not want to fight?" he said. 

Stalin and Heinrich Hoffman toast the Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939

Putin has commented on the Nazi-Soviet Pact before.  In 2009, for instance, at the commemoration of the 70th Anniversary of the start of World War Two, at the Westerplatte outside Gdansk, he was more conciliatory, stating that "all treaties" with the Nazis had been "morally unacceptable" and "politically senseless".  

This shift to a more unapologetic stance is symptomatic, of course, of the wider collapse in relations between Russia and the West that has peaked in the last year with the Russian invasion and partition of Ukraine.  But there is actually little that is genuinely new about it.  In fact, it echoes the old exculpatory Soviet line that Stalin signed the Pact to give him the chance to better defend himself against the 'inevitable' German aggression, and that anyway it had been the fault of the Western Allies, who had set a dangerous precedent by making an agreement with Hitler in Munich in 1938.

Both positions are thoroughly disingenuous and are challenged in my new book "The Devils' Alliance". Nothing prior to Hitler's attack of 1941 suggested that Stalin's motivation in signing the Pact was 'defensive' - in fact the opposite is true. He signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact in large part out of a desire to turn Hitler westwards to attack and undermine his old enemy, the Western Imperialists.  At that point, he thought, he would be able to march west unopposed, thereby turning the entire continent of Europe communist. We know this was the thrust of Kremlin thinking because numerous senior Soviet politicians said as much at the time.  

The juxtaposition of the Nazi-Soviet Pact with the Munich Agreement is similarly mendacious. It is true that collective security had failed by 1938, and each state was seeking to make the best bilateral arrangements that it could.  But the British and French effort to placate Hitler in 1938 cannot seriously be viewed in the same category as Stalin's pact with him of the following year. One was a failed attempt to preserve the peace (admittedly at the expense of Czechoslovakia), the other was a successful attempt to launch a war. One was a political arrangement to head off a crisis, the other was the opening of a two year economic and strategic relationship, which was an alliance in all but name.  Including both under the rubrik of "treaties with the Nazis" is a deliberate obfuscation. 

So, what about Mr Putin's contention that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was "not so bad".  Well, I suppose it depends on where you were standing. From the vantage point of the Kremlin, perhaps, it might seem so, but few people further west would have agreed.  The Nazi Soviet Pact launched World War Two.  It divided eastern Europe between the Nazis and Soviets and directly affected some 50 million people.  It left Poland divided and enslaved, the dismembered prey of the two most hideous and murderous totalitarian regimes the world has ever seen.  

The Pact gave Stalin the green light to launch an unprovoked attack on Finland in the winter of 1939; a short, bitter conflict that would see at least 150,000 killed.  It left the Baltic States at Stalin's mercy, consigned by the stroke of Ribbentrop's pen to a dark fate of occupation and annexation by the Soviet Union - their brave generation of independence snuffed out. The Romanian province of Bessarabia was similarly affected; annexed, occupied and wiped from the map.  

Stalin's march westwards in 1939-40 also had profound human effects.  Over 2 million people were deported from Poland, the Baltic States and Bessarabia to the wilder shores of the Soviet Union. Countless thousands more endured persecution, hardship and privation. For many of them, it was a life sentence.  

Comparing this litany of horrors to the Munich Agreement is not only disingenuous, it is downright daft. 

The Nazi-Soviet Pact was an archetype of cynical, Machiavellian totalitarian politics, and as such was a natural product of the two hateful regimes that spawned it. The Pact may have been "typical" by the perverted standards of Stalin's Soviet Union, but that does not mean that modern politicians can glibly play it down or make light of it.

The fact that Mr Putin sees fit to defend it in this way - in 2014 - speaks volumes about the current Kremlin mindset. The West, and its Polish and Baltic partners, should be very worried indeed. 

(Readers in the USA might be interested in the US edition of the book - which is here)

NKVD massacre site discovered - one of many?

An interesting news story caught my eye yesterday.  A piece on the Telegraph website reported that Ukrainian and Polish archaeologists had discovered a mass grave in the grounds of a former castle at Volodymyr-Volynsky in Western Ukraine.  According to the investigators, the grave contained some 950 corpses, including both civilians and Polish military personnel.  Cartridge cases found at the site were said to have come from the Tokarev TT pistol, the wartime side-arm used by Red Army officers as well as the NKVD.  The victims, it is said, had been executed with a shot to the back of the head.

For students of Polish history, this story will seem like "so far, so familiar".  It will, of course, be very reminiscent of the Soviet Katyn massacres, where some 22,000 Polish army officers, policemen and others were killed in the spring of 1940 - with the only exception being that, on that occasion, NKVD killers used German Walther pistols rather than their own Tokarevs.

In fact, this is not even the first NKVD mass grave discovered in Volodymyr-Volynsky.  Others were discovered in 1997 and again in 2013, containing the corpses of some 700, mainly Polish policemen.

Given the wider political situation in Ukraine at the moment, it is likely that we will hear a lot more of such discoveries.  As I noted in my book "The Devils' Alliance" almost every town in the Kresy (Eastern Poland, occupied by the Soviets in 1939) saw murders and persecutions of the local population by the NKVD.  Many of them would have witnessed their own "Katyns", especially in the murderous phase immediately before the arrival of the Germans in June/July 1941, when the Soviets disposed of all those 'prisoners' that they did not want to leave alive.  At that time alone, it is thought that 3,500 were murdered by the NKVD in Lwow, 2,000 in Luck, 600 in Sambor, 890 in Czortkow, 574 in Tarnopol, 550 in Dubno... and so it goes on.

So, now that Ukraine finds itself at odds with the Kremlin, we can expect to hear of similar gruesome discoveries elsewhere in the country.  I suspect that such sites were probably never entirely forgotten and have lived on in folk memory; perhaps their locations are known precisely, perhaps only vaguely.  But with the seismic geo-political shift of recent months, the climate is now right for them to be "discovered", investigated and publicised. They certainly give Kiev a stick with which to beat Moscow in its current conflict, but we should see beyond the current squabble and recognise them for what they are: as historically important reminders of the horrors of Soviet rule.

1989 - It began in Poland

Last week The Times carried a supplement devoted to the Polish role in spearheading the protest against communist rule in eastern Europe.

It was, the paper reminded us, on June 4th 1989 that the ruling communist party held elections in Poland, in which they had (foolishly) agreed to allow some representation of the Solidarity-led opposition. Predictably, in every constituency in which it was permitted to field a candidate, Solidarity won, forcing the ruling communists (both in Warsaw and in Moscow) to radically rethink their concept of the one-party state. Lech Walesa (pictured above) had forced the first breach in the Iron Curtain.

Of course, for most of us, the fall of communism is synonymous with the dramatic events in Berlin five months later, when the Berlin Wall fell and thereby seemed to usher in a winter in which each and every one of the communist regimes of eastern Europe (with the exception of Albania) collapsed, to be succeeded by the often painful, but no less euphoric, transition to liberal democracy - a transition that, for some, is still going on.

This year sees the 20th anniversary of those momentous events - events that changed the face of Europe, brought the Cold War to an end, and finally drew a line under the post-war division of Europe. It is absolutely right and proper that those events should be celebrated, commemorated and generally shouted from the roof-tops. In the cynical, anodyne age in which we find ourselves, 1989 should be a lesson in the vital importance of politics, and in the power of people to change their world for the better.

Yet, in remembering the fall of the Berlin Wall, let us not forget where it was that the liberation of eastern Europe began - Poland. It was in Poland that Solidarity had provided the first home-grown political challenge to communism, and it was in Poland that the first chink in the communists' armour appeared.

Zaczelo sie w Polsce - It began in Poland