Posted on 08/24/2009 3:19:51 PM PDT by lizol
Detrimental denial
Vladimir Ryzhkov
"Now the whole world is in my pocket!" Adolf Hitler joyously exclaimed after the Moscow signing of the Treaty on Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union - known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - on August 23, 1939.
Hitler had endorsed a plan to attack Poland on April 11, 1939 after he had already conquered Austria and Czechoslovakia. His only concern was the threat of war on two fronts simultaneously, with Britain and France in the west and the Soviet Union in the east. The pact with Josef Stalin removed this threat.
Hitler got everything he wanted. He routed and occupied Poland, drove a wedge between the Soviet Union and the West, and received access to Soviet strategic materials to help fight a war with Britain and France.
Stalin was also pleased. On September 17, 1939, the Red Army began to occupy all Poland‘s eastern regions in accordance with the treaty.
Elated by the quick rout and partition of Poland, the dictators consolidated their successful union by signing the Boundary and Friendship Treaty on 28 September, 1939. This treaty was also supplemented with secret protocols and maps.
In 1940, the Soviet Union incorporated Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Stalin substantially enlarged his domain, simultaneously pushing Hitler to war in the west, and even rendering him some help in this war effort (while improving Soviet strategic positions in the event of a German attack).
Hitler's regime was the only perpetrator of World War II; this is an axiomatic truth, beyond discussion.
However, the Western leaders were also responsible for the war - for conniving with Hitler, then inaction against him and failure to find common cause with Moscow in an anti-Hitler coalition. Poland, Lithuania, and Slovakia were also at fault to the extent that they took part in territorial partitions at that time.
Yet it is impossible to deny that the Hitler-Stalin deal also played a major role in unleashing World War II. The pact divided a considerable part of Eastern Europe between Moscow and Berlin, and decided the destinies of six sovereign states without their consent. It is no wonder the existence of the secret protocols was invariably denied by Soviet leaders.
In 1989, the Congress of Soviet People's Deputies denounced the pact with a resolution signed by Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1990, Gorbachev attended the dedication of a memorial to the Polish officers shot by the Soviet secret police at Katyn in 1940.
Russia's president, Boris Yeltsin, repeatedly publicly denounced the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as a "dirty deal between Hitler and Stalin." The pact and its secret protocols have been published more than once.
Given these admissions and publications, the current attempts by some Russian officials and state propaganda - to justify the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as forced, and even "the only correct" decision; to negate its role in unleashing World War II and forcibly dividing Eastern Europe; and to deny the truth about the Katyn massacre - seem very strange. So is their indignation at the OSCE resolution denouncing totalitarian regimes, particularly Stalin's and Hitler's. Andrzej Wajda's film "Katyn", with its artistically precise and an authentic depiction of events, was banned from Russian cinemas. Why must modern Russia, which has a democratic Constitution and which has officially denounced the crimes of the Stalinist regime, defend Stalinist foreign and domestic policy?
This defence discredits Russia and aggravates its relations with its next-door neighbours. Apart from a misguided sense of patriotism and a desire to protect a criminal esprit de corps, what prevents Russia from denouncing the 1940 Katyn massacre and declassifying all secret documents on Stalin-era abuses, domestic and foreign?
Denunciation of the crimes and the criminal nature of the Stalin regime - which took countless Soviet lives before, during and after the war - will only emphasise the great achievement of our nation, which made the main contribution to the defeat of Nazism despite all the atrocities and crimes of its own government.
Vladimir Ryzhkov is a professor at the Higher School of Economics and chairman of the organisation "Russia's Choice"
I think I’ll make it a priority to watch “Katyn” this week.
You can say that again. That was a well written piece.
mark
Having taken time to read it, this nonsense is the very definition of insanity, pure and simple.
Taken 9/11/2001
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