Don't forget that Germany also signed a non-aggression pact with Great Britain.
Posted on 04/29/2025 1:45:37 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
From Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, Russian schoolchildren are preparing for the most important holiday of the year: Victory Day. Commemorated with a grand military parade on Moscow’s Red Square every May 9, the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany has long been used by authorities to rally support for the state. And it starts in school.
In September 2016, three history textbooks were sanctioned by the Ministry of Education, all of which gloss over Stalin’s crimes and his initial alliance with Nazi Germany. “My main issue with the textbooks is that they do not reveal the whole truth,” says historian and teacher Leonid Katsva.
What is still unclear is who decides which book should be used in the classroom. “Is it the teacher, the school director or the city? I asked this question to the Moscow city government many times and received no answer,” says Abalov.
Most schools across the country have sided with one of them, published by Prosveshenie, whose retelling of the war focuses almost exclusively on the heroic aspects of the Soviet war effort.
The pact was defensive!
For Russians, World War II began—not in 1939 as it did for the rest of the world—but in 1941. What happened before, and the Soviet Union’s role in it, has stirred emotions and denial in Russia. The most controversial moment, which the Kremlin traditionally does not emphasize, is the Molotov–Ribbentrop “non-aggression” pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany.
Putin has made contradictory statements about the pact. He struck a conciliatory tone in 2009 when he spoke in Gdansk in Poland, saying the Russian parliament had condemned the pact. Six years later, in a meeting with Germany’s Angela Merkel, Putin said the pact “made sense for ensuring the security of the Soviet Union.”
(Excerpt) Read more at themoscowtimes.com ...
Do the victims of the Gulag?
I wonder if this is how Japan teaches WW2.
Don't forget that Germany also signed a non-aggression pact with Great Britain.
Bottomline is that every view of any historical event is always one viewpoint or another. The idea of an “objective view” of history is appealing, but I don’t think it’s possible.
As one example, when Europeans pushed west in North America and removed Indians, were we bringing civilization to a savage stone age people? Or were we stealing land from people who have lived here for centuries? Or were we behaving like every nation ever has and taking what we could manage to get away with? I see all of that boiling down to three separate viewpoints: 1) Indians were primitives and no one cares about them 2) White people are brutal colonizers who steal things 3) People always do bad things to other people.
Back to WWII — Hitler was bad, Stalin was bad, the Versailles Treaty was bad, a lot of stuff went wrong for a lot of people.
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact proved that Poland had been recreated too small at Versailles. Putin’s claim that Western (Catholic) Ukraine is historically different from Eastern (Orthodox) Ukraine mirrors Lenin offering Western Ukraine and Belarus to Poland at the Treaty of Riga. Poland declined the offer as it was required to defer to Britain and France approving its final borders. The result was a Poland that was too small to resist foreign aggression without its allies, who proved unwilling to defend it. A larger reformed greater Polish Commonwealth might have kept the peace in Europe longer. Unreported in the West until after the fall of the Soviet Union, peasants in Ukraine had marched to the Polish border to demand that Poland save them from Stalin. Stalin saw a relatively prosperous Poland as a threat to the Soviet Union in much the same way Putin saw relative prosperity in Ukraine as a threat to Russia.
Ask Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia when the war started.
I wonder if this is how Japan teaches WW2.
Pretty much.
I am sure their textbooks are written by the same crew that writes Kim Un Jun’s biographies….you know, the one where he has not anus.
What a shock! Arrogant Russians are the stars of their own story.
Japan, which had recently signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany, was blindsided by the Non-Agression Pact.
After the Soviets defeated the Japs at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939, the Japs went on to basically sign their own Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviets, something Hitler might like to have known, when he declared war on the US.
Sometimes you just have to hit ROCK BOTTOM before things start looking up.
Britain wasn’t invading Europe with Hitler and being led by the worst mass murderer in white history while allied with the second worst.
Nazi Germany signed a Non-Aggression Pact with Poland in 1934.
In fact, Hitler admired Marshall Piłsudski. So much he attended a memorial service for Piłsudski at the Polish Embassy in Berlin, and had an honor guard place at Piłsudski’s tomb in Kraków, after the Nazis occupied it.
Hitler in the beginning thought Poland was a potential ally against the Russians, knowing how the Poles despised the Russians.
Soviet Russia also signed a non-aggression pact with Poland.
It really started in 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria. It set a lot of wheels in motion.
History is written by the victors. Including Stalin.
You realize there are gulags that have been preserved in Russia to remind the populace of the horrors that occurred under Stalin?
I think the Bandera thing is more minority/fringe whereas the Stalin thing in Russia is the mainstream.
How does this differ from what every country, including the U.S. has done and continues to do? Germany after WWII is one of the few that openly beat home the bad things Germany had done, and that was probably caused by pressure from the west.
There are more than 150 monuments and/or streets named after Bandera in Ukraine. Children sing songs about him.
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