The National Socialist and the International Socialist couldn’t get a long.
Eighty years after the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a non-aggression treaty dividing Europe into spheres of influence, Russia has put the original Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and its secret protocol on public display.
Alongside the pact at the exhibition at Russia’s State Archives in Moscow are documents spanning from the 1938 Munich agreement and occupation of Czechoslovakia until the outbreak of war, which organisers say confirm Soviet fears that the west sought to redirect German aggression toward Moscow.
Now, Russia has sought to normalise the non-aggression pact, arguing that the treaty had been taken “out of context” of the vicious realpolitik of 1930s Europe.
That attempt, accompanied by a foreign ministry social media campaign trumpeting the “truth about WWII” has sparked an outcry from nearby countries in eastern Europe that were annexed and divided under the pact.
“We should ask ourselves why Russia does not condemn the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and what kind of message Russia trying to send,” Debski said.
The governments of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania have released a statement saying the pact “doomed half of Europe to decades of misery”.
In a statement, they added: “This is why on this day proclaimed by the European parliament as a European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes we remember all those whose deaths and broken lives were a consequence of the crimes perpetrated under the ideology of Nazism and Stalinism”.
Over the last decade, the Kremlin has sought to combat criticism of its wartime record, by revising textbooks, expanding celebrations for Victory Day, and partnering with historians, reviving the tsarist-era Russian Military Historical Society in 2012 under the leadership of Sergei Naryshkin, a senior official later appointed as Russia’s spy chief.