Vladimir Putin defends notorious Nazi-Soviet pact

[steve2470]

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/05/vladimir-putin-defends-notorious-nazi-soviet-pact/

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday defended the infamous pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that agreed to divide up eastern Europe during a visit by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to carve up eastern Europe between them in a secret clause of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on non-aggression.

“When the USSR realised that it was left facing Hitler’s Germany alone, it took steps so as to not permit a direct collision and this Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed,” Putin said at a news conference in response to a question from a journalist.

He was asked to respond to comments by Russia’s outspoken culture minister Vladimir Medinsky praising the pact as a triumph of Joseph Stalin’s diplomacy.

[Adsos Letter]

1. Well, I'm sure Poland was relieved about the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact...

...relieved of all of it's territory, that is.

[MBS]

6. and Estonia and Lithuania and Latvia, too

Putin has been spouting this point of view for several months now (there's also a flurry of articles about his similar statements in Nov 2014).

Here's an especially informative Nov 2014 article from NY Review of Books, by Timothy Snyder, Yale professor, expert on eastern Europe and author of an excellent book, Bloodlands, on the history of this area:
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/nov/10/putin-nostalgia-stalin-hitler/

Putin’s New Nostalgia

As Russian military convoys continue the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has chosen to rehabilitate the alliance between Hitler and Stalin that began World War II. Speaking before an audience of Russian historians at the Museum of Modern Russian History, Putin said: “The Soviet Union signed a non-aggression agreement with Germany. They say, ‘Oh, how bad.’ But what is so bad about it, if the Soviet Union did not want to fight? What is so bad?” In fact, Stalin did want to fight. The August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin. It led directly to the German-Soviet invasion of Poland the following month that began World War II. . .

The Stalin-Hitler alliance had devastating consequences for Poland and the three Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. In Poland, on September 17, 1939, Stalin joined his ally Hitler in a military attack, sending the Red Army to invade the country from the east. It met the allied Wehrmacht in the middle and organized a joint victory parade. The Soviet and German secret police promised each other to suppress any Polish resistance. Behind the lines the Soviet NKVD organized the mass deportation of about half a million Polish citizens to the Gulag. It also executed thousands of Polish officers, many of whom were fresh from combat against the Wehrmacht.. .Because Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were attacked by the Soviet Union while Stalin was Hitler’s ally, their current leaders have also been particularly quick to see through other Russian propaganda positions, for example the grotesque claim that Russia had to invade Ukraine this year in order to protect Europe from fascism. They remember not only the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, but also the series of economic agreements between the Nazis and the Soviets that followed in 1940 and early 1941, and the sham elections and propaganda in the Soviet zone that seemed to find an eery echo in the recent Russian actions in occupied Ukraine.
. . .
. . .there is an important difference between Stalin in 1939 and Putin in 2014. One can at least credit Stalin for attempting to resolve a real problem: Hitler did indeed intend to destroy the Soviet Union. In allying with Hitler he compromised his ideology and made a strategic mistake, but he was certainly responding to a real threat. Putin, on the other hand, had no European enemy. Without any apparent cause, in 2013, for the first time, the Russia government designated the European Union as an adversary. In its media and indeed in official foreign policy pronouncements it has characterized the European Union as “decadent,” in the sense of about to disintegrate.

This change in policy toward Europe, accompanied by the creation of a rival Eurasian Union, was then followed by the Russian assault on Ukraine. The Kremlin has continuously presented its intervention in Ukraine as resistance to European aggression. This is all a bit strange. The Russian invasion of Ukraine precipitated a rupture with the West that, from the point of view of protecting Russia’s basic interests, makes absolutely no sense. This was Russia’s choice, and it hardly seems a masterpiece of strategic thinking. Now the Kremlin’s tortured search for a justification and precedent has led to the jettisoning of one of the basic moral foundations of postwar politics: the opposition to wars of aggression in Europe in general and the Nazi war of aggression in 1939 in particular.

[Journeyman]

2. Not much the West can say about it today. We had our moment to exact justice for their transgression. . .

but we deemed it inconvenient, and determined it was more important to find the Nazis guilty of Count 1 of the indictment (Planning and Waging a War of Aggression) than it was to confront the truth, that one of the nation's sitting in judgment was complicit in the very crime of which we were trying to convict the defendants.

Of such compromises and blindness were the laws of international deportment constructed.

[newthinking]

4. It is very easy to turn extremely complicated historical events into political narratives

What is being suggested in this forum (that Russia was particularly inexcusable in it's behavior leading up to the main conflict) is also a narrative, a fairly new one at that (just as the Russians have their narrative).

After WWI nobody wanted to fight Hitler, especially alone. Russia was not the only one to try appeasement and cooperation in order not to get into the conflict before they were ready.


British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain cheerfully greeted by Adolf Hitler at the beginning of a meeting on 24 September 1938, where Hitler demanded annexation of Czech border areas without delay


The more one studies WWII the more they realize the whole concept we have in the US of "the good war" is a naive narrative for public consumption. It was a nasty, dog eat dog war that everyone looked out for their own interests until there was no choice. It also had it's share of other nasty "rule breaking" (there are always war crimes in war) by all participants.

What is most important was that all the allies came together in the end and finished Hitler and what he represented.

War is hell and most anyone that fights it gets compromised in the process, even the "good guys". Despite it being sanitized for consumption.

[jakeXT]

3. They knew why Hitler was supported, appeased, given loans etc

If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them thinks anything of their pledged word.
As quoted in The New York Times (24 June 1941); also in TIME magazine (2 July 1951))

http://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable

[bemildred]

5. Not much different than what Chamberlain did, and for much the same reasons.

To stall for time. Hitler took it all back and then some, before he found his Stalingrad.

[Igel]

7. With a few real differences.

So "not much different"? Probably not.

IN the case of Russia, there was extensive oppression over the part that Russia occupied. When "we" gave up land that wasn't our own, we didn't really go in and put people in concentration camps and execute officers. Because Chamberlain allowed occupation of part of Czechoslovakia but didn't actually occupy the remaining portion.

Then again, we are generally ashamed and embarrassed by Chamberlain's moral lapses and the lack of a backbone. He's been invoked in the inability of the West to stand up to Russian aggression. Ironic, that.

Of course, then there's hindsight, in which Stalin's actions enabled Hitler to deal with his planned assault on Western Europe.

[bemildred]

8. I did not say they were identical.

I said the motives were similar, and the methods (throw the warmonger a bone to buy time) also.

I'm not ashamed of Chamberlain, he did what he had to in the circumstances, but you go ahead.

Russia had good reason to make Germany's path through hostile land as long as possible, we would do the same. That is what all the "trip-wire" stuff Nato is pushing is about, the "forward presence", they fear a Russian ground invasion and want to make him have to go a long way if he gets froggy.