Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

How was it made?

The European diplomacy of summer 1939 was a threefold negotiation. The Soviet Union kept up alliance talks with Britain and France while never quite closing the door to German soundings. After Munich, distrust of the West ran deep, and the May replacement of Litvinov, symbol of collective security, by Molotov was read as a signal that a change of course was possible. As the military talks with Britain and France drifted over Polish transit and much else, Germany raced a deadline: Soviet neutrality had to be secured before the planned invasion of Poland. On 23 August Ribbentrop flew to Moscow and the treaty was signed that night. The handshake of the self-proclaimed standard-bearer of anti-fascism with the self-proclaimed standard-bearer of anti-Bolshevism stunned the world.

What did the treaty and the protocol contain?

The public articles were simple: mutual non-aggression, neutrality if a third power attacked either party, peaceful settlement of disputes, a ten-year term. The substance lay in the secret additional protocol, assigning Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia to the Soviet sphere and Lithuania to the German, and partitioning Poland along an agreed line (see the sub-entry on the secret protocol). The friendship and border treaty of 28 September adjusted the line and moved Lithuania into the Soviet sphere. Alongside the pact ran a large trade agreement: Soviet grain and oil flowed to Germany, German machinery and military technology to the USSR.

What followed?

On 1 September Germany invaded Poland; on the 17th Soviet forces entered from the east, and Poland was partitioned for the fourth time. The USSR then forced base treaties on the three Baltic states and annexed them in the summer of 1940, fought Finland in the Winter War, and recovered Bessarabia from Romania. The world communist movement had to reverse its line overnight: parties that had preached the anti-fascist popular front were instructed to oppose an imperialist war, and across the West many members and sympathisers left in disillusion.

Why did the Soviet Union sign, and how is it judged?

The official Soviet logic was time. Munich had shown the West could not be trusted, and to avoid the worst case, an unprepared country fighting Germany alone, time had to be bought. The pact did buy the USSR twenty-two months. The criticism runs on two lines. First, that the respite was squandered: the Red Army stood unprepared before the surprise of June 1941, and Stalin distrusted the invasion warnings to the last. Second, that the pact was not mere time-buying but a territorial bargain, of which the secret protocol was the proof, and the reason the Soviet state denied its very existence for half a century.

Historiography has argued between the contextual reading, the pact as the outcome of collective security's bankruptcy, and the reading of collusion between two totalitarian states. In 1989 the Congress of People's Deputies, on the findings of the Yakovlev commission, officially acknowledged the secret protocol and declared it void. That acknowledgement gave the Baltic independence movements their decisive warrant, and to this day the pact remains one of the hottest stakes in Europe's politics of memory.