Secret Protocol (Molotov–Ribbentrop)

What the protocol itself said

The text was short: four articles, of which three carried the substance. First, in the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the Baltic states (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania was to mark the boundary of the German and Soviet spheres of influence, with Lithuania's interest in the Vilnius (Vilna) area recognised by both sides. Second, in the event of a rearrangement of Polish territory the spheres were to be bounded roughly by the line of the Narev, Vistula and San rivers, with the question of maintaining an independent Polish state, and its boundaries, left to further political developments and to friendly agreement. Third, the Soviet side called attention to its interest in Bessarabia, and the German side declared its complete political disinterest there. The final article bound both parties to treat the protocol as strictly secret. The clauses asked nothing of Poland or the Baltic states, which had no seat at the signing.

How the secret was kept, and how it surfaced

While the treaty itself was published at once, the protocol went into Stalin's personal safe and later into the archive of the Communist Party Central Committee. Its contents nevertheless leaked almost immediately: on the morning of 24 August the German diplomat Hans von Herwarth told his American colleague Charles Bohlen the full text. The German original was destroyed in the bombing of Berlin in March 1944, but a microfilm copy survived in the German foreign ministry archive and was handed to the British in May 1945. The document was first aired publicly at the Nuremberg trial in 1946: Ribbentrop referred to it, and Hess's counsel Seidl tried to read out a typed copy but was refused on the ground that he would not reveal his source; Seidl later printed it in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, to almost no notice. It became widely known through the US State Department collection Nazi-Soviet Relations 1939-1941 in 1948, which was read in the Cold War political context, and Moscow answered with the polemic Falsifiers of History, denying the protocol's existence. Molotov denied it until his death, while Khrushchev, in memoirs dictated in the late 1960s, acknowledged that unpublished clauses had dealt with Poland and the Baltic region.

The official Soviet position changed only under perestroika. Amid pressure from Poland and Eastern Europe, a special commission under Alexander Yakovlev investigated, and on 24 December 1989 the Congress of People's Deputies, having heard its conclusions, officially acknowledged and condemned the protocol and declared it void from the moment of signing, on the basis of handwriting, photographic and lexical analysis of surviving copies and their fit with later events. The text was then for the first time published in the USSR, from the German microfilm. The Soviet original, kept in Stalin's safe, then in the Central Committee general department, and finally in Special Packet No. 34 of the Russian Presidential Archive, was found in October 1992 by the historian Dmitri Volkogonov, shown to the press, and published academically in Novaya i noveyshaya istoriya in 1993. In June 2019 the Historical Memory foundation published the Soviet original of the pact and the protocol once more.

What kind of document it was

The protocol was never ratified. Neither the Supreme Soviet nor the Reichstag saw its text, and it bypassed the Soviet practice of honouring treaties concluded with other states. The Russian scholar A. A. Pronin judges it legally wrongful precisely because it disposed of third countries and draws a comparison with the Munich Agreement, which likewise set the fate of a third state outside its own forum. The 1989 Congress recorded that the negotiations had been conducted by Stalin and Molotov in secret from the party, the government and the Supreme Soviet, and that the decision to sign was in substance and form an act of personal power. The protocol has since become a reference point in European memory politics, on the basis of which the Baltic states denounce the annexations of 1940 as illegal. Its territorial clauses are void, but its political afterlife still shapes Europe.