Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

Such chutzpah was only trumped when Soviet prosecutors insisted on having the Katyn massacres added to the Nazi indictment, claiming that the killings were “one of the most important criminal acts for which the major war criminals are responsible.” Already adept at staging “show trials” of their political enemies, they demanded that the tribunal accept the Soviet investigation into the case without demur and duly produced a Bulgarian pathologist who claimed that the forensic evidence pointed to autumn 1941 as the date of the massacres (i.e., when the region was under German control). To their credit, the British and American judges dismissed the charge as the Soviets were unable to attribute the crime convincingly to any of the defendants in the dock.

After the pact’s brief and rather inconsequential outing at Nuremberg, Stalin’s propagandists and prosecutors might have congratulated themselves on a successful exercise in damage control. However, the American publication in 1948 of a volume titled Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941 would have shaken their complacency. The book, published by the US State Department, contained transcripts of hundreds of documents seized from German sources at the end of the war, including correspondence, discussions, and negotiations, as well as the text of the commercial agreements, the Nazi-Soviet Pact itself, and the secret protocol. For the first time, it brought the relationship between Moscow and Berlin out of the shadows and into the glare of public scrutiny.

The Soviet response was swift. Later that year, the pamphlet “Falsifiers of History” appeared, giving Moscow’s case. Personally edited and given its provocative title by Stalin, it grew out of a series of articles that had appeared in Pravda and was subsequently translated and distributed across the world. It was remarkable because it was the first time that the subject of the pact with Germany had been officially addressed in the Soviet Union since 1941. It was certainly strident stuff. With tempers piqued by the ongoing tensions of the nascent Cold War, “Falsifiers of History” carried the ideological fight to the Soviet Union’s enemies, attacking the West for its own complicity in failing to stop German aggression prior to 1939, criticizing the Americans for presenting “a distorted picture of events to slander the Soviet Union,” and even denouncing the hapless Finns for being “in league with the Hitlerites” in the Winter War of 1940. It also provided Stalin’s ex post facto justification for signing the pact. It was all down to Western perfidy—to the desire harbored in Paris and London to appease Hitler and turn him eastward and the wish of the “billionaires” of Washington to profit from the ensuing conflagration. “In August 1939,” it stated, “the Soviet Union did not doubt for a moment that sooner or later Hitler would attack it.” It went on: “That was why the first task of the Soviet Government was to create an ‘Eastern’ front against Hitler’s aggression, to build up a defence line along the western frontiers of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian Republics and thus set up a barrier to prevent an unhindered advance of the German troops eastward.” This task, the pamphlet explained, necessitated the “move” of Soviet troops into eastern Poland and the signing of “pacts of mutual assistance” with the Baltic states. “Thus the foundation was laid for the Eastern Front.” Clearly, Moscow wanted to world to hear the message that Stalin’s motives in signing the pact with Hitler had been purely defensive.

With that, Moscow’s line on the Nazi-Soviet Pact—given by Stalin himself—was fixed, but it was still a subject that no Soviet historian dared to touch. By the 1960s, however, that had begun to change. Stung by what it viewed as further falsifications emerging from the West, Moscow embarked on a propaganda campaign to wrest the memory of World War II away from its ideological enemies, a campaign described by one prominent commentator as “one of the most audacious enterprises of the Soviet propaganda machine to smother reality.” Remarkably, this effort even extended to a discussion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which until that point had been a taboo subject and consequently absent from Soviet historiography. In the new Soviet histories published in the 1960s, therefore, the pact received a few pages of analysis, albeit with the expected omissions, evasions, and justifications. It would be argued, for instance, that Stalin had accepted Hitler’s offer solely as a last resort, that otherwise war with Germany would have been inevitable, and that acceptance of the pact brought the USSR numerous favorable consequences.

Even Khrushchev, whose denunciation of Stalin in 1956 echoed around the world, would loyally parrot this analysis. Writing his reminiscences two decades or so later, he was still firmly on message: “We weren’t fooling ourselves. We knew that eventually we would be drawn into the war, although I suppose Stalin hoped that the English and French might exhaust Hitler first.” The pact, he wrote, was “profitable to the Soviet Union. It was like a gambit in chess: if we hadn’t made that move, the war would have started earlier, much to our disadvantage. As it was we were given a respite.”

Ever the loyal Bolshevik, Molotov too concurred. Speaking some years later, he first denied the suggestion that Stalin had trusted Hitler: “Such a naïve Stalin? No. Stalin saw through it all. Stalin trusted Hitler? He didn’t trust his own people! Hitler fooled Stalin? And as a result of that deception Hitler had to poison himself, and Stalin became the head of half the world!” Explaining the pact, he went on, “We had to delay Germany’s aggression, that’s why we tried to deal with them on an economic level—export-import.” Stalin, he said, “wanted to delay the war for at least another half a year, or longer.”

So, the Soviet Union thus forged its postwar interpretation of the Nazi-Soviet Pact as an agreement forced on Stalin by circumstances. Importantly, however, the Soviet leader had not been taken in by Hitler’s blandishments and had managed thereby to delay the inevitable Nazi attack, saving the USSR from an even worse fate. Naturally, the fates of the millions persecuted, killed, and deported by the Soviets from eastern Poland, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia were not permitted to disturb the rosy narrative. Those territories had been regained by Red Army troops in 1944 and 1945 and were now safely restored to the Soviet bosom, despite the efforts of the few “nationalists” and “terrorists” who had briefly disturbed the Pax Sovietica in the first postwar decade. The region’s historians and journalists were similarly circumscribed. The pact was a verboten subject, passed over in silence, hidden from view, with even the most minimal mention forbidden to deviate from the strict line dictated from Moscow.

The ultimate taboo, however, was the secret protocol. Although the original document had presumably been destroyed in wartime Berlin, a microfilm copy had been made and found its way into American hands at the end of the war, after which it was mentioned obliquely at Nuremberg and then published for the first time in 1948. Yet, given the lack of an original—and the protocol’s embarrassing content—the Soviet Union officially denied its existence and denounced the copy circulating in the West as a forgery, a slander of the Soviet Union, and yet another falsification of history.

So, when Vyacheslav Molotov was asked in 1983 about a “secret agreement” signed in 1939 with the Germans, he was adamant that there was no truth in the allegation: “None whatever,” he said.

“There wasn’t one?” the journalist repeated.

“There wasn’t. No, that’s absurd.”

The journalist pressed a little more. “Surely we can talk about it now?”