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

Molotov replied, “Of course, there is no secret here. In my view these rumours were deliberately spread to damage reputations. No, no, this matter is very clean. There could not have been any such secret agreement. I was very close to this matter, in fact I was involved in it, and I can assure you that this is unquestionably a fabrication.”

Molotov certainly had been “close to” the secret protocol; in fact, he had signed it. Yet, he went to his grave in 1986 denying its existence.

Not everyone in the USSR would be so loyal to Stalin’s line. Three years after Molotov’s death, in 1989, a summer of protests in Moscow’s Baltic republics would see a quite different narrative emerging. Taking the spirit of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika policies at face value, many among the Baltic peoples had by that time begun to openly rail against Soviet rule. Spurred by exiles and sympathizers who had already named August 23 as “Black Ribbon Day” and held rallies in New York, London, and elsewhere to protest human rights abuses in the Soviet Union, Baltic activists had gathered signatures and made earnest pleas for international recognition of their plight. But for the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, on August 23, 1989, they planned a protest on an unprecedented scale.

On that day, a human chain comprising as many as 2 million people snaked down main roads and byways through the three Baltic republics, linking the three capitals of Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius, a distance of over five hundred kilometers. At 7 p.m. they all linked hands in what would be known as “the Baltic Way.” It was the largest popular protest that the Soviet Union had ever witnessed. Elsewhere vigils, church services, and local gatherings were held. Five thousand came together in the center of Vilnius to sing patriotic songs and light candles. Prewar national flags were flown and black ribbons worn in memory of Stalin’s victims.

For all of them across the three republics, the protest was about human rights, Soviet occupation, and the desire for national independence. But the focal point of their grievances was very clearly the Nazi-Soviet Pact. At Šiauliai in Lithuania, for instance, a public demonstration showed three coffins draped in the flags of the prewar republics, while beside them the swastika and the hammer and sickle were crossed, tied together with a black ribbon. In Estonia and Latvia, meanwhile, banners proclaimed the illegality of the Soviet occupation or simply carried the date “August 23, 1939.” A communiqué sent by the protest’s organizers to the United Nations clarified the central significance of the pact. With its signing, the Nazi-Soviet Pact had inflicted many wounds, it stated, and “some of those wounds are still bleeding.” “The criminal pact,” it went on, “has to be voided! The essence of the Hitler-Stalin Pact and its secret protocols was imperialist division of the spheres of interest between two great powers. On the basis of this criminal deal, the Soviet Union unilaterally violated all the international treaties concluded with the Baltic republics, infringed on the historical right of the Baltic nations to self-determination, presented ruthless ultimatums to the Baltic republics, occupied them with overwhelming military force, and under conditions of military occupation and heavy political terror carried out their violent annexation. The Hitler-Stalin Pact is still shaping the Europe of today.”

In the aftermath, the Soviet authorities made a few token arrests, complained about “nationalist, extremist groups” and their “anti-Soviet agendas,” and rebuked the local authorities for failing to take action to break up the protests. Beyond a few well-intentioned international comments, little changed, but the Baltic peoples were emboldened, encouraged to push again for independence.

Aside from the obvious political challenge, the Baltic Way also posed an intellectual one. After decades of exercising total control over information within the USSR, in Gorbachev’s new era the Soviet view no longer went unchallenged in the realm of ideas. The same was true of history, where Stalin’s traditional “defensive” narrative of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was increasingly being brought into question. Forced by events into a more honest reassessment of its own past, Moscow established an official commission to investigate the circumstances of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and, in particular, the existence of the secret protocol. In December 1989, the commission duly reported in the affirmative, declaring that there “could not be the slightest doubt” that the protocol existed. The Congress of the People’s Deputies of the Soviet Union then passed a resolution in support of the findings.

Other revelations followed. In the spring of 1990, after decades of official denial, the Soviet state finally acknowledged the responsibility of its secret police forces in carrying out the Katyn massacres, adding a rather hollow-sounding expression of its “profound regret.” The Soviet monolith was cracking. And just as Soviet control over eastern Europe had collapsed with spectacular suddenness that very winter, it would begin to unravel at home as well. And when it did, in 1991, the Baltic states were the first to head for the exit, spurred in large measure by the injustices of five decades earlier. Rarely, it seemed, had high politics and dark history been so closely entwined.

IN EARLY APRIL 2009, THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT IN BRUSSELS considered a resolution proposing that August 23 be thenceforth recognized as the European Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. Drawing on the earlier Prague Declaration, tabled by the Czech government and cosigned by, among others, the former Czech president Václav Havel and the later German president Joachim Gauck, the resolution vowed “to preserve the memory of the victims of mass deportations and exterminations.” It was passed by a large majority. “Better late than never,” said one Estonian member of the European Parliament during the debate, adding, “We owe our parents and grandparents a firm parliamentary message, and that is what we have produced today.”

Of course, there were dissenting voices. Thirty-three members of the European Parliament abstained, and forty-four voted against the resolution. One of the latter was a Greek communist who waxed indignant, in an impassioned written submission, against the “indescribably vulgar” juxtaposition of the Nazi and Soviet regimes, which thereby advocated “acquitting fascism, slandering socialism and exonerating imperialism of the crimes which it committed and is committing today.” A few others concurred. One British journalist, for instance, criticized the vote as “an unpleasant effort by many Baltic and central European politicians to equate Stalinism and Nazism,” ignoring the glaringly obvious point that those who had experienced both horrors were perhaps best placed to make the judgment.

Russia, too, cried foul, with 53 percent opposing the resolution in one opinion poll and only 11 percent in favor. According to another survey, Russian popular opinion considered that the European Parliament’s decision had been adopted to “undermine Russia’s authority” and to “diminish its contribution to the victory over fascism.” A few weeks later, then Russian president Dmitry Medvedev established a Presidential Commission to Counter Attempts to Falsify History, along with accompanying legislation that enabled transgressors to be fined or imprisoned for up to five years. The new body, one of its members vowed, would “ensure the Russian view prevails.” Any worrying sense of déjà vu was only heightened by the presence on the commission of prominent members of the Russian military and the FSB, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB.