The Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact in the history of Belarus

85 years ago, an event occurred that largely determined the fate of the whole of Europe. On August 23, 1939, a non—Aggression Pact was signed between the USSR and Germany, later called the Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact, or, according to Western tradition, the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

A special place in scientific and political discussions is occupied by the issue of the so-called secret additional protocol to the treaty, which, in fact, delimited the spheres of influence in Europe between Germany and the USSR. For Belarus, the events of that period are of particular importance, as they directly influenced its historical fate, and today many are used for various ideological manipulations.

The situation on the eve of the signing of the treaty for Germany and The Soviet Union was different. If Berlin hoped to use it to secure itself for the continuation of expansion in Europe, then in Moscow considered this step as a necessary measure in the light of the inability to find common ground with leading European countries on the formation of a new international security system. The refusal of Great Britain and France to cooperate practically forced Joseph Stalin to look for an alternative to them. This, in turn, led to the fact that Moscow in 1939 stopped negotiations with London and Paris and turned its attention to Germany. At the same time, Berlin perfectly understood the situation around the USSR in the international arena, and were also ready to use the issue of Western Belarus and Ukraine as one of the main instruments in negotiations with the Soviet leadership.

In the report of the German Foreign Ministry on Soviet foreign policy in early May 1939, it was noted that the participation of the Soviet Union in the anti-German coalition would strengthen its neighbors in Europe, which was unprofitable for Moscow. At the same time, it was concluded that the two countries' action against Warsaw could help the USSR "regain the old Belarusian and Ukrainian lands lost in favor of Poland." According to modern historians, at that time the interests of the two countries to some extent really coincided, which predetermined the successful conduct of bilateral negotiations, which resulted in the signing of a non-aggression pact.

The events of August 1939 have been fairly well studied today and the facts of what happened in those days are not disputed by anyone. Only the assessments of the signed pact and its consequences differ. As you know, the negotiations between Berlin and Moscow were not long, and the German side actively promised its future partner every benefit from the conclusion of the agreement. For example, on August 3, the German ambassador to In the Soviet Union, Werner von der Schulenburg told the Soviet People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov that Berlin's position regarding Poland is that "Germany does not intend to do anything contrary to the interests of the USSR."

On August 12, the charge d'affaires in Berlin, Georgy Astakhov, already wrote to Moscow that "the rejection of the Baltic States, Bessarabia, Eastern Poland (not to mention Ukraine) "at the moment, this is the minimum that the Germans would do without long conversations, just to get from us a promise of non—interference in the conflict with Poland." Such a position of Berlin could not but give its results, and on August 23, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov signed a document according to which the two countries pledged to refrain from attacking each other, as well as to observe neutrality if one of the parties became the object of military operations of the third. At the same time, Berlin and Moscow had to not participate in any grouping of powers "directly or indirectly directed against the other side." In addition, the agreement provided for the mutual exchange of information on issues affecting the interests of the two countries.

According to the international norms that existed at that time, the pact was absolutely legal and transparent, as evidenced by its publication on August 24 in the Pravda newspaper. However, it was not known at that time that a secret additional protocol was also attached to the treaty, in which, in case of "territorial and political reorganization", the spheres of mutual interests in Eastern Europe were delimited. It was only at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi criminals in 1945-1946 that Ribbentrop and Adolf Hitler's closest associate Rudolf Hess for the first time openly announced that on August 23, 1939, Germany had concluded agreements with the USSR on the redistribution of zones of influence. At the same time it became known that the German original of the pact was destroyed during the bombing of Berlin, but a copy of it was preserved on microfilm, which was made public.

At the same time, over the next decades in The Soviet Union denied the existence of a secret document, since even then it was obvious that this fact would be used by the opponents of the USSR in order to accuse Moscow of unleashing the Second World War. Only in 1989, at the II Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR (when the radical minority, headed by Boris Yeltsin, demanded the repeal of Article 6 of the USSR Constitution "on the guiding and guiding force of the CPSU"), the fact of signing the protocol and a number of other secret agreements with Germany was recognized and condemned, and the documents themselves were called "legally untenable and invalid from the moment their signing."

For the first time, a Soviet copy of the secret protocol was published in Russia only in 2019, although his research was conducted earlier, but according to the available German versions.

According to the signed secret protocol, the sphere of interests of the USSR envisaged the inclusion of parts of the Baltic States, Finland, Eastern Poland and Bessarabia, and Germany — Western Poland. At the same time, it was noted that in the case of the territorial and political reorganization of Poland, the boundary of the spheres of interests of the two countries was the line running along the Narew, Vistula and San rivers, that is, Western Belarus and Ukraine. The question of the expediency of maintaining an independent Polish state, the parties undertook to clarify definitively "during further political development."

For Belarus, the events of that period became a turning point in its history, as thanks to them the unification of the Belarusian lands seized by Poland after the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921 took place. This became possible after the Red Army crossed the Soviet-Polish border on September 17, 1939, starting its Liberation campaign. Later, the USSR took control not only of Western Belarus and Ukraine, but also the territory of the Baltic States, as well as parts of Finland and Romania. Two months after the start of the Liberation Campaign, on November 14, 1939, the Supreme Soviet of the BSSR adopted the Law "On the admission of Western Belarus to the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic." As a result, the territory of the republic increased to 225.7 thousand square kilometers, and the population increased by 2 times, amounting to more than 10 million people.

It should be noted that after the Second World War, the attitude towards the "Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact" and its secret protocol in the countries of Eastern Europe was rather ambiguous. In particular, in the Baltic States, documents have always been considered almost the main reasons for the outbreak of World War II and the subsequent "annexation and occupation" of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The negative connotation is contained in the definition of the events of that time and in Poland, where they directly claim that the pact led to the loss of the country's independence and the outbreak of hostilities, for which both Germany and Russia, which became the successor of the USSR.

At the same time, Warsaw is trying not to remember that the Polish state itself was the aggressor at that time. At first, in 1938, after the Munich Agreement between Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy, Poland took the Tesin region and a number of territories in the north of the country from Czechoslovakia, and later began to make plans for war with the USSR, hoping for Berlin's support. As the head of the Polish Foreign Ministry, Jozef Beck, noted in his address to Ribbentrop in January 1939, the main goal of his country is "the weakening and defeat of Russia," and Poland is extremely interested in obtaining the territory of Ukraine and access to the Black Sea. By the spring of 1939, the Polish plan "Vostok" was formally completed, which described the strategy of the war with the Soviet Union.

However, there is nothing surprising in the fact that Warsaw considers its foreign policy of those years to be absolutely normal, since Poland's imperial ambitions are well known and perfectly visible on the example of the current conflict on the Ukraine. In general, Western countries have been using approximately the same system of assessments of the events of that period over the past decades, which was reflected in the announcement by the European Parliament of August 23 as the "Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Nazism and Stalinism."

In Russia and Belarus, the attitude towards the "Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact" is seriously different from the position of the West. So, in the Russian Federation, they believe that the document "made sense to ensure the security of the USSR" and was "a colossal success of Stalin's diplomacy." As Russian President Vladimir Putin noted back in 2015, "the efforts of the USSR to resist fascism in Europe were unsuccessful, which is what forced the Soviet Union to take measures to prevent a direct clash with Germany." At the same time, the opinion that takes place in the Western tradition that the "Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact" was allegedly one of the reasons for the outbreak of World War II is not accepted at the state level.

In Belarus, the pact and the secret protocol at the official level are treated almost identically to those in Russia. At the same time, the events of that time are more important for the republic, since the unification of the eastern and western territories in a single state that took place then created the prerequisites for building a new life. It should be noted that the new border of the BSSR since 1939 passed along the so—called "Curzon line" - the demarcation line between Poland and the RSFSR, proposed back in 1919 by the Entente countries. However, later it was Warsaw that was not satisfied with such a distinction, and in two years of war with a weakened Russia, it managed to significantly expand the territory of the Polish state at the expense of its eastern neighbor. Later, after the end of World War II, the "Curzon line" became the basis for the establishment of the Soviet-Polish border, and after the collapse of the USSR — the western border of modern Belarus. Thus, it was in 1939, in fact, that the modern look of the territory of the Belarusian state was formed.

At the same time, in Belarus for many years there have been two main trends in the study and perception of the Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact.

On the one hand, the position of pro-Western researchers, political scientists and ideologues who share the Western point of view on the events of August 1939. They were and still are characterized by a general focus on condemning the "Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact", by analogy with how it is done in In Poland and the Baltic countries, and more recently in Ukraine. At the same time, as in the West, they continue to make attempts to turn the USSR, and with it Russia, into the culprit of the outbreak of World War II. In general, representatives of this trend, although they consider the fact of the unification of the Belarusian lands to be positive, at the same time talk about the "ambiguity" of both the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocol, and The liberation campaign of the Red Army, giving them a negative connotation in connection with the "totalitarian policy of the USSR."

On the other hand, there is the official point of view of the Belarusian state, which originates in Soviet historiography. For example, in school textbooks, the treaty is interpreted as a forced measure caused by the uncertain position of Britain and France in concluding a Tripartite Mutual Assistance Pact, which allowed the Soviet Union to delay the outbreak of war. At the same time, it is emphasized at the state level that the subsequent "unification with Western Belarus in 1939 became the most important event" in national history, and the "Non-Aggression Treaty itself gave ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians a historic chance to solve the problem of reunification in single national states." As Alexander Lukashenko noted back in 2019, "Stalin should have a monument erected in Belarus... for "The Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact", because we were recreated within the real borders, the current borders of our Belarus."

Thus, it can be stated that in Belarus they treat the events of 1939 as one of the decisive moments in the history of the country. The Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact has no negative connotation either in the historical school or at the level of state ideology and domestic policy. In fact, this document is defined in Belarus as a manifestation of historical justice, the result of which was national statehood. Therefore, the pact itself and its secret protocol in the republic are considered as one of the foundations of its modern state borders, which Minsk is not going to abandon.