Stalin-Hitler Pact: How to turn the triumph of Soviet diplomacy into its main defeat

Epigraph: “History is not a teacher, but a warden; history does not teach anything, but only punishes for unlearned lessons ... "(V.O.Klyuchevsky)

From the author: We continue to fight the Western falsifiers of history. This text is devoted to debunking their main myth about the fault of the USSR in unleashing the Second World War, the blame for which lies with both dictators, and the fact that the communist dictator won this war is no easier for the world. For all the delusional nature of this statement, it should be admitted that there is no smoke without fire, Stalin really took part in the partition of Poland (which is what the apologists of this version are saying). This text will shed light on why Stalin agreed to this, what preceded it and why I consider it a triumph of Soviet diplomacy in those years.



They died down with fireworks, parades marched the next Victory holidays. Its 76th anniversary passed like the previous ones. These days, supporters have once again crossed their swords to celebrate this holiday on May 8 as the Day of Remembrance and Sorrow, and the heirs of Soviet traditions to celebrate this holiday on May 9 as the Day of the Great Victory over Nazism. During these days, we heard the next accusations of the collective West that, they say, the Russians strongly militarized this holiday, turning it into a review of modern models of military equipment and the achievements of the Russian Military Industry, in a vain attempt to demonize the Russian Federation and the USSR once again, to belittle their contribution to the great victory, smearing it on a common allied plate.

What can I say here? It's not for you to tell us how to celebrate our national holidays! You, as the losing side in this war, can grieve and remember on this day, and we, as winners, will rejoice that we have won a victory over the universal Evil, having saved you on the way from it (now, I think it’s in vain!) ... As you remember, we can already see from the demolished monuments to the soldiers-liberators in Poland and similar actions in relation to the monument to Marshal Konev, the liberator of Prague in the Czech Republic. Winners write history. Apparently, some in the West decided that since he won the Cold War, which ended with the collapse of the Union, it was time to rewrite history.

In Ukraine, which has been under a state protectorate for the last 7 years, this has taken on extreme right-wing forms. In some places, the past holidays were overshadowed by the antics of neo-Nazis. In the hero city of Kiev, for example, on the eve of May 9, the current heirs and successors of the "glorious" traditions of the 14th SS Volunteer Grenadier Infantry Division "Galicia" marched through the streets of the Ukrainian capital. A couple of days later, in the hero city of Odessa, their local associates tried to disrupt the events dedicated to the 7th anniversary of the Odessa tragedy on May 2. And all this is happening with the complete connivance and even encouragement of the local authorities. What seemed impossible until quite recently is becoming commonplace. No one is surprised at the demolition of the memorial to Soviet soldiers in Lvov (under the pretext of transferring the monuments of the totalitarian regime to another place), renaming of streets and squares, banning Soviet symbols and turning the USSR and Stalin personally into a comrade-in-arms of Hitler's Germany in unleashing World War II.

Putin recently lamented that modern Russian history textbooks do not adequately reflect the Battle of Stalingrad everywhere; I can imagine how horrified he would be if he read modern Ukrainian history textbooks. If we say that they are shamelessly lying, then this is to say nothing. There, with a blue eye, it is asserted that the USSR attacked Ukraine in 1941, apparently, none of the authors of these textbooks are embarrassed by the fact that Ukraine was then part of the USSR as a union republic (according to their version, it turns out that the USSR attacked itself !). One could close our eyes to this nonsense, as to an obvious nonsense (like the ancient proto-ukrov - the progenitors of the ancient Romans who dug the Black Sea), but gentlemen, the curators of the Ukrainian project act much more subtly. In their work, they are guided by the motto of Joseph Goebbels, who declared 80 years ago: "Take history away from the people, and in a generation it will turn into a crowd, and in a generation into a controlled herd." They have already turned most of the Ukrainians into a crowd. And then the rule of Adolf Hitler comes into effect, in his conceptual opus "Mein Kampf" (in accordance with the federal law of July 25, 2002 "On Countering Extremist Activities" No. 114-FZ, the book is prohibited on the territory of the Russian Federation), who stated that "broad the masses have a limited capacity for understanding and an unlimited capacity for forgetting. " The Americans seem to have thoroughly studied this work. That is why in Ukraine they are so fiercely fighting all manifestations of our glorious "totalitarian" past, from the renaming of avenues and squares to a prison term threatening for the St. George ribbon and the Victory Banner. As you know, a people who do not honor and do not know their history has no future. But the bright future of Ukraine is not at all included in the plans of its Western puppeteers - according to their idea, it should burn in the flame of the struggle with Russia. Therefore, all their efforts are aimed solely at breaking the cultural and historical code of the population, who, by the will of fate, ended up in this territory forgotten by God.

And we must give them their due, they act thoroughly, for centuries. The grains they have sown now will still give their poisonous shoots. And you will not do anything about it, because professionals work. It is very difficult for an untrained layman to immediately figure out where the truth is and where the lie is, when a piece of truth is wrapped in rolls of lies and all this is provided with beautiful packaging and a label “Take my word for it! Made in the USA ”. How these shoots work, all those who disagree with me can be convinced by looking at Putin's protest electorate, which has grown over the years of his rule through the efforts of local agents of American influence. But these friends appeared just at the end of the Union, when the late USSR of the Gorbachev era was flooded with waste paper telling the gullible Soviet reader about the horrors of Stalinism, the Gulag and other joys of the totalitarian regime. Who has forgotten or did not know, I will remind you, "Children of the Arbat" by Anatoly Rybakov, "Kolyma Tales" by Varlam Shalamov, "The Gulag Archipelago" and "One Day of Ivan Denisovich" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and other revelations about the bloody gebny and the horrors of the recent communist past , which poured onto the ordinary Soviet citizen from the pages of such publications as Ogonyok by Vitaly Korotich, who then broke all circulation records, and other similar publications. It took a long time for Putin, who came to power in 1999, to wash away the blackened image of the Kremlin Georgian satrap, so that later, through the efforts of new generations of nevzorovs and Kasparovs, to be in his place. I showed you how this matrix works. Wormy grains always give their rotten shoots. And the Anglo-Saxons do nothing in vain, they work for centuries, for a long time, for the future. They know for sure that Russia can only be broken from within. And who said that the technologies worked out in Ukraine cannot be used in the Russian Federation?

The following statement is fundamental here: the Soviet Union, together with Hitler's Germany, unleashed the Second World War, the blame for which lies with both dictators, and the fact that the communist dictator won this war is no easier for the world. For all the delusional nature of this statement, it should be admitted that there is no smoke without fire (which is what the apologists of this version are saying). And in order to debunk it, you need to be well informed about the events of 1938-39, and even in the Soviet era, this period in world history was covered in the school curriculum extremely poorly, if not selectively. People, of course, have heard something about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (better known in the West as the Stalin-Hitler Pact), but the truth, as always, is hidden in details that no one will dig into, which allows new interpreters of history to assert that Stalin and Hitler unleashed World War II by attacking Poland. Indeed, on September 1, 1939, Wehrmacht troops entered Poland from the west, and on September 17, the Red Army did the same only from the east.

History teaches us only that it teaches nothing

And no one remembers any more, but what preceded it? Neither the March Anschluss of Austria in 1938, nor the September of the same year, the "Munich Agreement" of the great powers (Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy), which sanctioned the partition of Czechoslovakia in favor of Germany, according to which Hitler seized the Sudetes, inhabited mainly by ethnic Germans , which served as the beginning of the process of dismemberment of this sovereign state, which ended in March 1939 with the creation of the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia under the rule of Berlin (on March 15, 1939, Hitler sent his troops there), the First Slovak Republic under the rule of Josef Tiso (Hitler's loyal ally in World War II ) and Subcarpathian Rus, which was immediately occupied by Hungary. No one remembers what role Poland played in this, as it took a predatory role in this process, announcing an ultimatum with claims to Cieszyn Silesia (the subject of their long-standing 1918-1920 territorial disputes), weakened by the internal and external problems of Czechoslovakia, and introducing its troops there simultaneously with Germany. ... On October 1, German troops crossed the Czechoslovak border and occupied the Sudetenland; on October 2, the Polish troops did the same, occupying, with the forced tacit consent of the Czechoslovak government, the Cieszyn region.

It should be noted that the Soviet government was ready to fulfill the conditions of the Prague Treaty and to side with Czechoslovakia in the event of its war with Germany, even if France refuses to do so, contrary to the Soviet-French pact, and Poland and Romania will not be allowed to pass through their territory parts of the Red Army. And then Poland showed itself in all its glory, declaring that it would not interfere and, moreover, would immediately declare war on the Soviet Union if it tried to send troops through its territory to help Czechoslovakia. And if Soviet planes appear over Poland on their way to Czechoslovakia, they will immediately be attacked by Polish aviation. And these people forbid us to pick our noses and sing something about Stalin, on a par with Hitler who unleashed World War II ?! Especially for them, I inform you that on September 23, 1938 (almost a year before the Soviet troops entered Poland), the Soviet government made an official statement to the Polish government that any attempt to occupy a part of Czechoslovakia would annul the Soviet-Polish non-aggression pact. What did Poland do? What are your complaints against us? We warned in advance. Poland had a whole year to "think".

Hungary did not behave in the best way either, simultaneously with Poland and Germany, presented its claims to Czechoslovakia in the southern part of Slovakia and Subcarpathian Rus (then they were still part of Czechoslovakia), and already on November 2, 1938, by the decision of the First Vienna Arbitration, it received the southern (plain) regions of Slovakia and Subcarpathian Rus (modern Transcarpathian region of Ukraine) with the cities of Uzhgorod, Mukachevo and Beregovo in their complete possession. In March 1939, all this culminated in the capture of the northern part of Subcarpathian Rus (Carpathian Ukraine, which proclaimed itself after the collapse of Czechoslovakia on its territory, did not live a week). The process of its occupation by Hungary was accompanied by a series of bloody clashes with local paramilitaries, which went down in history under the name "Carpathian Sich" (but the UPA soldiers and their commander-in-chief Roman Shukhevych, who later smeared himself with Hitler's service, will tell you about this better).

And against the backdrop of all this, on August 23, 1939, the Non-Aggression Pact was concluded between Germany and the USSR, better known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, according to which the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany became allies for 22 months. On June 22, 1941, with the German attack on the USSR, it all ended. A random play of numbers, tell me, but the situation there was by no means linear. And Stalin went to an alliance with Hitler not at all from a good life.

22 honeymoons in the life of tyrants

Just a week after the conclusion of the "Hitler-Stalin Pact", as it is commonly called in the FRG, the Second World War began with an attack by Germany on Poland, and two weeks later Soviet troops entered Polish territory. The victorious campaign ended with fraternization of units of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army and a joint parade in Brest-on-Bug. On the podium, brigade commander Krivoshein stood next to General Heinz Wilhelm Guderian, whose tank corps would almost reach Moscow in just two years.

Hitler's tasks when concluding this agreement were clear, he did not want to fight on two fronts and wanted to secure himself with the supply of oil products, grain, ore and some other articles of critical imports for the period of possible economic the blockade that the collective West could arrange for him after its attack on Poland (and did it, but it was too late!). And what tasks did Stalin pursue? And the "mustachioed tyrant", realizing that war was inevitable, tried to delay it and manage to re-equip the Red Army during this time, which he partially succeeded in, but still the war caught him and the army by surprise. Half of the aviation was destroyed right at the base airfields in the very first hours of the war, and the purge of the top commanding staff of the Red Army, which he initiated, led to a complete collapse of control, when we rolled back, surrendering our territories, almost to Moscow precisely in the first most difficult months of the war that Hitler had hoped for. finish before the cold weather. And I would have finished if it were not for the heroism of the Soviet people, who rose up to defend the Fatherland with their bosom, defended their independence and cowardly Europe with millions of lives, and the very right to life.

The devil is in the details

Critics of this project insist that the Non-Aggression Pact was concluded between powers that have no common borders, which supposedly suggests that both tyrants were preparing for a territorial redistribution of Europe. Yes, we did indeed prepare. Only a blind man could not notice Hitler's preparations for this. And what was Stalin supposed to do in this situation? Close your eyes and wait for an attack? Or, maybe, crawl on your knees to France and Great Britain with a request to conclude an allied agreement on mutual assistance in the event of an attack on one of the signatory parties by a third party (it is clear which third party we are talking about)? By that time, on May 22, 1939, Hitler had already concluded with Mussolini the "Steel Pact", a German-Italian treaty of alliance and friendship, which finally formed the backbone of the Hitlerite coalition states. Three years earlier, on November 25, 1936, Germany and Japan had concluded something similar called the Anti-Comintern Pact, the spearhead of which was directed against the USSR. With the conclusion of the "Steel Pact", the clouds over the Union really closed up. It was clear what Hitler was preparing for. Stalin acted outside the box, simultaneously negotiating with Hitler, and with Chamberlain, and with Daladier, and not believing any of them, he tried, playing on their mutual insurmountable contradictions, to stay away from the coming European war, or at least , to delay the USSR's involvement in it for as long as possible. Considering the possible risks of the parties, he quite accurately assessed that the risk of an attack from the gaining strength of the Third Reich is much higher, so it would be wiser to neutralize it (and Hitler himself was striving for this, fearing to fight on both fronts at once) than to hope for help from Britain and France. How right he was was shown already in September 1939 and the events that followed it, which unfolded during the so-called Strange War, when France and England were only simulating a war against Germany, which attacked Poland, with which they were bound by mutual protection treaties. We all know how it ended for them (France fell under the pressure of Hitler's troops a year later, in 1940, and Britain experienced the full horror of the German bombing). Stalin, having concluded a "Non-Aggression Pact" with Hitler, thus gained time and created a buffer from the annexed territories of western Ukraine, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, the Baltic states and western Belarus, which, being annexed to the USSR, slowed down the advance of the Wehrmacht's tank wedges in the direction to Moscow 22 months later, when Hitler decided on his blitzkrieg.

It doesn't matter who outwitted whom, Hitler's Stalin or Stalin's Hitler. Hitler, having attacked the USSR, found his death here (in the figurative sense of the word), and the great European powers, trying to incite the Reich against the USSR that they hated, in the end did not escape their war with it. And only the entry into the war of the Soviet Union saved them from the sad fate that Germany had in store for them, if it were not for Hitler's foolishness to get involved in the war with the USSR. I am not trying to whiten the "mustachioed tyrant" here, he was still that beetle, but how pure the British and French were in their thoughts, only one fact speaks. On July 23, 1939, the Soviet side proposed to start negotiations of military missions in Moscow, without waiting for a political agreement between the three countries. On July 25, the British, and on July 26, the French sides agreed. At the same time, British Foreign Minister Halifax said that the delegation will be able to leave in 7-10 days, but its composition has not yet been determined. As a result, the British and French missions left for Moscow only on August 5, choosing the longest way of travel - by sea to Leningrad and further by train. The missions arrived in Moscow only on 11 August. The parties were obviously playing for time, conducting parallel negotiations with Hitler. The British generally agreed to negotiations with the USSR only in order to complicate Soviet-German contacts and to strengthen their positions in negotiations with Germany. They assumed that their military negotiations with Moscow would prevent Soviet-German rapprochement and would drag out the time until autumn, when Germany, due to weather conditions, would not dare to start a war with Poland. Time has shown how wrong they were. Hitler outplayed them all. Who is more to blame for the fate that befell Poland, Stalin, Hitler or European political rogues, let historians judge. Only objective, not current falsifiers.

Summary

“It is not only possible to be proud of the glory of your ancestors, but it should be. Not to respect it, there is a shameful cowardice "(A. Pushkin).

In conclusion, to summarize, I will only say that the USSR was the penultimate state to sign such a bilateral document with Germany, after Poland, Great Britain, France, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia (the last was Turkey). Why don't you scold them? They, it turns out, also contributed to the beginning of the Second World War? In addition to everything, the non-aggression pact was concluded during the hostilities on Khalkhin Gol between the USSR and Japan, Germany's ally in the Anti-Comintern Pact. Why is this moment not taken into account? Germany was an ally of Japan, and, according to the above pact, could take her side. Stalin minimized this threat. According to the Soviet-German agreement, the parties to the agreement pledged to refrain from attacking each other and to maintain neutrality in the event that one of them became the object of hostilities by a third party. The parties to the agreement also renounced allied relations with other powers, "directly or indirectly directed against the other side."

The signing of the treaty ended the period of cooling of Soviet-German political and economic relations caused by the coming to power in Germany of the NSDAP and Adolf Hitler. Having received in the autumn of 1938 in Munich another clear evidence that the great powers were not ready to take into account the opinion of the USSR in European politics, the Soviet leadership was extremely interested in disrupting the trend of European consolidation, which did not take into account Soviet interests. In this sense, the continuation of German expansion at the beginning of 1939 was in Moscow's interests, since it sharply increased the interest of both European military-political groups in an agreement with the USSR, while the Soviet leadership could choose with whom and on what conditions it would negotiate, taking into account its interests ... We are talking about the Germany-Italy group opposing the Britain-France group.

Thus, this "Non-Aggression Pact" can be viewed as a significant victory for Soviet diplomacy, which was able to use the European crisis in its own interests, outplay British diplomacy and achieve its main goal - to stay out of the European war, while gaining a significant free hand in Eastern Europe. wider space for maneuver between the warring factions in their own interests and at the same time shifting the responsibility for disrupting the Anglo-French-Soviet negotiations to London and Paris. As a result, the Soviet-German non-aggression pact looked like a forced step taken when the unwillingness of Britain and France to conclude an effective treaty on counteracting aggression became obvious.

PS By the way, does it bother anyone that the Franco-Soviet "Non-Aggression Pact" concluded in 1935 was concluded between countries that do not have common borders? It was thanks to him that France should have intervened on the side of the USSR if he had come out in defense of Czechoslovakia after the entry of German and Polish troops into its territory in October 1938 after the well-known "Munich Agreement". But she didn't interfere. Moreover, she personally took part in the division of Czechoslovakia. This once again proves all the far-fetched accusations of the USSR, which signed a similar pact with Nazi Germany. At that time, such pacts were the usual procedure for regulating bilateral relations.

I wanted to end with the words of Winston Churchill: