Seventy Years Ago Today: The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
By Robert Higgs • Sunday August 23, 2009 2:45 PM PDT • 32 Comments
When American students learn about World War II, they are usually taught that it began on September 1, 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland. They do not get much instruction about the Treaty of Non-Aggression between the Third German Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, better known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (after the foreign ministers of the two countries), signed early on August 24, 1939, but dated August 23. By this agreement, each side promised to remain neutral in the event that the other were attacked by a third party.
A key feature of the agreeement, however, was the secret protocols that accompanied it, by which the USSR and Germany divided eastern and central Europe into “spheres of influence” and provided that each side might occupy its sphere should “territorial and political rearrangements” be made in these areas. In other words, they agreed on a plan for carving up the entire area between the USSR and Germany as their borders existed at that time.
Seventeen days after the German invasion of Poland, the Russians invaded from the other side and quickly occupied the Polish territories identified as the Soviet sphere of influence in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Afterward, the two sides cooperated economically and militarily in subduing the Poles and in supplying one another with various raw materials and manufactured goods, including military arms and equipment, as well as plans for weapons.
The pact, which came as a great surprise to almost everyone, created a potentially huge embarrassment for the many Soviet sympathizers in the West, including those in the United States, who had worked tirelessly for years to move public opinion against the fascists in general and Germany in particular. But, like the mindless marionettes they were, they missed not a beat, switching virtually overnight to praise for Stalin’s efforts to promote world peace and opposing war against Hitler.
Further potential for embarrassment arose in June 1941, when, notwithstanding the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Disdaining embarrassment, the Roosevelt administration immediately embraced the mass murderers in Moscow and maintained them in a tight embrace for the balance of the war. Strange bedfellows, indeed.
Tags: Europe, Fascism, Military, Politics, Russia, The State, War 
You mean to say history is taught in the USA, much like geography?
alzurzin | Aug 24, 2009 | Reply
Dear Dr. Higgs:
At Rutgers, I had a history professor who openly taught from a “Marxist perspective” as if he provided some insightful, alternative view to the collectivist garbage other teachers were slinging.
In his mind, the Communists were the only true champions against racism and oppression in the United States and the rest of the world. He would speak of how FDR provided “hope” for the American people; not because the New Deal was actually accomplishing its ostensible mission, but simply because he was a president who would not crush labor when it peacefully or violently rebelled against capital. Occurrences such as Operation Keelhaul never entered our discussions. Thank heavens for the Mises Institute, the Independent Institute, and everyone who seeks truth, peace and voluntary cooperation.
bill sinnott | Aug 24, 2009 | Reply
An interesting speech was given by the author of the book Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II, Victor Suvorov, on CSPAN2. In the speech, based on his book, he argues that Stalin’s goal in signing the pact was really a quasi alliance with the Nazis in order to help them fight a western front that would weaken captialism and when the time was right Stalin would sweep all over Europe. In fact he argues that Stalin was preparing to invade the Germans and that’s why Hitler invaded. It seems Stalin took the attitude of “Hitler’s is no more use to me, time to take him out” It sounds like a plausible thesis and interesting book.
Javier | Aug 24, 2009 | Reply
It could just as easily gone the other way, depending on which way the puppet masters wanted to go. Considering our current fascist system in the US, it’s not that far fetched either. We can only say what if, and imagine what terror could have followed. And look forward at the terror that is to come.
Chris | Aug 24, 2009 | Reply
I suggest reading “Stalin’s Folly” by Constantin Pleshkov for a Russian historian’s view of Stalin’s plans to invade Germany in 1940.
Henry Barth | Aug 24, 2009 | Reply
Correct. The USSR was an attacker in WWII and continued attacking the Baltic republics and Finland and at the end of the war a group of Japanese islands. The USSR was the only attacking nation in WWII that had not lost the war and the USSR wanted to continue in its ways. This is the root cause of the “Cold War” (in which hundreds of people died).
Emile | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
I learned about the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement and its implications in “The Gulag Archipelago.” Solzhenitsyn described how ammunition trains were carrying arms to the Germans and were subject to “counter-revolutionary” activity such as sabotage.
Great article Dr. Higgs.
John Heinbockel | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
Not to haul any water for Stalin, the murdering thug, but imagine for a minute that Moscow had not joined us in our war on Germany. Without the efforts of our erstwhile “ally”, the outcome of WW II would have certainly been less satisfactory than it turned out to be.
The Russians killed more of our German enemy and lost many more of their own than the balance of the “allies” combined. Indeed, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
In any event, Stalin is gone, his Soviet Union is gone, into the dustbin of history as they say, so other than to learn from that piece of “history”, which we never seem to do, why not let it be?
David Patrykus | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
Read Baker’s “Human Smoke,” and Buchanan’s “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War.”
snoball | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
And yet WW2 is sold as “the good war,” fought by “the greatest generation.” I weep for my father’s generation — a bunch of teenage boys and twenty-somethings who were forced to leave their lives behind, to be sent all over the world to kill and die in a war that most of their parents had really tried to prevent: Congress had passed strict Neutrality Laws. In those days, too, dissent was forcibly silenced — and The Lie took control.
Robert | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
The hypocrisy that elevates Stalin over Hitler, stems from the pro-socialist faction seeking to scapegoat all faults of socialistm onto the Third Reich– including mass-murder, enslavement and medical experiments. However it’s absurd to claim that abject statism is capable of anything else, if the individual is considered wholly secondary and expendible to the state.
Brian McCandliss | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
Very interesting; completes the history as Studs Terkel reported in the mid 1980′s with his Oral History of WW2, “The Good War,” which described folks’ reactions to shifting allegiances, among other things. A *very* good read.
Tim | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
One thing Mr. Higgs should point out is that Britain declared war against Germany (not the other way around) after the Sept. 1 invasion, in order (officially) to make good its March 1939 pledge to protect Polish territorial and state integrity.
Yet, Poland did not cease to exist on Sept. 1, thus the Soviet invasion of Poland that Mr. Higgs refers to was just as much a violation of Poland’s integrity, as Germany’s invasion was.
Where was the British declaration of war against the Soviet Union?
What should also be pointed out is that, on its western border, the Polish-German border was not one that had been in existence for long (just 20 years), and that it was hardly a settled affair (corridor issues all throughout the 20s and 30s).
On its eastern border, Poland had similarly just 18 years prior, waged a war of agression against the Soviet Union, expanding its border eastwards thereby.
Just because Poland was attacked by two autocratic/tyrannical regimes does not make it the innocent actor that Poland is always portrayed as, and its own government was hardly a model of democracy and respect for minorities either. It was judged to be as anti-semitic by western European powers as Germany in the late thirties, and it had been treating its German minority as 2nd class citizens since 1919.
Until March 1939, Britain had a decidedly Poland-unfriendly foreign policy for just that reason.
Chris | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
My mother was outraged by the information from Ukraine about the Soviets deliberating starving people to death there. As a result, she was anti-Stalin before being anti-Stalin was cool. Certainly the Molotov Ribbentrop pact cemented her disgust with the Stalinists.
As a result of her political activism doing things like integrating the lunch counters in St. Louis in the 1940s, my mother has an FBI file. Among other disgusting labels the FBI had for her was “premature anti-Stalinist.”
You see, after WW2 it was okay be anti-Stalinist. But doing so prematurely was wrong, terribly wrong.
Jim Davidson | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
Interesting article
Soviet and Nazi- Germany also cooperated a lot even before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The military of both nations developed parallelly. Germany were allowed to use Soviet bases and fields to develop new technology and doctrines which Soviet then could adopt.
Ante Bragd | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
We paid later with the cold war for the pact with devil,but in the meantime it helped to defeat the nazis,and that’s what counts in the end.
fred | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
It’s all perspective. Stalin and Hitler were both treacherous, but so was the West. Stalin was prepared to join the France and Britain in war against Nazi Germany over Czechoslovakia. When the West shrewdly sold the Czechs out to bide time for re-armament, Stalin acted shrewdly too. Nazi Germany had a secret naval base in the USSR after the MR Pact, and honed their panzer tactics on the Steppes of Russia in the 1930s, away from Western eyes. Poland, a dictatorship at the time, as well as Hungary, participated in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. The fight to “Free People” from tyranny and oppression only applied to Europeans (ok, Chinese too), never mind those in Europe’s colonies. Stalin and communism, killed 20 million of their own, while Hitler killed 10s of millions in the death camps and by war. The GREAT GAME is different from what we are lead to believe.
John Collis | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
David, your ignorance of history is astounding. If Stalin hadn’t joined us the communization of half of Europe and all of China would have been avoided. Mao killed over 100 million in peacetime and the Soviets killed over 62 million in peacetime. The wartime Jewish deaths attributed to the Germans are exaggerated by a factor of five to ten. The Soviets and the Germans would have ended in a stalemate and the subsequent expulsion of 15 million Sudenten Germans by postwar Soviet satellites in Poland and Czechoslovakia with the resulting deaths of 2-4 million Germans would never have occurred nor the rape of all the women in Berlin. We need to bring FDR’s Soviet-loving policies to light and if some of you Comsymps don’t like it, tough.
Michael Hardesty | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
This is an interesting point and very real. After the WWII Stalin went on with anti-West propaganda and we were told that the final victory all over the world of proletarians and communism is near.
Nick Nazari | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
I don’t think you know what you’re talking about...
Nick Nazari | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
Dr. Higgs – More like this, please. Thanks.
greg muffitt | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
I’m interested in the comment about “our war” posted by one of the readers. WWII did not officially become “our war” until December of 1941, by which time the conflict in Europe had already been raging for over two years (and of course much longer in Asia). By that time, Germany had proven itself incapable of inflicting defeat on Britain, and ultimately would prove itself incapable of defeating the USSR as well (and this would have been true regardless of Lend-Lease or American involvement in the WTO). Other posters have got it right — American involvement in WWII was not necessary to defeat Hitler, and was tragically costly besides. This is a view point which is also never (or rarely) taught in schools.
Chris | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
One should be clear — the German Nazis and the Russian Communists were both the same brutal totalitarian socialists, merely different national cultural manifestations of the same ideological phenomenon. One of the great lies of the 20th century, still repeated and believed by the undiscerning, is that the the German Nazis were “right wing.” Right wing means conservative, left wing means anti-status quo and revolutionary. There was nothing conservative nor pro-status quo about the Nazis. Neither were they a “military dictatorship” — yes they liked uniforms but that is a German cultural norm even today. Nazi Germany was run by a revolutionary socialist political construct — they actually had the military, run by the real conservative, noble, traditional “Junker” class as an adversary, which the Nazis were able to overcome with a type of coup d’etat 4 years into their reign. So yes . . . the Nazi and Soviet division of Poland and mutual assistance for awhile was perfectly logical . . . as they were cut of the same cloth.
George | Aug 25, 2009 | Reply
How does one go about getting their FBI file to look at? I should wonder if everyone should be asking that question. If you know could you let me know. Thanks
Lynn Goodrich | Aug 26, 2009 | Reply
Good book reccommend. I would add another by Joachim Hoffman called Stalin’s War of Extermination and James Edward’s Hitler: Stalin’s Stooge. To the list.
Javier | Aug 28, 2009 | Reply
Excellent piece and very thought provoking. Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we first practice to deceive.
We need less government and a true Department of Defense.
Fred Breisch | Aug 30, 2009 | Reply
Maybe Poland was ‘judged to be as anti-semitic by western European powers as Germany in the late thirties’, but I do not think such a ‘judgment’ to be right. Poles did not build concentration camps for Jews, nor forced them to wear a star of David, etc.; Germans did. Do you really think that until March 1939 or after March 1939 Britain cared for how Poland had treated their own citizens?
Wiseguy | Sep 2, 2009 | Reply
Poland signed a deal with Germany in 1934. In 1938, after the Munich pact, Poland together with Germany occupied Czechoslovakia and gained part of its territory.
Mateusz Piskorski: “...as Poles, we should remember that a year before we also cooperated with Berlin, although on an obviously smaller scale. Poland had taken part in the partition of Czechoslovakia...”
http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20090825/155922851.html
“...In early November 1938, under the first Vienna Award, which was a result of the Munich agreement, Czechoslovakia (and later Slovakia) — after it had failed to reach a compromise with Hungary and Poland.... and Poland obtained small territorial cessions shortly after...”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_occupation_of_Czechoslovakia#The_first_Vienna_Award
“...Poland was conspiring with Nazis to destroy Soviet Union...”:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/world-war-2/6127277/World-War-2-Poland-was-conspiring-with-Nazis-to-destroy-Soviet-Union-Russia-claims.html
Vladimir | Sep 2, 2009 | Reply