WWII Nazi-Soviet Pact: BBC Viewpoint

In today’s BBC News article, Orlando Figes, a history professor at London’s Birkbeck college, offers his view on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact: a pre-WWII appeasement agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Figes writes:

“Seventy years on, the pact between Hitler and Stalin still casts a shadow over Europe. Its memory continues to divide.

For the Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Bessarabians, the pact began the reign of terror, mass deportations, slavery and murder which both the Nazi and the Soviet armies brought along with them when they co-ordinated their invasions of these countries in line with the pact’s notorious secret protocols – by which Stalin and Hitler had agreed to divide Eastern Europe between their regimes.

For the Jews of all these lands, the pact was the licence for the Holocaust. For the European Left, the idea that the leader of the USSR could sign a pact with Hitler symbolised the moral bankruptcy of the Soviet regime.

…

The pact remains an embarrassment for those in Putin’s Russia who take pride from the Soviet achievement in the war.

…”

The purpose of this post is not to discuss the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. It’s historical interpretation is indeed controversial, and I invite all readers of this blog to do your own reading and make up your mind. However, there are few statements which Figes makes which I simply can’t let slide.

Firstly, Figes writes that this “pact with Hitler” “was the licence for the Holocaust” and “symbolised the moral bankruptcy of the Soviet regime”. Perhaps Mr Figes should be reminded of an earlier “pact with Hitler” which the British Prime-Minister Neville Chamberlain signed with both Hitler and Mussolini. The 1938 Munich Agreement, signed by Britan and France above all gave Hitler the green light to annex parts of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovak government was informed (by future allies) that it could either resist Nazi aggression alone or submit to annexing. Was that a lesser “licence for the Holocaust”? Following Figes’ logic, did the Munich Agreement symbolize the moral bankruptcy of the British and French regimes too? Doesn’t it also “continues to divide”? (The Czech still call it “Munic Bentrayal” or “Munich Dictate”). Perhaps a pice for the BBC by Orlando Figes on the Munich Agreement to commemorate 70 years since the beginning of WWII is also due?

Most pathetic is Figes’ assertion that “the pact remains an embarrassment for those in Putin’s Russia who take pride from the Soviet achievement in the war”. Next to everyone in Russia, Putin’s or not, takes just pride from Russian (Soviet) achievement in the war without a hint of embarrassment. Regardless of how you interpret the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the events after WWII, nothing can diminish the sacrifice that almost 30 million Russians who lost their lives made while fighting to defeat Nazism in Europe along with the British and American allies, and to save millions of same Jews that Figes is talking about from Nazi ovens and gas chambers. I find it next to criminal to put Nazi and Soviet armies in one basket (which Figes does when he talks about “slavery and murder which both the Nazi and the Soviet armies brought”). This suggests that, for example, over a million Russians who held off the Nazis and starved to death in the Blockade of Leningrad, or those Soviet soldiers who lost their lives in the Battle of Kursk, are reduced to accomplices to Holocaust, rather than being treated as war heroes. This suggestion is sickening.

Questionable high-level political dealings, either by Soviet or other allied governments, should never be used to cast shadow on the achievement of ordinary men and women who fought the Nazism in WWII.

P.S. I’m not a communist, never was and I sure hope never will be. Neither do I sympathize with the Soviets, or deny the many atrocities SU committed. I simly can’t make peace with selective history, double standards, and reflex logic, which too often make way into mainstream media.

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Tags: BBC, Blocade of Leningrad, Figes, France, Germany, Hitler, Holocaust, Leningrad, Molotov, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Munich Agreement, Munich Betrayal, Munich Dictate, Mussolini, Nazi, Nazism, Orlando, Ribbentrop, Siege of Leningrad, Soviet Union, Soviets, Stalin, UK, World War II, WWII