by Vincenzo Medde [a pro-NATO Russia-basher, but he makes some valid points.]

[transl. from the Italian]

Vladimir Putin on June 18, 2020 in the American magazine “The National Interest” published a long article The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II to present the Russian and personal version of the events that led to the Second World War. In this article, Putin takes up some points of view presented at the informal summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States on December 20, 2019.

The speech at the summit – presented as a true historical reconstruction – according to Sergey Radchenko , lecturer in international politics at Cardiff University, would never have had a grade in any respectable university, nor could it have been published in any serious journal.

Even the intervention on “The National Interest” – which also claims to be based “exclusively on archive documents and contemporary evidence while avoiding any ideological or politicized speculations” – appears at times more speech and rhetorical peroration than a historically questionable but reliable reconstruction, and it is hard to believe that the Russian historians who helped Putin are unable to produce analyzes, certainly biased, but at least a little more sophisticated.

Indeed, professional historical research – which draws not only from Western archives, but also from those, available after 1989, of countries such as Russia, Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic countries, and which benefits from knowledge not only of English and German, but also of Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Baltic languages ​​- has produced reconstructions that document a very different historical reality from that presented by Putin. Below are some examples taken mainly, but not only, from the books and essays of the American historian Timothy Snyder.

1. When did World War II start?

According to Timothy Snyder “the Second World War began with the alliance between Hitler and Stalin” ( Snyder , Echoes ).

For five years the Poles had rejected the insistent offers of the Germans to forge an alliance against the USSR, the last time on January 25, 1939 in Warsaw when they rejected yet another offer from the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. That same day the “New York Times” published an article by Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck in which, in the face of the world, it was made clear that Poland would never side with Germany or the USSR in any war. between the two powers (Snyder, Bloodlands : 146; Black Earth : 130).

The Soviets, on the other hand, who considered Poland a “monstrous birth of the Treaty of Versailles”, according to Molotov’s definition (Graziosi: 448), on 23 August and 28 September 1939 signed pacts with secret protocols which had the purpose of dividing of Poland between Germany and the USSR and the assignment of the Baltic territories to the Soviets . Poland was invaded by the Germans on September 1st and by the Soviets on September 17th, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany on the 3rd. This is how the Second World War began.

The vindictive cynicism of the Soviets also showed itself in the tragedy of the Poles. On September 17, at 3 am, the Polish ambassador was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was informed that he no longer enjoyed diplomatic immunity, given the fact that the Polish state had “dissolved”, had “collapsed” – these are the terms then used by the Nazis and the Soviets in the documents of 28 September. The Polish Embassy staff was rescued by the German Ambassador Schulenburg (Wedgewood Benn: 713).

On 22 September the commanders Heinz Guderian for the Germans and Semyon Krivoshein for the Soviets met in Brest and organized a parade: in front of an improvised stage for the military authorities, infantry units, motorized troops, tanks, artillery pieces paraded ; then there was the raising of the flag: of the Kriegsflagge accompanied by the hymn Deutschland, Deutschland über alles , of the red flag with hammer and sickle accompanied by the Internazionale . The next day, at the headquarters, Krivoshein received two German journalists with whom he toasted Hitler and Stalin “men of the people”. He also gave them his address in Moscow, inviting them to visit him “after the victory over the capitalist Albion” (Moorhouse).

Nobody can know what would have happened if the Nazi-Soviet pact had not been signed or if the USSR had remained neutral; but, without the alliance and the guarantee that there would be no attack from the east, could the Germans have defeated France so quickly and easily in 1940? Could the Wehrmacht have invaded Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg without Soviet wheat and oil? Without Soviet oil and grain, could the Germans have bombed London and avoided the effects of the British blockade? In short, the Germans, who have direct responsibility for the unleashing of the Second World War, took advantage of the favorable conditions deriving from the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and the war began precisely with the signing of this pact (Snyder, The fatal fact ).

The German historian Ernst Nolte expresses himself with equal determination. «[…] It is excluded that Hitler would have attacked Poland if there had been a great enemy power on its eastern border. […] It is therefore not possible to have any doubts about the meaning of this pact. The Soviet Union gave Germany the green light for the war against Poland: that is, it was a war pact . This war also had to lead to the division of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence: in this sense the pact represented a pact of division. And, at least as regards Poland, the division was not limited to establishing zones of influence, but suggested the disappearance of the Polish state itself as an autonomous national reality: the pact was therefore an annihilation pact “(Nolte: 320-321 ).

To conclude in a nutshell on this point, the Soviet Union with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact made possible the beginning of the war and with the economic exchanges created the basis for its continuation .

2. The Munich Pact, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union

“… during those dramatic days of 1938 the Soviet Union was the only country to side with Czechoslovakia,” asserts Putin. But it is worth returning to 1938 and to Munich with another guide, Terra Neraby Timothy Snyder (pp. 121-126). Czechoslovakia saw itself as a Western democracy and its particular combination of freedom and prosperity was unique in Central Europe and possibly the continent. At least it is doubtful that the Soviets really intended to defend that country. The USSR did not share any borders with Czechoslovakia, so the Red Army would have had to cross the territory of Poland or Romania, which both countries, but especially the former, could never have allowed, and for valid reasons. Reasons that Stalin and Molotov, even in institutional settings, clarified a year after Munich stating that they hoped for the dismemberment of Poland in view of the annexation of new territories to the USSR (see below 3. The secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact).

Still in 1938, a ferocious campaign of deportations and ethnic extermination by shooting of Soviet citizens of Polish origin was underway throughout the USSR , particularly in western Ukraine, which bordered on Poland; it was the “national” aspect of the Great Terror that raged in the USSR in 1937-38. Starting from September 15, 1938, as part of the Polish Operation , special troikas carried out numerous mass executions on the basis of unequivocal oral instructions: “Poles must be completely exterminated” (Snyder, Black Earth: 126). The troikas moved from place to place and after brief instructions handed down the sentences: men were shot, women and children deported to the Gulag. In the Zitomyr area, on the border with Poland, on September 22 the troikas sentenced one hundred people to death, one hundred and thirty eight on the 23rd, four hundred eight on the 28th .

If the Red Army, with the NKVD in tow, crossed Poland, the Poles knew what to expect. On the other hand, fears confirmed by the violence deployed by the Soviets after the invasion of 17 September as the planned outcome of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

Putin’s accusation that the Europeans, and the Poles in particular, betrayed Czechoslovakia, even participating in its partition, perhaps alludes to the annexation by Poland, in 1938 and following the Munich Pact, of Zaolzie, a region of Czechoslovakia. with a Polish majority. According to the Polish historian Sławomir Dębski it was a mistake and a trap that Poland was unable to avoid. Error that in 2009 the then president Lech Kaczyński recognized: “Poland’s participation in the reduction of the territory of Czechoslovakia was not just a mistake – it was a pity, and Poland can admit it”; while, finally observes Dębski, «The world is still waiting for similar words from the Russian leader».

Putin remembers the Western “betrayal” of 1938 against Czechoslovakia, but does not remember another Western betrayal, the one plotted against Poland and the three Baltic countries, by the Americans and the British, which at the Tehran summit, on November 28-1 December 1943, they decided to cede to Stalin the Polish half he had invaded in 1939 and the annexation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia to the USSR as “in accordance with the will of the peoples”. In fact, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin merely ratified the partition policy that the Nazis and Soviets had agreed with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (Snyder, Bloodlands : 341, 569 note 44; Werth: 388).

3. The secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact

Putin seems to see the secret protocols as a kind of negative appendage to an otherwise positive pact. But these protocols were the very substance of the Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939 and the German-Soviet Treaty on Borders and Friendship of September 28, the reason Hitler and Stalin had been able to agree: the partition of Poland. , the cancellation of his state, free hand of the Germans in the western half of Poland, of the USSR in the eastern half and in the Baltic countries .

And it is certainly not without significance that the secret protocol of 23 August was mainly due to the Soviet initiative (Nolte: 319).

The reasons for this initiative are clarified with the usual brutality by Stalin himself on the occasion of an interview asked him by Georgi Dimitrov, secretary of the Comintern, (“to make a correct decision we need more than ever the immediate help and advice of comrade Stalin »). Stalin on 7 September 1939 granted him an interview in the presence of Molotov and Zhdanov, from which it clearly emerges that the anti-fascist strategy and the priority of the struggle against Hitler have been abandoned.: Nazi Germany must now be considered as an objective ally of the socialist revolution, given that the agreement with Hitler allows for the dismantling of the Treaty of Versailles and the cancellation of Brest-Litovsk with the help of the same Germany that had imposed on Lenin the humiliating territorial sacrifices of that treaty (Furet: 365-367).

But, for a more informed judgment, Dimitrov’s account of the interview is reproduced below.

Dimitrov . The Soviet position – abandoning the anti-fascist strategy and the fight against Hitler, fighting instead against the British and French governments, whose defense of Poland is only disguised imperialism – is also imposed on the communist parties. On 9 September, on behalf of the Comintern and therefore of Stalin, Dimitrov sent the following telegram to the French Communist Party: “Current war [after the invasion of Poland, on 3 September 1939 Great Britain and France declare war on Germany] is a war unjust imperialist provoked by bourgeois from all belligerent countries. Working class and communist parties must not support this war. […] World proletariat must not defend fascist Poland . […] Guerra has profoundly changed the situation:the old distinction between fascist states and self-styled democrats has lost political sense . Change of tactics necessary. In all belligerent countries, in the current phase of the war, Communists must declare themselves against war, expose its imperialist character, vote against military credits, tell the masses that war will lead to aggravated misery and exploitation. […] Communist parties, especially those of France, England, the United States, Belgium whose line contradicts ours must correct their line as soon as possible ”(quoted in Le Parti communiste français ).

Molotov cocktail. The meaning of the Nazi-Soviet alliance is officially illustrated, with the addition of the mockery, by Molotov, president of the council of people’s commissars and foreign commissioner, to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on October 31, 1939: to report the military defeat of Poland and the disintegration of the Polish state. The government circles of Poland have not a little praised the “solidity” of their state and the “power” of their army. But it was enough that Poland received two short blows, first from the German army and then from the Red Army, for nothing to remain of this abortion of the Treaty of Versailles which lived off the oppression of non-Polish nationalities. The Polish “traditional policy” of navigating without principles between Germany and the USSR has revealed its shortcomings and its complete failure.Everyone understands that it is not really the case to restore ancient Poland. It is also meaningless to continue the war under the pretext of restoring the old Polish state ”. (Cit. InThe communist parties français )

Putin’s positive assessment of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which has current political implications, is placed on a line of continuity between certain aspects of Stalin’s policy and that of the current Russian president. In 1939 Stalin allied himself with the Nazi far right in hopes of facilitating an inter-European confrontation that would destroy both Germany and the liberal countries. Putin’s support for the contemporary far right is aimed at destabilizing the European Union, which he sees as the viable alternative to his authoritarian solutions (Snyder, Terra Nera : 410).

Along a line of continuity, at least with Khrushchev, there is also the affirmation that secret protocols are only a manifestation of “personal power”: Putin, like Khrushchev, for whom Stalin was solely responsible for the “illegalities” in the socialist system. and Beria does not in any way want to connect Stalin’s decisions to the totalitarian and dictatorial government system of the Soviet Union, established since the origins of the USSR.

4. The Soviet invasion of Poland prevented millions of people of different nationalities from falling into the hands of the Nazis and from being killed with the complicity of local nationalists

Putin seems to forget that it was the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that made the German invasion of September 1 possible and handed over to the Nazis 189,000 sq km, almost half of Poland, with 22 million Poles and over two million Jews ( Snyder, Lands of Blood : 164-165; Paolo Morawski, Political Atlas of Poland ); in particular, the agreement signed on September 28, 1939 had moved Warsaw, the most important Jewish city in Europe, to the area controlled by the Nazis: 359,827 Jews out of a total of 1,306,950inhabitants of the capital. In the invaded Polish territories, the Germans immediately set their hands on the destruction of the Polish state, the killing – entrusted to the Einsatzgruppen – of the political and intellectual elites, the dispossession of the Jews and their deportation to the ghettos.

“The regions covered by the secret protocol of the Soviet-German agreement were the heart of international Judaism. The Jews had lived there for five hundred years and those territories were about to become the most dangerous place in their entire history. Twenty months later, the Holocaust would begin there. Within three years, almost all the Jews who lived there would have died. ‘ (Snyder, Black Earth : 138)

The Soviet press and propaganda throughout 1940 continued to present Germany as a “peaceful power” opposed to the French and English “warmongers”, also avoiding mentioning the Nazi violence against the Jews (Snyder, Lands of Blood : 391; Werth: 355).

S ovietici Nazis and also in one of the protocols, pledged to crack down on the Polish territories under their control any anti-German and anti-Soviet resistance , “both parties will tolerate in their territories no Polish agitation which may have an effect in the territories contracting party. They will repress such agitations in the bud and will agree on the most appropriate measures to be adopted in such circumstances ».

The invasion, on September 17, and then the occupation of eastern Poland – about 200,000 sq km, 13.7 million inhabitants, of which 38% Poles (Paolo Morawski, Political Atlas of Poland ) – by the Soviets would have been as devastating as the Nazi occupation of western Poland; so much so that between 1939 and 1941 many Poles, including Jews, sought refuge in the territories occupied by the Germans (Paolo Morawski, Political Atlas of Poland). Together with the Red Army, the NKVD arrived in force, which in the USSR had acquired an experience of political violence at that time unknown to the Nazis. During the Great Terror of 1937-38 over six hundred thousand Soviet citizens were arrested, shot and buried in mass graves, many more than the Poles killed by the Einsatzgruppen after the 1939 invasion (Snyder, Black Earth : 157).

At the beginning of the invasion, the destruction of the Polish state by the Nazis and the Soviets had created a chaotic situation. The soldiers of the Red Army beat men to death to pull out their gold teeth and raped women trusting that such violence would be seen as “boys’ entertainment”; local Communists robbed and killed Poles, especially officials and landowners, not forgetting the neighbors, robbed during spurious searches for weapons (Snyder, Black Earth : 159, 168).

Later, the NKVD imposed an order based on institutional and top-down violence. On December 5, 1939, the first wave of deportations was organized. In the following February, 139,794 people were crammed onto trains bound for the gulags of Soviet Kazakhstan. Many Polish Jews, accused of capitalism, were deported in April. In the months following the Soviet invasion, 292,513 Polish citizens were deported to the gulag , to which another 200,000 or so others arrested in the course of various operations must be added. 60% of the deportees were Poles, 20% Jews, 10% Ukrainians, 8% Belarusians (Snyder, Terra Nera : 160). But of the 78,339 deported in June 1940, about 84% were Jews (Snyder, Terre di: 175).

Katyn and the assassination of Polish officers . The goal of the Soviets as well as the Nazis was the obliteration of the Polish state and its ruling class; Hitler had been clear: “Only a nation where the highest levels are destroyed can be pushed into the ranks of slavery” (Snyder, Bloodlands : 159). The Soviets did not think otherwise; for this reason they targeted the officers in particular: because they constituted the command group of the Polish army, because some had participated in the Russian-Polish wars, because they came from the educated classes, which had to be exterminated to block any attempt at resistance and of reconstitution of the state.

The captured officers, about 15,000, were transferred to three camps (Kozelk, Starobelsk and Ostaškov) where they were investigated and questioned one by one, to then be subjected to a pounding daily propaganda on topics such as Stalin’s life and works , L ‘USSR, the most democratic country in the world , The material and cultural well-being of the workers of the USSR, accompanied by listening to Radio Moscow which broadcast uninterrupted every day from 5 in the morning to 24 (Zaslavsky: 30). The aim was to weaken the physical and moral resistance of the prisoners and to recruit collaborators and spies. But after several months of this treatment the overwhelming majority of Polish officers had not given in and retained patriotic sentiments, political orientations, ethical and religious values.

Beria, the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs of the USSR, informed Stalin on March 5, 1940 that the NKVD had managed to recruit only 24 officers, so he suggested “examining the cases according to a special procedure, applying the highest punitive measure: the shooting . Conduct the investigation relating to individuals without sending the detainees to trial, without raising charges against them, without documenting the closure of the investigation and without making accusations . To entrust the examination of the cases and the decision to a troika made up of comrades Merkulov, Kobulov, Bastakov ”(quoted in Zaslavsky: 39).

On the same March 5, the proposals of Beria and the NKVD – to shoot Polish prisoners without instituting a trial, without formulating accusations, without documenting the closure of the investigation – was approved in its entirety by the five members of the Politburo present: Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Vorošilov, Mikojan ; it was also approved by Kaganovich and Kalinin , absent but reached by telephone (Zaslavsky: 39-40).

On March 2, three days before Beria’s letter and the Politburo’s decision, the latter approved the proposal of Beria and Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, “to carry out deportation to the Soviet region of Kazakhstan for a period of 10 years of all the families of prisoners of war who are in the camps for former Polish army officers , police officers, prison guards, gendarmes, secret agents, former landowners, entrepreneurs and senior officials of the former Polish state apparatus, for a total of 22-25 thousand families “(quoted in Zaslavsky: 35).

Stalin’s “willing executioners” . In April-May 1940, 21,857 Polish officers and other citizens of the same nationality were killed by NKVD men in Katyn Forest and other camps and prisons in Ukraine and Belarus. The executions were carried out by 40 NKVD agents, whom Beria, with an order dated October 26, 1940, rewarded with an extra month’s salary.

Fabio Bettanin, in tracing an essential overview of Stalin’s “willing executioners” ( The long terror : 40-49), does not hide the difficulties of this reconstruction task: “Even today [1999] their names filter with difficulty in essays where the crimes of Stalinism are also described in detail. For lack of documentation, since it is probable that the lists with their names were the first to be destroyed and also for the choice not to organize a “ Soviet Nuremberg ” ».

I am unable to document any progress in the last twenty years of research on Soviet executioners, but surely there has been no Nuremberg that has judged the chain of command and execution – Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Vorošilov, Mikojan, Kaganovich and Kalinin, up to the material perpetrators – who is responsible for the massacre of Polish officers in Katyn and other places of death.

On April 13, 1943, the German press spread the news that in a wood near Katyn, graves containing the corpses of thousands of Polish officers, shot by the Soviets according to Berlin, had been discovered. The Soviets attributed the news to German propaganda, but the Nazi government established an International Medical Commission of Inquiry which included representatives of twelve allied or German-occupied countries; the commission, chaired by a professor of forensic medicine at the University of Geneva, concluded that the massacre dates back to the spring of 1940, which the Soviets were accusing. A Commission of the Polish Red Cross also came to the same conclusion.

A Commission composed of Soviet citizens only rejected the Germans responsible for the massacre of Polish officers, which was to be carried out in August-September 1941. Americans and British, who considered the contribution of the Soviets indispensable for the victory against Hitler, sided with Stalin and at the end of the war Churchill wrote that “the victorious governments decided that it was better not to face the problem and Katyn’s crime was never investigated in depth” (quoted in Zaslavsky: 73).

The truth was put on paper in a letter “secret” sent on 3 March 1959 by the head of the KGB, Alexander Šelepin, Khrushchev: “Under the provisions of the special troika NKVD of the USSR were executed 21,857 people, of which: 4,421 men in the Katyn forest (Smolensk province), 3,820 men in the Starobelsk camp near Charkov, 6,311 men in the Ostaškov camp (Kalinin province), while 7,305 men were shot in other camps and prisons in western Ukraine and the Western Belarus. The entire operation for the elimination of the aforementioned persons was carried out on the basis of the Resolution of the CC of the Communist Party of 5 March 1940 ”(Cit. In Zaslavsky: 79-80).

A truth that the Soviets officially denied always with shameless vehemence, until October 13, 1990, when Gorbachev (who even to the last refused to publish the secret documents on Katyn) recognized the guilt of his country in the Katyn massacre and apologized to the Polish people (Zaslavsky: 108).

(To see the remarkable Les bourreaux de Staline – Katyn, 1940 , documentary of the Franco-German cultural TV ARTE).

5. The Baltic countries became Soviet with the consent of their governments and citizens

Another statement that blatantly ignores what actually happened in the Baltic countries. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact placed the Baltic area within the sphere of Soviet interests. On September 24, 1940, under the pretext of the escape of a Polish submarine from the port of Tallin, Moscow sent an ultimatum to Estonia requiring a treaty of mutual assistance and military bases in the country. Estonia had no alternative and the Soviets established naval and military bases on two Estonian islands. The forced agreement was signed on September 28. Similar agreements, accompanied by threats and blackmail, were signed on 5 October by Latvia and on 10 by Lithuania. The three countries were occupied and garrisoned with the sending of 25,000 soldiers to Estonia, 30,000 to Latvia and 20,000 to Lithuania. Others 435.000 soldiers were ready to intervene against any resistance. Finland refused similar requests and Moscow waged war against it, but the Finns managed to resist the attack and even with the loss of some territories they retained their sovereignty and the state.

Armed with their military supremacy, the Soviets enforced the replacement of legitimate governments by Communist-controlled puppet governments . Soviet political commissioners (Dekanozov in Lithuania, Vyšinskij in Latvia, Ždanov in Estonia), supported by the Red Army, would lead the Sovietization process of the three Baltic countries (Werth: 354-355).

Soviet elections were organized, in which only local Communists and candidates loyal to Moscow could stand; in Lithuania, the Communist-led Lithuanian People’s Bloc announced that it had won the elections with 95% of the vote. The parliaments thus constructed asked that the three countries be annexed to the USSR, which thus could count on three other satellite republics.

Violent repressive measures followed and the deportation of about 130,000 citizens to the gulags of the USSR. In Lithuania, between June 1940 and June 1941, the NKVD deported between 20 and 30,000 Lithuanians, Poles and Jews to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Prime Minister Antanas Merkys and Foreign Minister Juozas Urbšys were deported in July 1940 (Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: 83). In Estonia, the Soviets destroyed the political elite and administrative leaders; President Konstantin Päts was arrested, deported and interned in a psychiatric hospital. Of the eleven members of the last Estonian government, ten were jailed and nine of them killed (four executed, five killed in Soviet labor camps). On June 14, 1941, the NKVD deported 10,200 Estonians, 1% of the total population, including 450 Jews, 10% of the Jewish minority. A few days later, as German troops approached, the Soviets shot Estonian prisoners and left their corpses in prisons (Snyder, Black Earth : 268-69).

When the war was over, the terrorist policy resumed. It is recalled above that at the Tehran conference, the Americans and the British granted Stalin the re-annexation of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia as “in accordance with the will of the peoples”. Well, in the two-year period 1949-50 the Baltics were so enthusiastic that the Soviets had to “promote” forced collectivization with the deportation of about 400,000 Lithuanians, 150,000 Latvians, 50,000 Estonians (Werth: 408).

This is the contractual basis and the consensus that led twice to the annexation of the Baltic states and their terrorist transformation into Soviet republics.

NB: The bold is always by the author of the article.

Bibliography

Vladimir Putin, The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II

Vladimir Putin at the informal summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States

Timothy Snyder, The reconstruction of Nations. Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1559-1999 , Yale University Press, New Haven & London 2003.

Timothy Snyder, Nazis, Soviets, Poles, Jews , The New York Review of Books, December 3, 2009.

Timothy Snyder, Echoes from the killing fields of the east , «The Guardian», Tue 28 Sep 2010.

Timothy Snyder, The fatal fact of the Nazi-Soviet pact , «The Guardian», Tue 5 Oct 2010.

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Timothy Snyder, Black Earth, the Holocaust between history and present , Rizzoli, Milan 2015.

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