With his eastern flank secured, the pact unleashed Hitler to steamroll first Poland, then Norway, and then finally France, Belgium and everything in between. As Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev revealed in a 1989 column in Pravda, Stalin and Hitler were indeed guilty of “collusion” in 1939. In the late 1980s, the Soviet policy of Glasnost (openness) would finally reveal that Molotov-Ribbentrop had included secret protocols carving up Poland as well as giving the Soviet Union free reign to annex the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. In truth, Molotov-Ribbentrop was two dictatorships dividing up the world map to their own ends. Officially called the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Soviet government would long assert that the pact was nothing more than a benign neutrality agreement a necessary alliance in the face of perfidious French and English unwillingness to join with Moscow in an anti-fascist bloc. The anniversary is marked annually across Europe in remembrance of the victims of both Stalinism and Nazism. Ewa Miles-Dixon wipes her eyes as she attends a 2014 Black Ribbon Day ceremony in Edmonton in remembrance of those affected by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939. Within eight days of its signing, German bombs began to rain down on Warsaw. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – so named for the foreign ministers of each dictatorship – had an immediate effect on European peace. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. The first shots of the Second World War were a direct result of a Soviet diplomat meeting a Nazi diplomat, shaking his hand, and telling Hitler’s Germany to do whatever they wanted with Western Europe.

A Nazi-Soviet conspiracy directly sparked the war Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were obviously the principal architects of the Second World War, but below find the lesser-known story of how the march to global war was encouraged, abetted and supplied by the USSR. What these boosters ignore is how the world’s first communist state was also instrumental to ensuring that a devastating global conflict broke out in the first place. Victory over fascism remains the USSR’s signature achievement - and the triumph is often used to justify the worst repressions of the Soviet state. In the words of the Marxist British historian Eric Hobsbawm, “the victory over Hitler’s Germany was essentially won, and could only have been won, by the Red Army.”

Article content T-34 tanks from the era of the Second World War drive through Red Square in May, 2021 in preparation for Victory Day celebrations.

The Second World War for ios instal