Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
On 23 August 1939 — stunning a world that had watched the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany exchange years of ideological abuse — Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop signed a ten-year non-aggression pact in Moscow. Stalin was the driving architect; having failed to obtain a credible collective security agreement with Britain and France at the Anglo-French-Soviet negotiations in summer 1939, he calculated that a deal with Hitler would buy time to rebuild the Red Army, purged of a third of its officers between 1937 and 1938. The public pact was accompanied by a secret protocol of enormous consequence: it divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet 'spheres of influence,' assigning Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and eastern Poland to the USSR, while Lithuania and western Poland fell to Germany. A subsequent amendment added Lithuania to the Soviet sphere in exchange for a larger German share of Poland. The pact freed Hitler to invade Poland without fear of a two-front war, enabling the campaign that began nine days later. For the Soviet Union, it delayed but did not prevent war; Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, violating the pact. The secret protocol, denied by Moscow until 1989, remained one of the Cold War's most politically explosive secrets — its acknowledgement by Mikhail Gorbachev helped accelerate the independence movements of the Baltic states.
- Year: 1939 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
