Anniversary of Stalin's death and the strange life (and afterlife) of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939

Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the death of Josef Stalin in 1953.

The US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has a surprisingly just-the-facts photo feature, The Death Of Stalin: 70 Years Ago¹. Including this image:

This symposium² from the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies discusses whether the US missed an opportunity after Stalin’s death to improve relations with the Soviet Union. From the YouTube description:

Stalin had such a decisive imprint on the Soviet political system that his legacy outlived him for decades. Even now, some seventy years after Stalin's death, the Russian army's invasion of Ukraine has underscored the persistence of Stalin's legacy in the Kremlin.

Reuters³ also has an article on the anniversary, which notes that interpretations of the Stalin era still play an important role in current understandings of Russian identity, particularly the USSR’s war against Hitler Germany - known as the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union and today in Russia.

One of the ironies involved is that Stalin himself was Georgian, not Russian. Georgia is today an independent country and not one with particularly good relations with Russia.

Though public commemorations [in Russia] remain largely taboo and streets no longer bear his name, his reputation has in recent years undergone something of a renaissance.

Polls in 2021 by Russia's Levada Centre, for example, showed 45% expressing "respect" for Stalin while 48% backed installing monuments to him.

"Why should I have a bad attitude towards him?" said Moscow resident Andrei, 31, praising Stalin as a strong unifying personality whose war victory should be lauded.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who casts himself as an heir to the tsars of the past, has offered a measured assessment of Stalin, praising his war leadership while condemning his domestic policies as "totalitarian".

Since the start of the conflict in Ukraine, the Kremlin - which says it is fighting Ukrainian "Neo-Nazis" - has sought to claim Stalin's wartime mantle, portraying its campaign as putting an end to unfinished business from World War Two.

German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939

One of the various controversial matters during Stalin’s leadership of the USSR was the 1939 agreement with Germany that is variously known as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact (after the foreign ministers), the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and other variations⁴.

The agreement included a secret protocol in which the two countries agreed on territorial changes:

To this public pact of nonaggression was appended a secret protocol, also reached on August 23, 1939, which divided the whole of eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Poland east of the line formed by the Narew, Vistula, and San rivers would fall under the Soviet sphere of influence. The protocol also assigned Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland to the Soviet sphere of influence and, further, broached the subject of the separation of Bessarabia from Romania. A secret supplementary protocol (signed September 28, 1939) clarified the Lithuanian borders. The Polish-German border was also determined, and Bessarabia was assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence. In a third secret protocol (signed January 10, 1941, by Count Friedrich Werner von Schulenberg and Molotov), Germany renounced its claims to portions of Lithuania in return for Soviet payment of a sum agreed upon by the two countries.

Over the last year, there have been references in discussions of the current Russia-Ukraine War to the 1939 nonaggression agreement, the purpose being to dunk on Germany for its decades-long effort to establish stable and peaceful relations with the Soviet Union and later post-Soviet Russia. A reference comes up in a symposium of March 2 on Stalin to his “appeasement” of Hitler with reference to that agreement.⁵

Historical analogies are notoriously tricky, especially when applied to foreign-policy issues of the moment.⁶ But the Nonaggression Pact did not represent some sort of merger of the Nazi and Soviet ideologies, as is sometimes implied. It had some ideological implications. But it was the product of hard-nosed and cynical foreign-policy realism.

(Caption: Cover of Osteuropa 2009, 59:7-8)

The ambiguity of the situation was caught by one of Stalin's most famous quotes, which came at a formal celebration of the signing of the agreement at which German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop was present in a toast: “In the course of the conversation, HERR STALIN spontaneously proposed a toast to the Führer, as follows: ‘I know how much the German nation loves its Führer; I should therefore like to drink to his health’."⁷

Anders Stephanson sees this agreement as an instance of “Stalin's Hyper-realism.”⁸ But applying the most calculating realism doesn't mean there are no choices. Stephanson argues that Stalin's famous reluctance to accept that Germany was actually about to invade in 1941 was due to a mistaken assumption on Stalin’s part about what Hitler's calculation at that moment would be in a cynical realist sense.

Stalin defended his own diplomatic strategy during the second week of the German invasion in 1941:

It may be asked: how could the Soviet Government have consented to conclude a non-aggression pact with such treacherous monsters as Hitler and Ribbentrop? Was this not a mistake on the part of the Soviet government? Of course not! A non-aggression pact is a pact of peace between two States. It was such a pact that Germany proposed to us in 1939. Could the Soviet Government have declined such aproposal? I think that not a single peace-loving State could decline a peace treaty with a neighbouring Power, even though the latter was headed by such monsters and cannibals as Hitler and Ribbentrop. … What did we gain by concluding the non-aggression pact with Germany? We secured for our country peace for a year and a half and the opportunity of preparing its forces to repulse fascist Germany should [it] risk an attack on our country despite the pact. This was a definite advantage for us and a disadvantage for fascist Germany.⁹

Mikhail Gorbachev’s government publicly admitted the existence of the “secret” protocols but the text had been available from German archives for decades.

But since then, Russia has tried to breath some new life into the old agreement:

The re-evaluation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact began as early as 2005, when Putin compared it to the Munich agreement and accused the Baltic states of attacking Russia “to cover the shame of collaborationism”. By 2007, as Russia clashed with Estonia over a bronze statue to a second world war soldier, Russian historians were increasingly publishing books and essays defending the pact as expedient.

But praise for the treaty really escalated after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, when Moscow compared far-right support for Ukraine’s revolution to Nazi-era collaboration. The following year, Vladimir Medinsky, the country’s culture minister, called the treaty “a great achievement of Soviet diplomacy”.¹⁰

(Minor editing for clarity: 07/26/2023.)

1. Chapple, Amost (2023): The Death Of Stalin: 70 Years Ago 03/03/2023. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. <https://www.rferl.org/a/stalin-funeral-death-70-year-anniversary/32297993.html> (Accessed: 2023-04-03).

2. The Death and Legacy of Stalin: A 70-Year Retrospective. Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies YouTube channel. (Accessed: 2023-04-03).

3. Churikov, Roman & Chkhikvishvili (2023): 70 years after death, Stalin's polarising legacy looms large. Rueters 03/03/2023. <https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/70-years-after-death-stalins-polarising-legacy-looms-large-2023-03-03/> (Accessed: 2023-04-03).

4. German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Britannica Online 02/18/2023. <https://www.britannica.com/event/German-Soviet-Nonaggression-Pact> (Accessed: 2023-04-03).

5. The Death and Legacy of Stalin: A 70-Year Retrospective. Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies YouTube channel. (Accessed: 2023-04-03).

6. See: Record, Jeffrey (2002): Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.

7. Hencke, Andor (1939): Memorandum of a Conversation Held on the Night of August 23d to 24th… 08/24/1939. Yale Law School-Lillian Goldman Law Library. <https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/ns053.asp> (Accessed: 2023-04-03).

8. Anders Stephanson (2001): Stalin's Hyper-realism. Diplomatic History 25:1. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/24913825> (Accessed: 2023-04-03).

9. Roberts, Jeffrey (2002): Stalin, the Pact with Nazi Germany, and the Origins of Postwar Soviet Diplomatic Historiography. Journal of Cold War Studies 4:4, 94. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26925240> (Accessed: 2023-04-03).

10. Roth, Andrew (2019): Molotov-Ribbentrop: why is Moscow trying to justify Nazi pact? The Guardian 08/23/2019. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/23/moscow-campaign-to-justify-molotov-ribbentrop-pact-sparks-outcry> (Accessed: 2023-04-03).