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Moscow Publishes Photocopies of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Secret Protocols
- unityByFreedom 7y ago> The Soviet copy of the original document was declassified in 1992 and published in a scientific journal in early 1993. > Despite publication of the recovered copy in western media, for decades, it was the official policy of the Soviet Union to deny the existence of the secret protocol [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact
- drglitch 7y agoAs a bit of an aside, it is surprising how concise and to-the-point each of the articles (points) are. Compared to contracts written in modern legalese or your typical website TOS this looks almost "dumbed down" and yet it was one of the most important documents of 20th century. Perhaps we're overcomplicating things a bit today? (ps: native Russian speaker here, but the German version looks similar.)
- dao- 7y agoTOS are written for lawyers and courts. For bilateral contracts like this there's no overarching law and legal authority, so they're more like a protocol of a verbal contract.
- ethbro 7y agoWhen you read books about arms control between equal parties, they really drive in this point. The lack of a binding authority means what you're really doing is communicating and clarifying your intentions. Knowing full well that either party could unilaterally chose to breach the terms. One of the reasons that bilateral arms control agreements usually include a breach clause. "If you do X, we will do Y." Where Y is calculated to make X less advantageous.
- sephamorr 7y agoI'd like to read more about arms control negotiation, do you have a book suggestion?
- sambe 7y agoContract law and international arbitration do exist though. The ultimate inability to enforce seems like it is a separate issue and not limited to bilateral contracts - nation states are more powerful than international courts in many cases.
- microcolonel 7y agoParticularly at that time, there were no international courts that I know of who would have anything to say about a secret pact between two belligerents in the second world war. The contract was to be enforced by the militaries of these belligerents, and to be interpreted and settled privately.
- sambe 7y agoThe International Court of Arbitration already existed, and there were other such courts even earlier. It may well be the case that this was never intended as a formal contract, but I am responding to the assertion that there was no way for it to be. I stand by the claim: the issue is authority/power, not the necessary legal means.
- docbrown 7y agoWhile it is true about contract law and international arbitration, it would be inadequate to compare courts of early Soviet Union and today. As stated in the article, these agreements were meant to be privately handled between Adolf and Stalin, meaning there would be no overseeing court body to interpret the legality of their proposal. If anything, this agreement was their blueprint to lay a foundation for their own court system with them being their own judge and executioner.
- sambe 7y agoYes; that is what I'm saying: power is the real issue, not lack of legal framework/remedy (and in most cases, private contracts are specifically the purpose contract law; "I intended it to be privately handled" would not be a winning argument. "I have the Soviet army over that hill" might be though).
- stefan_ 7y agoThey also literally titled the secret amendment "Geheimes Zusatzprotokoll". And there is a photocopy of it!
- gritzko 7y agoThe Munich agreement was very detailed and formal. That made no practical difference. Everybody and their dog rushed to take a bite out of Czechoslovakia.
- megous 7y agoIt looks fairly similar in length: https://www.mzv.cz/file/198473/MunichAgreement.pdf https://www.mzv.cz/file/198473/MunichAgreement.pdf
- gritzko 7y agoWell, relatively more detailed and formal :) > The territory marked No. I on the 1st and 2nd of October; the territory marked No. II on the 2nd and 3rd of October; the territory marked No. III on the 3rd, 4th and 5th of October; the territory marked No. IV on the 6th and 7th of October. The remaining territory of preponderantly German character will be ascertained by the aforesaid international commission forthwith and be occupied by German troops by the 10th of October.
- hibikir 7y agoThe complications are about drawing a line about what breaks the agreement and what does not. This is important when both parties rely on a third party to decide who broke the agreement, and justify penalties: Nobody wants uncertainty in front of a judge. In this case, neither Nazi Germany or the USSR really care about those things. If one party went over the line in a non-accidental way, there'd be would be war. It's not as if, when Germany invaded the USSR, some faux argument about the USSR breaking the agreement first would have made a difference whatsoever to third parties. Therefore, what is best for large, highly militarized sovereign countries that solved their disagreements by trying to utterly destroy the other's regime might not work so well in civil life, where making sure we know exactly how he judiciary will interpret the contract is so important we incorporate in Delaware not just because it's cheap, but because we know how the judge will interpret the legalese.
- onetimemanytime 7y agoAs others have said, these agreements are meaningless, they are more like timeouts to get ready to attack. Lots of agreements were broken, when one side felt they could away with it.
- baybal2 7y agoVery ironic with timing. These days saying "Union invaded Poland" in public gets you killed in Russia. Yes, just referring to an official archive document, and its fact of existence (despite its glancing mention being part of history textbooks just a decade ago)
- emiliobumachar 7y ago> These days saying "Union invaded Poland" in public gets you killed in Russia. This surprised me. What's the officially sanctioned version of history?
- baybal2 7y ago> What's the officially sanctioned version of history? To hear the official version, you have to ask first, and that either gets you a jail term for "denial of historical facts (of course, without stating which facts)" or you will just go missing to be found in separate body parts a month later.
- foobarian 7y ago> or you will just go missing to be found in separate body parts a month later. My communist ancestors would call this "getting swallowed by the night"
- vkou 7y agoThis is complete nonsense. The Russian government cares about one thing - perpetuating the Russian government. Nobody in it cares about 80-year-old history.
- konart 7y agohttps://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Польский_поход_Красной_армии_(1939) https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Польский_поход_Красной_армии_(... >Польский поход Красной армии (17—29 сентября 1939 года), в советской историографии освободительный поход РККА, в современной историографии также советское вторжение в Польшу Polish march of the Red Army, liberating march of The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army in soviet historiography, also Soviet invasion of Poland in modern historiography. For some reason some people over here are very eager to 'prove' some weird fantasies. I even bothered to find a scanned copy of a moder school text book. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6jSNt06CW1HQlM5ekpUWDVfdUU/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6jSNt06CW1HQlM5ekpUWDVfdUU... The polish invasion is there. Not awful lot about it, just that Hitler and Stalin desided this is how it shall be and that sovieat army entered Poland on 17th.
- lalabert 7y agoIgnorant Brit here! Is there an English version available? Agree on the comment re this being one of the most important documents of the 20th century.
- ozim 7y agoAs a Polish person who had Russian and German (English also :)) in school, so I can read those documents, I would say you Brits should get interested about it in 1939 not now. Those French guys also should chip in earlier. Don't take it personally it is a just historical joke!
- ozim 7y agoMost interesting part for me as a Pole, is "Die Deutsche Reichsreugierung" and "Union der Sozialistischen Sowjetrepubliken" and the same in russian script. So how they described themselves, and the rest is quite boring non agression treaty, so they skipped "we are going to meet in the middle of Poland and then we will see 'смех' 'Umfassungsgraben'".
- ACS_Solver 7y agoYou can read it in English on Wikisource [1] among other places. The text itself is nothing new, it's been available for decades, it's just that few people have seen the Soviet-held original copies. [1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact
- vkou 7y agoNot sure. But from a rough translation if it, it is quite literally the bullet points that you've been taught in school. "Neither party will attack the other for 10 years, with an automatic extention to this clause, if neither party denounces the other." "In the Baltics, the northern border of Lithuania is the border of the interest of influence of both participants." "Each party is interested in a chunk of Poland, divided by such and such river. If both parties are interested in an independent Poland, we can discuss this later." "Any disagreements regarding this agreement should be resolved through a peaceful exchange of ideas."
- jagger11 7y agoA digression: in effect of the secret protocol being signed, then-USSR attacked Poland on 17-th of September 1939 (co-starting the 2WW, together with Germany). Wikipedia articles describing this "event" are typically named "Soviet invasion of Poland" or "Soviet occupation of East Poland", or something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland The Russian version is titled: "Polish march/hike/walk of the Red Army (1939)", and Russian speaking Wikipedians don't like the idea of changing the title.
- ekianjo 7y agoWorth noting that the Allies who justified the protection of Poland to declare war on Germany, avoided declaring war on Soviet Russia which invaded Poland on the Eastern side (about 2 weeks after).
- vetinari 7y agoFrom another POV: those two week later Poland as a state didn't exist, the former Polish government was in exile, and USSR took back territories that Poland took from USSR in the 1919-1921 Polish-Soviet war.
- jagger11 7y agoPolish government went exile after the Soviets invaded. PS: In 1919, it was USSR who fought the war on Polish ground, and lost. I don't think you'll find too much material to play moral high ground here.
- vetinari 7y ago2nd Polish republic was established after WW1, so there was no Polish ground. The border was supposed to be Curzon line (exactly that line, that USSR took back in 1939), but the Poles were gunning for more, hence the 1919-1921 war. If you consider Polish ground whatever was high mark of Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, then good luck with that. It was empire building in the making, they overstretched and didn't make it. It is no Polish ground exactly in the same sense, that Balkan is not Turkish either.
- Koshkin 7y agoLooks like the pact was a smart move after the West’s failure to support the initiative to create an anti-fascist coalition (in the hope that Hitler would attack the Soviet Union); its announcement even caused a government crisis in Japan.
- aivisol 7y agoSmart move on part of whom, Germany or USSR?
- liberal_098 7y agoNot only a smart move but also quite typical for that time. Note that Pilsudski was a kind of dictator and the Polish government was rather aggressive with respect to all its neighbors. Therefore, the war between Germany and Poland was a collision of two dictators - Hitler and Pilsudski.
- sverige 7y agoYou can't be serious comparing Pilsudski to Hitler. Poland had very good historical reasons for having an aggressive stance toward her neighbors, since it was still within living memory that their neighbors had carved them up and made them disappear from the maps. It happened again shortly after this, along with both the Nazis and Soviets committing gratuitous atrocities during their respective genocides. I would go so far as to say that it is completely rational for Poland to doubt the intentions of Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Russia to this day.
- Koshkin 7y agoWell, after losing in the Great War, Germany, too, "had very good historical reasons for having an aggressive stance toward her neighbors." Which is the reason Hitler came to power in the first place.
- strzzz 7y agoDo not forget Poland itself was aggresor occupying part of already independent neighbour Lithuania some 20years before WW2.
- HocusLocus 7y agoThe phrase "publishes photocopies" has me in stitches.
- duxup 7y agoLegal stuff and photocopies go hand in hand it seems. There was a local case involving some harassing txt messages, the evidence was a series of photocopies of an iPhone on a copier....
- jk27277 7y agoPoland, one of the biggest warmongers in WW2, just recently wanted 100 billion from Germany for WW2. History tells us, you don't negotiate with Poland, you dived Poland instead
- AnaniasAnanas 7y agoHow was Poland "one of the biggest warmongers in WW2"?
- dang 7y agoPlease do not do nationalistic flamewar on HN. It's most unwanted here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- laacz 7y agoIt's chilling to see actual document which robbed so many people of freedom for 50 years, brought death and deportation to gulags and labor camps to more than 200k people in Baltics alone.