Eighty-six years ago, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany concluded a pact, known by the names of its two signatories as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. By virtue of this agreement, the two totalitarian powers divided Central Europe between them, including Poland. The consequences of this criminal pact, which claimed the lives of tens of millions of people, are still felt today. The successors of the states that concluded it—the Federal Republic of Germany (the legal successor of the Third Reich) and the Russian Federation (known until 1991 as the USSR)—in fact deny the genocidal nature of the 1939 pact.
Putin’s Russia openly glorifies the pact, praising the cooperation between Berlin and Moscow, while also questioning the right to independence of, for example, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which under the agreement between Hitler and Stalin were incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. The Kremlin, however, does not wish to recall other specific aspects of its cooperation with the Third Reich, which lasted until June 1941—nearly two years. Russian media, for instance, do not mention the NKVD-Gestapo conference in Zakopane dedicated to suppressing the Polish underground, Stalin’s congratulations to Hitler on his successive victories in the West, or Soviet deliveries of raw materials for the German arms industry.
This is silenced in Russia—but in Berlin? German politicians, as well as historians, would prefer to draw a veil of silence over the anniversary of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. For our western neighbors, commemorating the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and National Socialism (this is how the date is recognized in the European Parliament) unnecessarily “equates the victims of Hitler and Stalin.”
A commission of experts from the Brandenburg Foundation of Museums concluded already a year ago that commemorations of August 23 place the victims of Stalinism and Nazism on the same level, erasing differences between the two dictatorships. According to the experts—who seemingly strive to humanize Stalin—the anniversary even carries an anti-communist overtone, which risks being “hijacked” by right-wing nationalist and populist forces, as well as the far right. Consequently, the Foundation banned the organization of anniversary ceremonies at the museum on Leistikowstrasse—formerly a KGB prison in Potsdam—allowing only for a “silent remembrance” of the millions of victims of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.
Such a form of “commemoration” would surely have delighted the pact’s authors and signatories. Was that the intention of the German experts?