Re-examining the Nazi-Soviet Pact 70 Years On

David Marples

August 23 marks the 70th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a nonaggression treaty between the two totalitarian powers of USSR and Nazi-Germany, as well as a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence between Hitler and Stalin.

In May 2009, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev authorized a commission to investigate cases of historical revisionism of the Second World War to the detriment of Russia. The move followed the approval a year ago of new school textbooks in Russia that reassessed the role of Stalin, acknowledging that he made some errors but noting in turn his achievements and successes, particularly in the war years. Taken together they symbolize the new Russian policy of identifying contemporary Russia with the former Soviet regime.

Last month, Russia responded furiously to a proposal by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to declare the date August 23 one of commemoration of the victims of Fascism and Communism. In Moscow’s view, it is not possible to equate the evils of Nazism with Stalin’s regime.

A recent article in Vesti Nedeli by Il’ya Kanavin (June 21) also focused on the Pact, citing historian Natalya Narochnitskaya’s view that by the terms of the Pact, the USSR was only regaining territories that were formerly part of the Russian Empire. Citing this same author, Kanavin maintains that Stalin was obliged to make a deal with Hitler for the following reasons.

First, it was essential to keep the German army as far from the Soviet border as possible as the USSR was at war with Imperial Japan in the Far East and could not be fighting on two fronts simultaneously.

Second, Germany and Poland to that point were in close collusion and could even be termed allies, based on the agreement of 1934, that contained secret clauses on mutual military aid. He emphasizes that such secret protocols were a staple of treaties in this period.

Third, with the removal of some 38,000 Soviet officers during the Purges, Stalin needed time to train new military leaders and produce more arms.

Fourth, Stalin was isolated because the only potential allies, Britain and France, had no intention of reaching an agreement with the USSR. A year earlier the two democratic countries had participated in the notorious Munich agreement that led to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia through the policy of appeasement. Only Churchill opposed Hitler but world leaders were allegedly more afraid of Stalin than the German dictator.

Lastly, Kanavin maintains that the Soviet Union should not take be blamed for permitting Hitler a free hand in his assigned sector of Poland. Stalin then had little choice but to sign the agreement, in full knowledge that he was only postponing the conflict.

These arguments can be questioned on a number of grounds, and not least because they distinguish between a rapacious Hitler regime and a defensive-minded and implicitly benign Stalin government that eventually would bear the brunt of the war.

The comment that Stalin was occupying only territories formerly under the Russian Empire is inaccurate. In the summer of 1940, for example, after forcing the Romanians out of Bessarabia, Stalin also occupied northern Bukovina (today it is the Chernovtsy Oblast of Ukraine) that had never been under Russian rule. When Molotov visited Germany late in 1940 he made several more territorial demands that reportedly led Hitler to accelerate plans for the invasion of the USSR.

Eastern Poland’s Volhynia region was part of the Russian Empire but Eastern Galicia had only been under Russian rule briefly during the First World War. It is hard to perceive acquisition of these territories as anything other than the westward expansion of the USSR.

But it is the assault on the annexed population that belies the arguments of Kanavin and Narochnitskaya, and particularly because there are several instances of collaboration between the two occupying powers. Both systematically eradicated the Polish population—the Nazis overtly and the Soviets through deportations and secret executions in forests such as Katyn. More than 15,000 Polish officers were executed.

Stalin, however, claimed to be liberating subject populations—Ukrainians and Belarusians—who wished to join the USSR. The Soviet advance only took place 16 days after the German invasion of Western Poland. In this way the Russian side did little fighting—only in Grodno did the Poles offer much resistance—and was able to pose as a friendly power.

However, having eliminated all vestiges of Polish rule, the new government organized mass deportations of Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews in 1940 and 1941. A similar policy was deployed after the USSR occupied the three Baltic States in the summer of 1940.

President Medvedev and Russian historians have to face a few home truths. Even Kanavin concedes that the mass execution of Red Army officers weakened the Soviet military. But this action was part of the Terror that the Stalin regime applied both domestically and in newly conquered territories, committing mass murders on an epic scale. Today, the Baltic States consider the entire period 1940-90 to have been one of Soviet occupation. That is why their citizens initially welcomed the Germans in the summer of 1941. Large sectors of Western Ukraine remain alienated from Moscow today for the same reason.

By the agreement of August 23, 1939, two dictators acted in Machiavellian fashion. It is facile to suggest that Stalin should be regarded differently because he emerged as a victorious war leader responsible for the defeat of Fascism. His naïve trust in Hitler, manifested by the Treaty, also was responsible for the Soviet failure to respond in the first days of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ leading to the mass loss of territory and capture of millions of Soviet citizens.

August 23 was a dark day for Russia, as it was for the rest of Europe and that is how it should be remembered.

[This article first appeared in the Moscow Times, August 20, 2009]

Genocide or not, Stalin starved millions to death and Soviet regime concealed for 54 years

By David Marples

Highly politicized Holodomor doesn’t hide the fact that ethnic Ukrainian dimension was present

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the Ukrainian famine, known as the Holodomor, or death by hunger. [In Ukraine, the official annual commemoration is the fourth Saturday in November]. Many governments, including those of Canada and the United States, have recognized the famine as an act of genocide by Stalin’s regime against Ukrainians.

Ukrainian president Victor Yushchenko has issued a bill that would make it a criminal offense to deny that the famine was genocide. After 75 years, we know much about this tragedy, but the academic community has yet to reach a consensus on the issue. A majority of Western scholars — at least judging from published articles and books — denies that Stalin’s intention was to kill Ukrainians, per se, and maintains that he targeted the Soviet peasantry as a whole. Thus they deny an ethnic dimension.

For example, in his acclaimed 2007 book on life under Stalin, The Whisperers, British historian Orlando Figes writes that the Soviet regime “was undoubtedly to blame for the famine. But its policies did not amount to a campaign of ‘terror-famine,’ let alone of genocide … ” Harvard University’s Terry Martin and the University of Amsterdam’s Michael Ellman have expressed the same opinion.

We may never know how many died of starvation in 1932-33. Yushchenko and others speak of 10 million, or about a third of the population of Ukraine. However, more reliable estimates in Ukraine and elsewhere suggest that the death toll was three to five million, still a truly staggering figure.

It is problematic for scholars when issues become heavily politicized before definitive conclusions have been reached. The Soviet regime denied the existence of the famine for 54 years. Communists in Ukraine reject the notion that Moscow turned on Ukrainians, as do Russia and several western countries.

However, Yushchenko has made the Holodomor the central event in the history of modern Ukraine. It is a divisive one because of the association of the U.S.S.R. with modern Russia. Implicitly, it is alleged that Russia is responsible for the deaths of millions of Ukrainians. Russian president Dmitry Medvedev demurs, and the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn argued that famine occurred also in Russia as well as among ethnic Russians, Jews and Germans resident in Ukraine.

However, archival evidence suggests that the ethnic dimension of the famine was always present. Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s had been allowed to develop its own culture and institutions under a policy known as “indigenization.” By the early 1930s, the Soviet authorities were very concerned by the results. Led by the commissar of education and former colleague of Lenin, Mykola Skrypnyk, the republic was distancing itself from Russia.

National “deviationism” in Ukraine was linked by Stalin with the danger of new intervention from Poland, regarded as a hostile neighbor since the war of 1919-20. He wrote in a letter to his colleague Lazar Kaganovich, party leader of Ukraine in the 1920s, that he feared that “we might lose Ukraine” and that Polish leader Josef Pilsudski would exploit dissatisfaction in the republic.

Added to these volatile elements, the Soviet regime began rapidly to collectivize farms starting in 1929. Ukraine was among the first republics to be collectivized. In Kazakhstan, a third of the peasantry (about one million people) died by 1931. Stalin’s goal was “to liquidate the kulaks (rich peasants) as a class.” Many so designated destroyed their livestock rather than give it up to the new collective farms. The countryside became a war zone in which millions were dispossessed, with many deported to Siberia or the Far North.

After collectivization, state grain quotas were imposed on the farms. Grain was taken before the farmers could feed themselves and their families, and quotas were raised sharply in Ukraine, despite a poor harvest in 1931 in particular. Stalin, who used the grain to feed the growing urban population as well as the Red Army, appointed Extraordinary Grain Commissions in several regions. Vyacheslav Molotov led the one in Ukraine. When the grain ran out, Molotov demanded that the commissions take all food from the villages, which were stripped bare as though a plague of locusts had descended on them.

Peasants could not travel to towns or cross borders to obtain food after 1932, as they were not assigned passports like the rest of the population. In January 1933, Ukraine’s border with North Caucasus was closed. Ukraine’s leadership in Kharkiv, the capital at the time, was distraught. Most Ukrainian Communists blamed “kulaks” and nationalists for the starvation in villages. Stalin then sent his own plenipotentiary, Pavel Postyshev, to Kharkiv to purge the dithering leaders. Later all these figures either died during the purges or, like Skrypnyk, took their own lives.

The mass deaths of peasants were concealed from the public with the collusion of some western journalists and diplomats. Many prominent figures – including George Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb – reported that this ravaged land was in fact a Communist utopia. Walter Duranty of The New York Times lied systematically to Americans about the situation in the Soviet countryside.

The link between the Ukrainian famine and external events is clear. In January 1933, Hitler had come to power in Germany, adding another dire threat to Stalin’s regime. Ukrainian nationalists, Poles, Hitler and Stalin’s chief enemy, Leon Trotsky, all feature in Stalin’s correspondence and party documents as threats to Soviet security.

Whether or not this catastrophe was premeditated – and we may never find a “smoking gun’’ – Stalin, Molotov and other Soviet leaders deliberately starved their own people and then concealed this atrocity from the outside world.

(Kyiv Post, 26 November 2008)

Against the ‘nationalist’ interpretation. Russia’s response to the commemoration of the Ukrainian Holodomor

By Ilya Khineiko

For a long time, Russian political elites have been skeptical and increasingly irritated by the attempts of the Ukrainian government to raise international awareness of the 1932-1993 Great Famine in Ukraine, the Holodomor. The simmering tensions came to the fore this month when Ukraine commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor. While Europe and North America expressed their sympathy and sent official condolences, Russia has engaged in what can be called an anti-Holodomor campaign at the highest political level.

In October, the Ukrainian Foreign ministry accused Russia of using “pressure and blackmail” to prevent Ukraine from putting the issue of Holodomor for consideration by the UN General Assembly as an act of genocide against Ukraine. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev turned down Ukraine’s invitation to attend the commemorative events in Kyiv on November 22. Moreover, he weighed in on the historical discourse of the Ukrainian Famine in a letter sent to President Viktor Yushchenko a week earlier, outlining Russian objections to the Ukrainian interpretation of Holodomor. Furthermore, on November 17 and 21 two “alternative” historical conferences on Holodomor were held in Moscow and Kharkiv respectively. The Russian delegation included the noted Moscow expert, Sergey Markov, and the well known ‘anti-revisionist’ Russian historian Aleksandr Dyukov. The Ukrainian side was represented by the who’s who of the pro-Russian political camp, such as Nikolay Azarov from the Party of Regions, the controversial mayor of Kharkiv Mikhail Dobkin, and the former head of the presidential administration under Leonid Kuchma, Dmytro Tabachnik. According to the Ukrainian internet portal RUPOR, the conference was sponsored by the Russian government commission for the affairs of compatriots abroad, which in turn is believed to be connected to the Russian foreign intelligence agency.

This is a brief recap of events, and we shall now examine the substantive content of this campaign. The Russian position laid out in the aforementioned letter by President Medvedev can be summed up as follows.
- The Famine of 1932-33 did take place.
- It was caused by a combination of drought and the disastrous consequences of the policy of forcible collectivization, which was carried out throughout the Soviet Union.
- The Famine was not directed against any particular nationality
- The current Ukrainian interpretation of Holodomor is being used for political purposes and is aimed to drive a wedge between Russian and Ukrainian peoples.

A similar position was articulated during the conference in Kharkiv. Writing on his personal blog, a political scientist from Belarus, Yuri Shevtsov, who took part in the conference noted that the only two points of contention raised by the participants that differed from the official Ukrainian interpretation of the famine were the issue of recognition of Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian people as well as a need for a more nuanced assessment of the policy of collectivization. Interestingly, Yuri Shevtsov is the author of a book about the ideology of Holodomor. Gleb Pavlovsky, a self-aggrandizing pro-Kremlin spin-doctor, wrote a foreword to the book and, by the author’s own admission ordered and sponsored its writing and subsequent release . According to Yuri Shevtsov, current attempts by the Ukrainian government to promote the genocidal interpretation of the Famine must be viewed in a broader Eastern European context of the reassessment of the Second World War. The governments of Ukraine, the Baltic States and several other Eastern European countries have sought to rehabilitate their own Nazi collaborators by arguing a (false) moral equivalence between Nazism and Communism. (Interestingly enough, Mr. Shevtsov’s list of such collaborators includes not only the SS units from the Baltic countries but also the UPA and the Polish Home Army). He also sees the ‘ideology of Holodomor’ in socio-economic terms linking it to radical (neo-liberal) market reforms carried out in Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism with its unabashed individualism and aversion to “any form of social solidarity” that in turn can be traced to the peasant rejection of modernity. Finally, he warns that the conflict between the ‘crypto-Nazi’ East European regimes and Russia over the interpretation of the WWII and Soviet communism threatens the project of European integration because “without Russia European unity can never be stable”.

It is hardly surprising, given the circumstances of its appearance, that Yuri Shevtsov’s polemical invective avoids altogether any discussion of how the denunciation of the concept of Holodomor fits with the current trends in the post-Soviet historiography of the Soviet period, particularly the role of Stalin. In an attempt to provide a more ‘objective’ assessment of the Soviet period, unlike the excesses of the perestroika and the Yeltsin era, the Putin regime seeks to promote a wholly new vision of Stalin as an effective manager who sought to transform the USSR into an industrial society. Such a concept is presented at the web site of the Russian ministry of Education. Predictably, its authors deny the organized character of the famine and reject its characterization as deliberately directed against any ethnic or social group.

It is not hard to see that such ‘pragmatic’ rehabilitation of Stalinism, from which the rejection of the Ukrainian interpretation of Famine logically follows, serves as an implicit legitimization of the contemporary political regime in Russia. Indeed, it becomes possible to justify the creeping authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin by pointing out its effectiveness and arguing that, just like it was in Stalin’s case, under present historical circumstances there could be no alternative to the current political course. Ukraine, with its fledging but functioning democracy presents not only a subversive example of a different approach to the common Soviet past but also the way to deal with the challenges of the present. Perhaps that helps to understand the reasons why the Russian President has decided to jump into a historical debate with his Ukrainian counterpart and why the Russian state is willing to invest considerable resources to debunking the dangerous ‘myth of the Holodomor’.

Ukrainian President declares national day to remember victims of communist repressions

On the 70th anniversary of the Great Terror Yushchenko signs a decree to honor the memory of the victims of communist repressions

By Ilya Khineyko

In the midst of his continuing standoff with the Verkhovna Rada, President Viktor Yushchenko took a step that supersedes the current political crisis. In a presidential decree signed on May 21 the president proposed to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Great Terror of 1937-1938 by making the third Sunday of May an annual Day of Remembrance for the victims of political repressions by the Soviet regime. The announcement was made the next day when Yushchenko visited the Bykivnia memorial site on the outskirts of Kyiv where those executed by NKVD were buried between 1936 and 1941. It was during the Perestroika era when the information regarding mass burials of the victims of Stalinist terror such as Kurapaty in Belarus or Levashovo near Leningrad was made public, which ultimately played an important role in the unraveling of the Soviet system.