Why Putin loves the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

...and why his left supporters are deploying arguments borrowed from 1939

First off thanks to everyone who has newly subscribed. Please spread the word and keep the feedback coming. Second: what a week! Prigozhin (probably) assassinated, progress in Ukraine’s counter-offensive, some concrete commitments to Ukraine on F-16s. I’ll come back to all of this in September. But today’s newsletter is about history, and its misuses in debates over the Ukraine conflict…

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Vyacheslav Molotov signs the Pact. Stalin looks on.

On 4 September 1939, the day Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, Communist Party leader Harry Pollitt strode along the corridors of his party HQ, waving his fist and shouting "Smash the fascist bastards!".

He rushed out 50,000 copies of a pamphlet entitled How To Win The War. This was an anti-fascist war, it said, completely unlike the pointless carnage of 1914-18, and would require the left to defeat the Hitler-appeasing section of the British elite.

Pollitt - whose coded comms with Moscow had somehow broken down - had failed to realise the significance of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed 84 years ago this week.

It was not simply a non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin. In a secret protocol, it handed Finland and the Baltic States over to Soviet control and guaranteed the division of Poland between the USSR and Germany, thus greenlighting the Nazi aggression that would start World War Two.

On 2 October 1939, after numerous frantic communications from Moscow, the CPGB’s Central Committee ditched its support for Britain's anti-fascist war effort, sacked Pollitt as general secretary and denounced Britain and France as the main aggressors.

The party's slogan changed from How to Win the War! to Stop The War! For the next 18 months, right up to the launch of Operation Barbarossa, British communists mobilised to force their government to accept a "people's peace" with Nazi Germany.

To put it bluntly: if British workers had followed the CPGB at the time of Dunkirk, they would have handed victory to Hitler and ensured an epoch of Nazism across Europe.

In the late 1970s, when I first became active in the labour movement there were still people around who'd taken part in this debacle, and indeed defended the CP's line, just as they defended the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. I never imagined then, however, that these blasts from the Stalinist past would be relevant in the mid-21st century.

Sadly, the attack on Ukraine has made both the Pact and the British CP's response to it, relevant once again.

Russian MFA video marking the Pact’s anniversary

The Russian MFA marked the anniversary of the Pact with a video retailing the Kremlin line, which defends the agreement as a legitimate tactic in the face of British and French determination to appease Hitler. Meanwhile the heirs to British Stalinism, organised in the Stop the War Coalition, are mobilising to prevent next month's Trades Union Congress from expressing support and solidarity for Ukraine - using arguments remarkably similar to those deployed by the CPGB in 1939-41.

So this edition of Conflict & Democracy is a double history lesson: on the significance of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and why lying about it has become so important for the Kremlin; and on the similarities between the arguments used by the CPGB in 1939-40 and those of left-wing Kremlin sympathisers today.

What did Molotov sign?

Let's start by listing the undisputed facts about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact:

• It was signed in Moscow on 23 August 1939, and included a Secret Protocol which allocated Finland, the Baltic States and Bessarabia (now Moldova) to the Soviet sphere of influence, and planned for the destruction of Poland and its partition between Germany and the USS

• It legitimised to the Nazi invasion of Poland on 1 September, inevitably triggering the declaration of war by Britain and France, who had offered unilateral guarantees of Polish sovereignty

• It authorised the Russian invasion and annexation of eastern Poland on 17 September, after Stalin told close confidants: "The elimination of that state under present conditions would mean one bourgeois fascist state less". (Johnstone, 1997, p9)

• It legitimised the annexation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia by the USSR.

• It triggered the annexation of Romanian territory (now parts of Ukraine and Moldova) by the USSR

• When Finland resisted Soviet demands for territorial annexations, the Pact triggered the Winter War (1939-40), which ended with parts of Finland being annexed into the USSR.

• In Poland, Germany immediately perpetrated mass murder atrocities against Jews, seized Jewish property and began the policy of ghettoisation

• In Poland, Germany immediately began "Germanisation" - deporting and “Germanising” Polish children, and subjecting Polish men to forced labour.

• The Soviet Union began mass deportations of Baltic citizens. It deported between 200,000 and 1.5 million Poles into forced labour camps, including tens of thousands of Polish Jews. It perpetrated the Katyn Massacre, executing 22,000 Polish officers in cold bloo.

That is a lot of historical bad karma and, like it or not, implicates the USSR in starting the Second World War - even though its people then struggled heroically to resist and defeat fascism after June 1941.

The cover up

The existence of the secret protocol was revealed by the allies at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945 - but denied by the USSR right through until 1989, when Gorbachev finally told the truth. In the interim, the Soviets insisted that the Secret Protocol was a forgery and that no such document existed in their archives. Western communists, meanwhile, defended the Pact retrospectively as a necessary compromise to buy time for the inevitable clash with Hitler - and pointed to the USSR’s vital role in defeating Nazism.

However in December 1989 the USSR's Congress of People's Deputies voted to declare the Pact illegal, null and void from the moment of its signing. This was a vital step in legitimising the Baltic States' claims to sovereignty during the final years of the USSR: the whole debate on the Pact had been driven by mass campaigns in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia after 1989.

Equally important today is that this was a vote by the parliament of the USSR, including deputies from all republics. It means that those wanting to defend or justify the Pact for Soviet-nostalgic reasons stand on shaky ground: the USSR itself repudiated the Pact, not the subsequent CIS states.

As late as 2009, when Vladimir Putin was trying to drive a wedge between Poland and the USA over missile defence, he admitted that the Pact was "condemnable" and that its "immorality... had been assessed by the parliament" (ie by the Soviet legislature). He added:

"Russia has always respected the bravery and heroism of the Polish people, soldiers and officers, who stood up first against Nazism in 1939".

But in 2014, following the annexation of Crimea, Putin reversed his position on the Pact dramatically. He told a conference of Russian academics that the carve up of Poland had been poetic justice for the Poles' seizure of land from Czechoslovakia under the 1938 Munich agreement. In May 2015 he told Angela Merkel to her face that the Pact had been justified.

By 2020 Putin, together with his ethno-nationalist hangers on, were in full revisionist mode over the Pact. His 9,000 word article defending it, published in English in The National Interest, looks - with hindsight - like the intellectual forebear of the 2021 essay in which he staked Russia's territorial claim to Ukraine.

Looking back at the National Interest article, I think it forms the keystone of his world view.

Putin's Defence of Molotov

Putin's modern defence of the Pact revolves around the following assertions:

• The Allied democracies had themselves ripped up the inter-war legal system by agreeing to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938. By the time the Pact took effect international law was dead.

• The Allies refused to form an anti-fascist alliance with the USSR.

• In doing so their intent was to propel Germany into an attack on the USSR, rather than themselves.

• Only at the last moment, when attempts to form an alliance with Britain and France failed, did Russia switch to an alliance with Hitler.

• Poland bears prime responsibility for provoking the Second World War, and was morally culpable because of its own annexations of Czech territory.

• Only when Britain and France failed to aid Poland effectively did Russia move its troops into Eastern Poland, in part to protect Jews.

• In any case, Russia mainly claimed territories it had lost at the end of the First World War, populated by ethnic Belarisuans and Ukrainians and therefore part of the Russki mir.

• The Soviet annexation of the Baltic states was legal at the time.

• Any “mistakes” made in 1939 were the responsibility of Stalin, not the Russian people.

You could make a factual case for each one of these claims. There was a rabidly anti-Soviet faction in the British government and Foreign Office. Allied talks with Russia were carried out unenthusiastically and at low rank etc. Poland, for obvious reasons, did not want to be “guaranteed” by the USSR.

But there is counter evidence which knocks down the whole argument. For example, there is no moral or legal equivalence to Britain acceding to Hitler's demands at Munich, out of weakness, and Russia actively colluding with him to destroy Poland as a state. And it is well documented that Soviet diplomats engaged in an active and prolonged negotiations with Hitler after Munich, and that their talks with Britain and France in the Summer of 1939 were for show.

However the contemporary relevance of Putin’s revisionism over 1939 lies in its implications for Ukraine. We could draw some implicit general points from Putin’s 2020 article:

First, cynical realism is the only basis for conducting international relations.

Second, once a rules-based order breaks down (the League of Nations system in the 1930s, the Charter System today) annexations of territory become legitimate in order to guarantee the national security of Great Powers.

Third - in his claims about the legality of the Baltic annexations - the contemporary sovereignty of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia is called into question.

Fourth, and explicitly, so is the territorial integrity of Poland (Putin claimed in July that western Poland was “a gift from Josef Stalin”, and that Poland wants to annex Lviv etc).

Fifth, and finally, by seizing Crimea in 2014, setting up the LNR/DNR, and now attempting to annex Zaporizhzia, Donetsk, Kherson and Luhansk from Ukraine, Putin is only doing what Stalin did to Poland east of the Vistula - pragmatically creating an anti-fascist redoubt and protecting ethnic Russians.

Such are the uses of history to the Kremlin. But the reversal of Gorbachev-era contrition for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is not just about Soviet-era nostalgia.

It is about establishing behavioural norms for an era of systemic competition.

The subtext is: this is how we behaved last time, and there was a legal and practical basis for it, and even your own politicians - Chamberlain and Churchill - acquiesced with the logic of realpolitik. So this is how you should expect us to behave again.

To understand how this message is translated into contemporary influence operations inside the West, it's useful to consider the case of the British CP in 1939-40 as a template, and the current British “anti-war” movement as its echo.

Guardian 26 October 1939 illustrates fog of war

British Communism in 1939-40

Before detailing the scandalous arguments used by British Communists in 1939-40 it is worth remembering what they didn't know. We have to assume they were not informed of the Secret Protocol, and that they believed Baltic annexations by the USSR were the result of "workers' revolutions" there.

As for the resulting atrocities, even mainstream press coverage of this was complacent, and clouded by the fog of war. A Guardian report from 26 October 1939, for example, calmly states that the Nazis were setting up a "Jewish state" in Lublin and notes a "scheme for settling some 1,750,000 Germans" into Poland, and that factories belonging to Jews were being “handed over to German owners”. What this entailed in human terms was almost never covered, and scarcely mentioned in Parliamentary debates at the time.

But ignorance is no defence for what the CPGB did. From 7 October 1939 onwards its slogan was the call for "a peace conference of Powers", obviously not including Poland, which had ceased to exist.

The party elaborated its stance in a notorious pamphlet Workers Against The War, issued by its London District in January 1940.

Its starting point goes way beyond a defence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as realpolitik. It states:

"British and French imperialism bear the main responsibility for the war, for its continuation, and for its extension". (p2)

It states:

"The central question for the Communist Party, therefore, is how to build a united front of mass struggle against British Imperialism, and against the reformist leadership of the Labour movement, for the defeat of anti-Soviet intervention, and for the ending of the Imperialist war and of Capitalism". (p2 my emphasis)

Let's unpack this: not only does the pamphlet begin with the claim that the character of the war is the same as in 1914 - an “inter-imperialist” conflict in which the workers should take no sides (a claim directly opposite to the CPGB’s best-selling pamphlet from September 1939).

It goes further, stating that the main responsibility lay with Britain and France: they were the real aggressors, and responsible for the "continuation" of the war because they failed to accede to German "peace proposals".

By January 1940 hundreds of thousands of civilians had been deported, raped, herded into ghettoes and forced labour camps in the German zone. Tens of thousands had been murdered. There’s a good summary with sources here. Furthermore, Poland had been eradicated as a state, an act which left any remnant of international law and order shattered.

By the "extension" of the war, the CPGB means the Russian invasion of Finland, engineered through a classic false flag operation on 30 November 1939. This, said the CPGB, was Britain’s fault. In April 1940, when Nazi Germany attacked Norway and Denmark, the CPGB yet would again claim that Britain bore the "main responsibility" for the extension of the war.

"British imperialism" said the CPGB, bore specific responsibility for starting the war, said the CPGB. British and French imperialism, it said were "working to prepare new combinations and new fronts against the Soviet Union".

Furthermore, British workers were now suffering as a result. "Seven million pounds a day are spent unproductively," said the CP - being a little bit coy because they are describing the massive rearmament programme that was rapidly ending unemployment. And "the cost of living has risen. Social services have been reduced to a minimum".

The British state was, in addition accused of encouraging "anti-Semitic and anti-Irish tendencies" - at a time when the mass murder of Jews was taking place in Nazi occupied Poland and a massive forced deportation of Jewish refugees under way to Russia's Siberian heartlands.

The CP called for "all workers" to:

"unite in active struggle against the war, the War Governemnt and the policy of the reactionary leadership".

It called on Labour to vote against the defence budget and end participation in the various industrial committees set up to boost the war effort. It called for workers to stop British supply of weapons to the Finnish government (which was fighting the Soviet invasion). Its aim, ultimately, was to bring down the Chamberlain government and end the war.

In the entire pamphlet there was not a single word of condemnation of Nazi Germany. Not a single mention of its atrocities against Polish, Baltic and Jewish civilians. There was no demand on Germany to take any action that might de-escalate the conflict. The forcible liquidation of Poland as a nation was never mentioned.

Though the British CP wobbled towards an anti-fascist line during the Dunkirk crisis, its Moscow-backed leader Rajani Palme Dutt soon corrected this, telling party members that the fall of France proved "the main enemy is at home" - ie the Churchill-Attlee government. Echoing Stalin over the fate of Poland, Dutt said of France:

"In the cannibal context of imperialism there is one power less".

By the summer of 1940 the CPGB was committed to the overthrow of Attlee-Churchill government and their replacement by a "people's government and a People's Peace" - that is, a peace deal that left Hitler in charge of his territorial possessions, with no suggestion of accountability under international law for any of the atrocities perpetrated.

1940 as a playbook for today

What's remarkable about the 1940 pamphlet is how closely it precedes the arguments of the modern-day Stalinists in Stop The War Coalition.

• They, too, claim that NATO is the real aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

• Their strategy is to turn working class discontent over the cost of living and austerity into opposition to aid for Ukraine

• They want to stop the supply of British arms to a country resisting Russian imperialism

• They remain supremely uninterested in the details of mass murder, rape, forcible deportation and torture by the Russian side.

• Their argument that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is part of an “inter-imperialist” war is a mask for actions favouring Russia and undermining the resistance of the Ukrainian people.

• A good 5 out of 14 pages in the 1940 pamphlet consist of exhortations to build the Communist Party. Likewise, almost every email from Stop The War urges people to contribute money to an organisation that barely exists; which raises no solidarity whatsoever with even the civilian victims of the Ukraine war.

But beyond these parallels there is a deeper one: cynical realism. The people who wrote the 1940 pamphlet knew full well that their own instincts, and their own previous methodology, should have made them critical supporters of Britain's war effort. Indeed, they had been selling a pamphlet declaring World War Two an anti-fascist war for four weeks, until the infamous Central Committee meeting where Pollitt and his allies were sacked and forced to recant their views.

Today's Stop The War coalition is run by people who - if Ukraine were Venezuela or Cuba - would be calling for arms, aid, ammunition and volunteers to go and fight. Underlying Stop The War's attitude today is the same cynical realpolitik that guided their predecessors in 1940.