Many people ask what was the benefit of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the USSR. Here I will attempt an answer. The single most serious threat to Russia, both as a state and as an ethnicity, is a unified western Europe. Luckily for Russians, Europeans are usually too busy killing each other to ever unify properly against Russia. Whenever one European power gets strong enough to lead a coalition to ethnically cleanse Russia, another European power stabs them in the back. The picture I show above is a good example of this.
Just from this picture we can make a profound insight about World War II. European imperialists outnumber and outgun Russians. Aside from Russian tenacity, European attempts to wipe out the Russians have been confounded by Europe’s own lack of unity and tendency to backstab.
World War II was no exception. Germans had successfully put together the strongest coalition in history, and were finally powerful enough to create a final solution to the Russian question. But the English resented a strong Germany and stabbed them in the back, which was both confusing and enraging to the Germans and their other allies on the continent. You can see the pure, sincere anger the artist felt when he drew this picture. There’s the savage Russian communist, but also the treasonous Englishman, the artist hates them both equally. (The artist was Portuguese, click here for background information)
Now about this question of non-aggression pacts. Let’s review what Carl von Clausewitz had to say about the subject of non-aggression treaties in his famous book On War:
If two parties have prepared for war, some motive of hostility must have brought them to that point. Moreover so long as they remain under arms (do not negotiate a settlement) that motive of hostility must still be active. Only one consideration can restrain it: a desire to wait for a better moment before acting. At first sight one would think this desire could never operate on more than one side since its opposite must automatically be working on the other. If action would bring an advantage to one side, the other’s interest must be to wait.
But an absolute balance of forces cannot bring about a standstill, for if such a balance should exist the initiative would necessarily belong to the side with the positive purpose-the attacker.
One could, however, conceive of a state of balance in which the side with the positive aim (the side with the stronger grounds for action) was the one that had the weaker forces. The balance would then result from the combined effects of aim and strength.
So to paraphrase Clausewitz, if motives of hostility bring two parties to the brink of war and those motives remain unresolved, it is not possible to completely avoid war, only delay it. The most obvious reason for one side seeking to delay the war would be to wait for more ideal circumstances.
Quoting Clausewitz is immediately relevant to German-Soviet relations, because pretty much every officer on both sides would have read On War or at the very least be familiar with it. After all, Clausewitz is one of the most famous military thinkers in modern western history, how could they not be familiar with him? Therefore, we can somewhat safely conclude that the governments and armed forces on both sides understood that this pact was temporary.
Clausewitz emphasized that such delaying tactics generally benefit one side, which raises the most important question: which side benefited most from the non-aggression pact?
To answer that question, let’s look at the events leading up to World War II. By far the most significant event sparking the war was the 1938 partition of Czechoslovakia by Germany and Poland. Aside from the immediate physical effect of almost doubling Germany’s industrial strength, there were a few equally important political signals:
-Poland blocked the Soviet Union from sending troops to help Czechoslovakia, signaling that they were an enemy of the Soviets and an ally of Germany. Polish hostility was further complicated by their mutual defense treaties with the western liberal democracies. The Soviets could not directly fight Poland for any reason without incurring reprisal from the Poles’ British and French masters.
-The Munich Agreement signaled that the western liberal democracies would do nothing to stop German expansion, as long as that expansion was eastward.
-Furthermore, the Munich Agreement was a clear signal that everybody in “the garden of Europe” considered Russians the big primary enemy and would at least temporarily put aside their own differences. France and Britain would quite eagerly fight side by side with Germany to defeat and wipe out the Russians. This signal was further confirmed by Chamberlain’s plans to attack the USSR through Finland, an idea that he would have certainly at least tried to carry out if he wasn’t preempted by the Germans pushing his army into the channel.
Still, at this point, the USSR was reasonably safe, as they did not share a direct border with Germany. The 1939 invasion of Poland changed that. After Germany finished annexing Poland, they would now share a border with the USSR, the next logical domino in their expansion. By convincing the Germans they needed a non-aggression pact, the Soviets made several huge accomplishments:
-They regained territory lost in the Soviet-Polish War, which could then be fortified, and would slow down any theoretical German invasion by that much.
-With the threat of German invasion at least delayed, the Soviets had valuable time to strengthen their armed forces and mobilize their economy.
-And perhaps the most important success of all, the Soviets poisoned the relationship between Germany and its western neighbors. Understand that it was not so much the invasion of Poland that angered London and Paris. It was the German scheming with the Russians. Hitler had demonstrated that he was willing to negotiate with the hated enemy, which meant he could no longer be trusted. The British would never trust him again, even when it would have been advantageous to trust him. Chamberlain’s pro-nazi regime was thrown out and replaced by Churchill. However much Churchill personally hated the Russians and wanted them all dead, he was not willing to accept Germany as a continental power. He understood, perhaps correctly, that if Hitler betrayed western trust once, he might do so again, making him an unreliable ally against the Russians.
That last point is the most catastrophic development for Germany. If Hitler had realized just how diplomatically damaging the non-aggression pact would turn out to be, that it would put Germany in the same two-front scenario that doomed them in the previous war, he might have reconsidered.
Consider what Churchill himself said in his October 1939 address:
What is the second event of this first month? It is, of course, the assertion of the power of Russia. Russia has pursued a cold policy of self-interest. We could have wished that the Russian armies should be standing on their present lines as the friends of the allies in Poland, instead of as invaders.
But that the Russian armies should stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.When Herr von Ribbentropp was summoned to Moscow last week it was to learn the fact, and to accept the fact, that the Nazi designs upon the Baltic States and upon the Ukraine must come to a dead stop.
If Churchill, the British imperialist who passionately hated and feared Russians with every fiber his being, understood that the Germans were a worse enemy and the Russians were just being pragmatic, anyone should be able to understand why the non-aggression pact was a smart move.
For that reason, I think any reasonable observer can conclude that the non-aggression pact overwhelmingly favored the Soviets.
Ian Kummer
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it’s interesting). They still like to blame the USSR for this pact, although they all had treaties with Hitler
The picture is discussed here:
https://worldhistoryarchive.wordpress.com/2021/11/18/portuguese-pro-fascist-map/
It is a WWII Portuguese fascist propaganda image showing Europe, except Britain, ganging up against the USSR.
Thank you, I edited that section of the article.
You’ll notice Portugal resolutely looking in the other direction. England and Portugal signed a treaty of non-aggression back in the middle ages and England / Great Britain / United Kingdom have never been at war with an independent Portugal since then. Salazar was a dictator, but one who was never remotely sympathetic to the Nazis, condemning the Nazi racial theories behind the Nuremberg Laws and considering fascism to be a form of pagan Caesarism, not compatible with his Catholic faith. I’m guessing the artist was a frustrated fascist, annoyed by Salazar’s relative moderation.
The map isn’t exactly fair with regards to Spain. Franco wasn’t interested in war on Hitler’s side either. He used WW2 as an opportunity to get rid of some of the more radical fascists in the Falange who were a potential threat to the more conventionally conservative elements of his power base. Encourage them to sign up with the Waffen SS and there’s a fair chance they won’t be coming back.
Hitler and Franco met at Hendaye after the fall of France in 1940. Franco turned up an hour late and gave a 1000 excuses why Spain wasn’t in a position to join the war. Hitler begged and promised 20 divisions to help Franco take back Gibraltar, but, very sensibly, the Caudillo didn’t bite. On his return to Germany, Hitler claimed the negotiation with Franco had made him “feel like a Jew” and that he would rather have three teeth pulled than spend another hour with the Spanish leader.
With regards to Churchill, he believed it was a corner stone of English / British foreign policy to prevent a single country from dominating Western Europe, so the UK would need to support German kingdoms against Napoleon for the same reason as supporting France against the Kaiser or against Hitler, or potentially, the remains of the Third Reich against the Soviet Union as in his Operation Unthinkable. Nothing personal, you understand, just business.
Hi Aelfsige, good to see you here as always. Thanks for clarifying about Portugal – I was not at all aware of their English non-aggression pact so was a bit puzzled by why the Portuguese soldier was looking the opposite direction. “Frustrated fascist” I think describes this artist perfectly. There’s a great deal of frustration and anger in this picture.
Many Spanish volunteers did go to the Eastern front, but as you said, Franco was pragmatic and kept Spain from getting dragged into one camp or the other. In the end, Franco survived the war and stayed in power, which is more than can be said for Mussolini.
I’m sorry, but idea that Europeans as a whole have some longstanding desire to ethnically cleanse Russians is complete nonsense. Nazi Germany is a very notable exception. They explicitly wanted to eradicate a large portion of the Slavic populations so as to make the remainder left alive easier to control as slaves. Germany was a latecomer to the Empire building game and couldn’t do much outside of Eurasia, so it turned to its East. But I find it very hard to extrapolate from that any kind of legacy European mentality that stretches back before the specific context of post-1871 unification Germany.
You could perhaps make an argument that Western European states have a longstanding complex about a unified Slavic power in the east (see echoes of this today with articles insisting we need to break Russia up into multiple mini-countries), but that still isn’t the same as wanting to purge an ethnicity or culture. Even if you try to make this some clash of civilizations argument about how Catholic and Protestant Western Europe hated Orthodox Russia, the goal there was to make the Orthodox into ‘proper’ Christians, not wipe out their societies.
This strikes me as a line of thinking that is hopelessly mired in idealism. ‘They hate Russians and want to wipe out their Russian-ness’ is just as asinine and goofy as Americans vaguely asserting how Johnny Foreigner ‘just hates us for our freedoms’. It’s not serious geostrategic analysis of how states operate in pursuit of their material interests. You even open this article by acknowledging how often Western European states were fighting each other. Yet I see no sign of attempting to explain this warfare as being driven by a desire to ethically cleanse. It seems like you’re very selectively carving out anti-Slavic warfare as driven by hatred of Slavs, while anti-anyone else fighting is driven by…whatever it’s driven by.
I know that this eternal victim mentality where everyone just hates Russia for being Russian is common in some Russian circles these days (and implicit, and sometimes explicit, in this kind of thinking is that noble Russian civilization is taking a stand against the homo-globo-femi-nazi satanist child murderers, or whatever. Funny, because at the end of the day Putin is himself by inclination just a pretty boring, though quite competent, neoliberal bureaucrat), but it’s stupid.
Whether you like it or not this IS a war of civilizations. The goal is the absolute destruction of Russians, and I tell them this every day. The USA will accept nothing less, at least in the long term.
As for why, I don’t think there actually is a rational reason for wanting to ethnically cleanse them. In the USA we have been long obsessed with wiping out Russian civilization with nukes, and apparently inherited that hatred from the British. Where the British and Euros got it, I can’t be sure. The Brits’ failure to subjugate Russia in the Great Game perhaps just escalated into genocidal hatred.
I just flatly reject your entire understanding and framing. If you’re speaking as a (not literal) ambassador for Americans and communicating this narrative to Russians, I think you’re grossly misinformed them.
You’re filtering typical great power rivalries through a lems of personalized psychology and idealism. European and Russian relations, alternating conflict and alliances, fits in the same mold as relations between any other European states (or states in general for that matter).
As for the US, relations there were generally good for centuries, until 1917. You see ethnic hatred where I see a much more obvious explanation: capital vs socialism. Communism put Russia firmly on the map as a fully industrialized superpower that lead a system that dueled for domination of the world order. If you want to see a clash fo civioizarions, it was between two very different visions of who gets to own the mean of production.
After it was fully modernized, even when the USSR collapsed the fear of Russian latent power didn’t vanish.
If the goal is the total destruction of Russian civilization, we’re pretty bad at achieving that. Not only did we have exclusive use of the bomb for years and didn’t leverage that power, but once Russia was brought low in the 90s and we backed the alcoholic, we didn’t destroy them. We looted and exploited them and left. That’s not a genocidal clash of civilizations. That’s capitalism being capitalism.
The ‘threat’ of Russia, currently, is the same as the threat of China: they’re great powers that exist independently of the Washington Consensus. This is all pretty standard hegemonic thinking.
Every time we are attacked, millions of Russians (eastern Slavs) would die, mostly non-combatants. In the war 26m of Soviet ppl were killed, in the 90s millions (no one knows the exact figure) perished through exterme poverty, homelessness, drugs, alcoholism (I was there then, can testify, the country looked steamrolled). If it’s not a genocide, I don’t know what it is. Also, our ideas about the USA and Western Europe have never been similar to their vision of us. We have always been able to admire culture and achievements. But they took this admiration for submissiveness. And never reciprocated. Russia is the biggest and least known country of the world. Sad.
You remember the 90s and early 2000s differently than me. Within my own family, in the news, and entertainment media, it was widely believed that Russia was finished. Look at military writing in that period. Everybody was rambling about China and Islamists – Russia wasn’t even conceivably a threat, and that wasn’t a crazy thing to think. Russia’s cratered birthrate, brain drain, and astronomically high abortion rate all pointed to total demographic collapse. And I think everyone can agree that if not for the competent management in the early Putin years, that demographic collapse absolutely would have happened. Perceptions didn’t change until 2008, when Russia successfully launched a fairly large and complicated military campaign outside their own borders. That was the wakeup call that Russians were on the rebound and far from going extinct like they were supposed to.
Just look at how post-Soviet Russia is portrayed in Hollywood, even in new movies like “Without Remorse.” It’s a rusted, crumbling monolith populated by aging alcoholics, not a child in sight. Our elites clearly view Russia the same way Rome viewed Carthage. “Russia must be destroyed” and that’s the ultimate goal.
Our elites’ hatred of Russians is similar to and directly related to their hatred of WASPs in the USA itself. They want white Americans extinct just like they want Slavs extinct. And yes, it’s all Slavs, not just Russians. Ukrainians, Poles and Balkans won’t be useful either once the big bear has been eliminated. The Biden regime clearly imagined a scenario where Ukrainians and Russians drove EACH OTHER into extinction, but are fine with the contingency plan of just Ukrainians going extinct.
I’m not sure how you think that’s contradicting me. Western capitalism looted Russia, and then it was an afterthought in popular perception, just a place villains could be written as coming from.
Which was really just a direct continuation of how it was treated during the Cold War, when it was the ideological and economic archenemy. The Soviet Union is always portrayed as a mass of drones, ever terrified of the KGB, and the entire country is color graded depressing grey (this continues right up to something like the recent Chernobyl miniseries). Most of the modern Russia stereotypes are just a direct continuation of Soviet stereotypes. Which you can interpret as malevolence, if you want, and to some extent it is because the USSR was the designated enemy for most of its history, and enemies are always portrayed negatively. But a simple fact is that Americans in general, and Hollywood in particular, are massively lazy and incurious. Russians aren’t portrayed well? Neither is basically anyone else. At best any other country or character from a country is portrayed as some cheerful stereotype. Hell, the US habitually doesn’t give positive or nuanced portrayals of vast swathes of the US itself.
With the US we’re talking about a society the destroyed Iraq based on complete lies and directly or indirectly caused the deaths of millions, and the most it can conjure up is a “Oops. Our bad. Mistakes were made”. Which says absolutely nothing good about America or Americans. But it undermines notions of Russia being uniquely targeted.
I do not get how you can get from ‘US media is lazy and habitually portrays Russia in unflattering terms’ to ‘so obviously the goal of the US is to destroy Russia’. The Carthage comparison especially doesn’t work because…Rome destroyed Carthage. When presented with the chance to obliterate them, Rome did. Whereas Russia has, in fact, not been obliterated. And even at its lowest points in the 90s was still pushing a population of 150 million and there was no real scenario in which the civilization would disappear. At times it seemed it may have (further, since the USSR was essentially one giant country) split into smaller states. But that still isn’t obliteration.