Vladimir Putin: Nazi-Soviet pact was no big deal

Vladimir Putin: Nazi-Soviet pact was no big deal
(Image credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939, formally known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, is widely considered to be the ignominious stage-setter that allowed Nazi Germany and the USSR to invade and divvy up Poland, which finally led Western powers to declare war on Germany after a series of brazen annexations.

But to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the pact was totally innocent.

"Serious research must show that those were the foreign policy methods then," he recently told a group of young historians in Moscow. "The Soviet Union signed a non-aggression treaty with Germany. People say: 'Ach, that's bad.' But what's bad about that if the Soviet Union didn't want to fight, what's bad about it?"

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The Soviet Union had long denied that it had secretly made a deal with the Nazis to split Eastern Europe into spheres of influence, but came clean in 1989. Putin's bit of revisionist history is seen as an attempt to legitimize his own autocratic regime, which earlier this year annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine.

Explore More

Ryu Spaeth is deputy editor at TheWeek.com. Follow him on Twitter.