Molotov-Ribbentrop: The Orwellian non-aggression treaty that started World War 2

"Russia and Germany have signed a cooperation pact. War now inevitable. Went for a stroll." - Evelyn Waugh

German Foreign Minister Von Ribbentrop, Joseph Stalin, & his foreign minister, Molotov

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the Nazi German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, officially called the Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was signed 75 years ago today. Made public on August 23, 1939 the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact was a Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact with secret protocols setting out how the two regimes would divide Poland and the Baltic States.  World War 2 would begin with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany on September 1, 1939. The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East on September 17, 1939. The double invasion is dramatized in Andrzej Wajda's 2007 film Katyn. This important date in history and cautionary tale for democrats is largely ignored.

German and Soviet Union soldiers greet one another in Poland (1939)

The Molotov - Ribbentrop Pact, 1939

Text of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact

The Government of the German Reich and The Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics desirous of strengthening the cause of peace between Germany and the U.S.S.R., and proceeding from the fundamental provisions of the Neutrality Agreement concluded in April, 1926 between Germany and the U.S.S.R., have reached the following Agreement:

Article I.
Both High Contracting Parties obligate themselves to desist from any act of violence, any aggressive action, and any attack on each other, either individually or jointly with other Powers.

Article II.
Should one of the High Contracting Parties become the object of belligerent action by a third Power, the other High Contracting Party shall in no manner lend its support to this third Power.

Article III.
The Governments of the two High Contracting Parties shall in the future maintain continual contact with one another for the purpose of consultation in order to exchange information on problems affecting their common interests.

Article IV.
Should disputes or conflicts arise between the High Contracting Parties shall participate in any grouping of Powers whatsoever that is directly or indirectly aimed at the other party.

Article V.
Should disputes or conflicts arise between the High Contracting Parties over problems of one kind or another, both parties shall settle these disputes or conflicts exclusively through friendly exchange of opinion or, if necessary, through the establishment of arbitration commissions.

Article VI.
The present Treaty is concluded for a period of ten years, with the proviso that, in so far as one of the High Contracting Parties does not advance it one year prior to the expiration of this period, the validity of this Treaty shall automatically be extended for another five years.

Article VII.
The present treaty shall be ratified within the shortest possible time. The ratifications shall be exchanged in Berlin. The Agreement shall enter into force as soon as it is signed.

[The section below was not published at the time the above was announced.]

Secret Additional Protocol.

Article I.
 In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall represent the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and U.S.S.R. In this connection the interest of Lithuania in the Vilna area is recognized by each party.

Article II.
In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narev, Vistula and San. The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish States and how such a state should be bounded can only be definitely determined in the course of further political developments. In any event both Governments will resolve this question by means of a friendly agreement.

Article III.
With regard to Southeastern Europe attention is called by the Soviet side to its interest in Bessarabia. The German side declares its complete political disinteredness in these areas.

Article IV.

This protocol shall be treated by both parties as strictly secret.

Moscow, August 23, 1939.

For the Government of the German Reich v. Ribbentrop

Plenipotentiary of the Government of the U.S.S.R. V. Molotov

Copy of the Non-Aggression Pact signed on August 23, 1939

A Christmas Miracle: The End of the Soviet Union

Christmas returns to the Kremlin

Twenty years ago today on December 25, 1991 a regime born in 1917 and formerly named in 1922 came to an end. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) or as it was also known the Soviet Union was formerly brought to an end on Christmas day and replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States. The last day of the Soviet Union was on Christmas day. Let that sink in for a moment.



Now there are those who claim that the world is a less stable place without the Soviet Union, and Mikhail Gorbachev claims that it could have been reformed. Academic Stephen F. Cohen goes further and quotes approvingly both by Putin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky with the adage: "Anyone who does not regret the breakup of the Soviet Union has no heart. And anyone who thinks it can be reconstructed has no head." Vaclav Havel, a man who had both head and heart understood why this kind of regime was so profoundly inhuman: "As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it."



The optimism expressed by Gorbachev and the nostalgia of Cohen fails to take into account the human cost of the USSR. The Soviet Union took the lives of an estimated 61 million human beings. It was a brutal and evil system that spawned other brutal regimes around the globe that claimed over a 100 million lives. Their lives mattered. Vaclav Havel in his 1990 New Years Speech called on his countrymen not to forget:

"The rivers of blood that have flowed in Hungary, Poland, Germany and recently in such a horrific manner in Romania, as well as the sea of blood shed by the nations of the Soviet Union, must not be forgotten. First of all because all human suffering concerns every other human being. But more than this, they must also not be forgotten because it is these great sacrifices that form the tragic background of today's freedom or the gradual emancipation of the nations of the Soviet Bloc, and thus the background of our own newfound freedom."

The numbers of lives lost is but the material accounting and does not take into account the spiritual ruin visited upon billions and its aftermath to the present day. The late Czech president explained it in the very same address:

"The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships."

The destruction both material and spiritual generated by the Soviet Union over seventy years will take centuries to repair and transcend. That hard truth may not be cause for celebration but the end of the system that wreaked so much damage is cause for celebration not regret. To do otherwise is to be heartless. The fact that it happened without violence on Christmas day in 1991 is also cause for joy.

KGB’s secret war against Martin Luther King Jr.

"Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land." - Martin Luther King Jr. April 3, 1968 Memphis, Tennessee


The world has been made well aware of the FBI’s wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. on the orders of then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and monitoring of the Civil Rights Movement, but what was only learned decades later was that a campaign had been waged against Martin Luther King Jr. by the Soviet Intelligence agency known as the KGB.

In 1992 a high ranking Russian intelligence officer defected to the United Kingdom and brought with him notes and transcripts compiled over the previous thirty years as he moved entire foreign intelligence archives to a new headquarters just outside of Moscow.

The Russian intelligence officer’s name was Vasili Mitrokhin and the information he gathered became known as The Mitrokhin Archive.

In the groundbreaking book, The Sword and the The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin published in 1999 details were obtained from The Mitrokhin Archive on Soviet efforts to replace Martin Luther King Jr. with a “more radical and malleable leader” such as Stokeley Carmichael to provoke a race war in the United States.

Pages 237 and 238 of The Sword and the Shield excerpted below detail elements of the campaign waged by Soviet intelligence and the active measures arrayed against the civil rights leader:

“In August 1967 the Centre approved an operational plan by the deputy head of Service A, Yuri Modin, former controller of the Magnificent Five, to discredit King and his chief lieutenants by placing articles in the African press, which could then be reprinted in American newspapers, portraying King as an “Uncle Tom” who was secretly receiving government subsidies to tame the civil rights movement and prevent it threatening the Johnson administration. While leading freedom marches under the admiring glare of worldwide television, King was allegedly in close touch with the President. 83 The same operational plan also contained a series of active measures designed to discredit US policy “on the negro.” The Centre authorized Modin:

• To organize, through the use of KGB residency resources in the US, the publication and distribution of brochures, pamphlets, leaflets and appeals denouncing the policy of the Johnson administration on the Negro question and exposing the brutal terrorist methods being used by the government to suppress the Negro rights movement.
  
• To arrange, via available agent resources, for leading figures in the legal profession to make public statements discrediting the policy of the Johnson administration on the Negro question.
  
• To forge and distribute through illegal channels a document showing that the John Birch Society, in conjunction with the Minuteman organization, is developing a plan for the physical elimination of leading figures in the Negro movement in the US. 84

Service A sought to exploit the violent images of the long, hot summers which began in August 1965 which race riots in Watts, the black Los Angeles ghetto, which resulted in thirty-six deaths, left 1,0332 injured and caused damage estimated at over 40 million dollars. The Centre seems to have hoped that as violence intensified King would be swept aside by black radicals such as Stokeley Carmichael, who told a meeting of Third World revolutionaries in Cuba in the summer of 1967, “We have a common enemy. Our struggle is to overthrow this system . . . We are moving into open guerilla warfare in the United States.” Traveling on to North Vietnam, Carmichael declared in Hanoi, “We are not reformists…We are revolutionaries. We want to change the American system.”85

King’s assassination on April 4, 1968 was quickly followed by the violence and rioting which the KGB had earlier blamed King for trying to prevent. Within a week riots erupted in over a hundred cities, forty-six people had been killed, 3,500 injured and 20,000 arrested. To “Deke” DeLoach, it seemed that, “The nation was teetering on the brink of anarchy.”86 Henceforth, instead of dismissing King as an Uncle Tom, Service A portrayed him as a martyr of the black liberation movement and spread conspiracy theories alleging that his murder had been planned by white racists with the connivance of the authorities. 87

University of Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew, who coauthored The Sword and the Shield with Vasili Mitrokhin was interviewed by Charlie Rose on PBS on September 28, 1999 about the book and towards the end of the interview discussed how the Soviets celebrated when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray. Other Soviet archives documented efforts by the Soviet Union to stimulate and activate the Black Panthers in their struggle against the United States government.

Vasili Mitrokhin died of pneumonia January 23, 2004 according to the British government.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo & Anatoli Marchenko: Symbols of resistance

"I am convinced that publicity is the sole effective means of combating the evil and lawlessness which is rampant in my country today." - Anatoli Marchenko














Orlando Zapata Tamayo & Anatoli Marchenko

On the eve of the 8 month anniversary of the death of prisoner of conscience and human rights activist Orlando Zapata Tamayo on February 23, 2010 the impact of his life and death are still reverberating around the world.

When Guillermo Fariñas Hernández learned that the European Parliament had awarded him the Sakharov Prize On October 21, 2010 he announced: “This prize I dedicate in particular to Orlando Zapata Tamayo and Pedro Luis Boitel. These two martyrs died from hunger strikes in protest against the dictatorship of Fidel Castro. I dedicate this prize to all the Cubans who have died for freedom and democracy in Cuba.”



Communism is an international phenomenon that demonstrates common patterns of repression regardless of geography and ethnicity. The tactics used to break down the person are the same whether in the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China or the Republic of Cuba under the Castro brothers.

On October 23, 2010 Orlando Zapata's family and friends gathered at his tomb

The patterns of resistance to communist repression share common patterns around the world. Before there was an Orlando Zapata Tamayo there was an Anatoli Marchenko. The parallels between the two are uncanny both were uncompromising human rights defenders who came from working class background. In the Introduction to his book My Testimony written about his time in prison in the 1960s Anatoli described how he survived the brutal conditions:

"When I was locked up in Vladimir Prison I was often seized by despair. Hunger, illness, and above all helplessness, the sheer impossibility of struggling against evil, provoked me to the point where I was ready to hurl myself upon my jailers with the sole purpose of being killed. .. One thing alone prevented me, one thing alone gave me the strength to live through that nightmare; the hope that I would eventually come out and tell the whole world what I had seen and experienced. .. And I gave my word on this to my comrades who were doomed to spend many more years behind bars and barbed wire."

Nevertheless, the commitment to the defense of human rights and not abandoning his homeland when told to by representatives of the Soviet regime would prove fatal. Soviet dissident Anatoli Marchenko was a worker-turned-human rights activist of Ukrainian origin. As a result of his human rights activism he spent 20 years in prisons and labor camps, whose cruel conditions he later described in his books.

One way in which he highlighted human rights problems in the then Soviet Union was through hunger strikes. The last one began on August 4, 1986 when he refused food demanding an end to the torture of political prisoners in the USSR and that they all be released. There was little reaction to his hunger strike from the world press. He died on December 8, 1986 at the age of 48 after being hospitalized the day before. Months later in 1987 Gorbachev announced the liberation of all political prisoners. One year later in 1988 Anatoli Marchenko was awarded the Sakharov Prize along with Nelson Mandela and to date the only one to win the award posthumously. Three years later in 1991 the Soviet Union was dissolved.



The dictatorship in Cuba knows this history and fears the legacy of Orlando Zapata Tamayo. They are trying to pressure his family into leaving Cuba making their lives unbearable.

The news media that ignored the suffering and torture that Orlando Zapata Tamayo was subjected to and who ignored his hunger strike but reported on his death now recognize its importance. CNN on October 10, 2010 reported the fact that: “International pressure grew when one jailed dissident, Orlando Zapata Tamayo, died earlier this year following a prolonged hunger strike protesting inmate living conditions. The Cuban government responded by promising to free the group by November in the largest release of political prisoners in more than a decade.”

Orlando Zapata Tamayo’s name appears as a symbol of resistance to the systematic denial of human rights in Cuba and the need for all political prisoners to be freed and the laws changed. His sacrifice was not in vain, and the 2010 Sakharov Prize although awarded to Guillermo Fariñas Hernández would not have been awarded to a Cuban if not for the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo on February 23, 2010. Like Anatoli Marchenko before him, Orlando Zapata Tamayo with his record as a human rights defender and his death on hunger strike denouncing torture and demanding freedom for all political prisoners has shaken the dictatorship and forced it to release the largest number of political prisoners since Pope John Paul II’s 1998 visit.

Now the question remains will the patterns of resistance and regime reactions continue to unfold in a similar pattern? If it does then it means that the dictatorship’s days may be numbered.

Regardless, Orlando Zapata Tamayo is in the thoughts and prayers of many Cubans remembering that 8 months ago today he died to demonstrate the brutal nature of the dictatorship so that others might live.