Putin Pact - Ribbentrop

Estonian colleagues told the story of how on the eve of the next anniversary of the signing of the Molotov -Ribbentrop Pact, they turned for comments on the grandchildren of former ministers - Vyacheslav Nikonov and Dominik von Ribbentrop. The grandson of the Reich Minister apologized and talked about the greatest tragedy of the Second World War, and the grandson of the Stalin Falcon is about the same thing that he is now repeating on numerous television talk shows-"On expediency." So I did not have to comment on the publication, she clearly demonstrated who and how rethought the experience of the past war.

Vladimir Putin, of course - not a relative of Vyacheslav Molotov. But he is his real political heir. And not only Molotov, of course. For completely unclear reasons, we perceive the agreements of Stalin and Hitler as something exceptional, not capable of reproduction in the latest conditions. Meanwhile, the peculiarity of the Soviet - and then Russian - diplomacy consisted and was that it always looked around in search of who could be divided by the world with. And I did not see anything special in this, since I lived in the experience of past centuries.

The paradox of Bolshevism is that, declaring rapid and daily development, this political teaching actually stopped history. This is a real dead water from Russian fairy tales. It is no accident that after the collapse of the CPSU in the former Soviet republics, political processes went as if there were simply no decades of the communist dictatorship. With politics in the Soviet years, something similar happened. When Vladimir Putin talks about Stalin's attempts to make a “anti -fascist coalition”, he does not rewrite history at all, these attempts are described in any history textbook of Soviet times. But in fact, Stalin tried not so much to put together a coalition against Hitler as to divide Europe with Western countries. But they could not - and did not want to understand what Stalin wants from them. But Hitler immediately understood everything. I understood and betrayed. It is no accident that the attack of Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union was always called not just an attack, but a treacherous attack. Verolomia is a break, undermining faith ...

For those who lead Russia today, the collapse of the Warsaw Treaty and the Socialist Camp is not a historical process, but a conspiracy

But at the end of the war, in Yalta, Stalin was not engaged in the section of the world with the allies - only this time no longer as a petitioner, but the winner? Are the agreements between the Soviet Union and the Western countries of the Cold War did not come down to the establishment of the borders of the spheres of influence, to the division on the living in Germany, Korea, Vietnam, Berlin? The Soviet Union reacted harshly to the popular uprisings and attempts of reforms in Central Europe, precisely because its leaders did not see any peoples and their desires at point blank range, but saw in the Revolution in Hungary in 1956 or in the “Prague Spring” the “state of the State Department” trying to invade the sphere of influence of the world's first in the world of the victorious socialism. And for those who lead Russia today, the collapse of the Warsaw Treaty and the Socialist Camp is not a historical process, but a conspiracy. I’m not even talking about the Ukrainian Maidan-judging by the issues of Russian journalists at a press conference of the heads of foreign policy departments of the Russian Federation and the USA in Sochi, John Kerry personally organized. And Victoria Nuland handed out cookies, yeah.

The belief that there is no people, no story, no desire for freedom, but there are only slaves and the State Department - that which turns Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Putin into one person. A person who is always looking around in search of the one with whom one could share the world. And when Putin explains the meaning of the Molotov -Ribbentrop Covenant, he does not engage in an revision of history, but a change in the values of our time. He, as it were, offers his Western partners not to fool, do not arrange conspiracies, not to give out cookies - but simply sit down and draw on the map the dividing lines. This is me, this is to you, this is a barrack. After all, if Molotov and Ribbentrop were able, can we not?

Vitaly Portnikov - Kiev journalist, author and host of the Radio Liberty program "Road to Freedom"

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