The 23 August
is the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, signed by the Soviet Union
and Nazi Germany in 1939. This formed the basis of the de facto Nazi-Soviet
alliance on the basis of which the two totalitarian powers divided Central and
Eastern Europe into their respective spheres of occupation. Hence the decision
to commemorate the victims of totalitarianism on this day. This year, the
commemoration was organised by the Hungarian government and the solemn ceremony
was held in the Parliament building, in Budapest.
This is a slightly edited text of my contribution:
“Molotov-Ribbentrop” is not just a shorthand
expression, a term adopted to mark the accord between the two totalitarianisms
of the 20th century. The consequences of the pact had far-reaching consequences.
In the countries that they occupied, both the Nazi and the Soviet occupation
aimed deliberately to destroy civil society, social cohesion and continuity in
order to ensure that the occupied did as they were told.
The Nazi occupation of the region from the Gulf of
Finland to the southern Balkans had an important and frequently unrecognised
consequence. Having destroyed local political forces, the Nazis thereby made it
much easier for the communists to seize power after the war. The communists
were acting in already traumatised societies. In this sense, the Soviet Union
was the beneficiary of Nazi destruction.
The most extreme illustration of this proposition was
the behaviour of the Red Army during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. Soviet forces
had reached the Vistula and watched idly while the German military
systematically destroyed Warsaw (across the river) and emptied the city of its
inhabitants. And there is an interesting counter-example. Nazi German forces
never occupied Finland, in consequence of which Finnish structures remained
intact and the continuity of the state was secured, hence the attempt at a
communist putsch in 1948 failed.
In essence, Nazism and communism had a shared interest
in the destruction of the societies that they had overrun and ended up by assisting
each other in this enterprise. It is in this sense that Stalin owed Hitler a
certain debt of gratitude, he had made the communists’ task a good deal easier
than it would have been had state structures survived the war.
