Nazi-Soviet collaboration

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.