Gazing into a mirror

Regarding “On the 80th Anniversary of the outbreak of World War II,” August 30, Russian Ambassador Anatoly Viktorov writes: “On September 17, 1939, the Red Army entered Polish territory and was instructed not to use weapons against the Polish Army until any military actions took place.”

Translated, this means that on September 17, 1939, following the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the USSR invaded Poland from the east.

While it is true that the West procrastinated and ultimately bungled its response to Litvinov’s April 17,1939 triple alliance proposal, Soviet ambassador to Germany Merekalov had initiated the contact with Ribbentrop’s under secretary Waizsacker the very next day, so Stalin had been duplicitous from the start.

What the Russians are trying to whitewash is the nature of the agreement between the two totalitarian regimes, in grabbing territories by joint aggression, explained in the joint declaration by Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania:

“August 23 will mark 80 years since the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that sparked World War II and doomed half of Europe to decades of misery.

“The Pact contained the secret protocol which effectively carved up Eastern Europe into spheres of influence …we remember all those whose deaths and broken lives were a consequence of the crimes perpetrated under the ideology of Nazism and Stalinism. “

The similarity in the ideologies of Stalinism and Nazism is best depicted in Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece Life and Fate in the conversation between Obersturmbannfuhrer Liss and Mostovskoy: “When we look one another in the face, we’re neither of us just looking at a face we hate – no, we’re gazing into a mirror…. ‘The German Communists we’ve sent to camps are the same ones you sent to camps in 1937. Yezhov imprisoned them: Reichsfuhrer Himmler imprisoned them…” MLADEN ANDRIJASEVIC

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