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| Maxim Litvinov |
 |
| Aleksey Merekalov |
 |
| Vasily Grossman |
Russian ambassador to Israel 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 Russian ambassador is 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.
This
is why on this day proclaimed by the European Parliament as a European Day of
Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes 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.”
****
Gazing into a mirror
****
Update,
September 10, 2019. Published as a
letter to the Jerusalem Post, September 11, 2019, under
