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On the eve of World War II, the Western democracies took considerable comfort in what they were confident was the implacable opposition of Soviet communism to German Nazism. Joseph Stalin was the polar opposite of Adolf Hitler, and as long as Hitler had reason to fear the Soviets in the east, he would never venture to begin a war with the west.

This optimistic view of European politics relied too heavily on Stalin's idealism, which, it turned out, was a nonexistent commodity. While Nazism was indeed the ideological antithesis of communism, Stalin, the pragmatist, decided that a guarantee of nonaggression with his rival would put the Soviet Union in a powerful position with respect to the capitalist democracies while protecting the nation against German expansion. Finally, in the short run, a nonaggression pact would give the Soviet Union necessary leeway for some expansion of its own, at the expense of Poland and Finland. Stalin therefore approached Hitler with the proposal that they conclude a Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, guaranteeing that neither nation would act militarily against the other. For his part, Hitler, who had his own designs on the east, most immediately Poland, and who sought to neutralize the Franco-Soviet pacts, was eager to treat with his ideological adversary.

The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, also known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact, was concluded on August 23, 1939, at Moscow. It stunned the world, especially Western politicians and the Western intelligentsia, many of whom were apologists for Stalin, excusing his many "excesses"--purges and the lethal programs of agricultural collectivization--on ideological grounds.

The treaty with Germany was one of several nonaggression pacts the Soviet Union had signed with other powers, but this one went beyond merely declaring nonaggression. It was linked to a trade agreement that had been concluded a few days earlier, on August 19, by which Germany exported manufactured goods to the USSR in return for raw materials essential to its war production. Unknown to the outside world, the nonaggression pact included a secret protocol providing for the German-Soviet partition of Poland. The secret protocol also cleared the way for the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. . .

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