75411 - The Pact and the Agreement

Ν. Λυγερός

After the German-Soviet Treaty of Rapallo in 1922, the Treaty of Berlin was signed in 1926. But all this was nothing in comparison with the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939. Because it had two levels. And one of them was the Secret Protocol which was made public only during the Nuremberg Trials from 1945 to 1946. This Secret Protocol defined the borders of Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence across Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. This explained the fact that just after the invasion of Poland by the Nazis, the Soviets annexed first, parts of the Karelia and Salla regions in Finland but also Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as well as parts of Romania. Parts of those annexations even now belong to Russia which was considered as the successor state of the Russian SSR after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. But the Pact was also followed by the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement in 1940. Business was still business even at that time. And it wasn’t a problem for the ideology of the party. For it, the Soviet Union had every right to justify and promote its existence.