A World of Great Spaces

At a tense press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in May 2015, President Vladimir Putin was asked about his attitude to the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. ‘We could discuss this all night’, he began, before justifying the pact as an agreement that enhanced the USSR's security, and trying to diminish the significance of the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland and the Baltic States by also noting Poland's annexation of the Zaolzie region (Teschen Silesia) of Czechoslovakia in October 1938 (Putin 2015b). This was not Putin's first controversial foray into the history of the Molotov– Ribbentrop Pact – officially the ‘Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’, signed on 23 August 1939. At a meeting in 2014 with young historians, Putin asked rhetorically ‘what was so wrong?’ about the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, before going on to justify it as a breathing-space for the USSR to modernise its army ahead of the German invasion (Putin 2014d).

Russian conservatives, such as historian Andrei Dyukov and polemicist Natalya Narochnitskaya, had long questioned the dominant Western argument that the pact was both deeply immoral and the primary cause of the war (Benn 2011). But Putin's remarks reflected a hardening of Russian official interpretations of history. Popular opinion in Russia largely followed. In a poll in August 2017, 45 per cent approved the signing of the pact, with only 17 per cent opposed; some 38 per cent did not know about the pact or struggled to answer (Levada 2017).

The rehabilitation of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in Russia was not only a dispute over history, but also a tacit debate about contemporary international relations. Attempts to rehabilitate the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact as a defensible act of great power diplomacy were part of a much wider rethinking of Russia's foreign policy, in which the ideas of ‘spheres of influences’ and geopolitical blocs were once more in vogue. Influential foreign policy gurus promoted new conceptualisations of international order based on ‘re-legitimis[ing] geopolitical spheres of influence as an organising principle of international life’ (Liik 2014: 15).