Tuesday marked an uncomfortable anniversary for Russian President Vladimir Putin. On that day in 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union entered into a partnership that paved the way for war just one week later. Defending Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s decision to formally collaborate with Adolf Hitler to secretly carve up and suppress Central and Eastern Europe is becoming more and more difficult for a man not only bent on whitewashing and reinterpreting history but also in light of the war he launched to “denazify” Ukraine.
Besides a formal treaty of nonaggression, the Nazi-Soviet Pact inked in Moscow was also an act of revisionist revenge against the West. From August 1939 until June 1941, the two allies systematically dismantled the post-1918 system forged by the British-French-American triumvirate at Versailles, replacing it with a totalitarian system rooted ideologically in either fascism or communism that inspired fear, repression and extermination.
After World War I, a rules-based order reflecting democratic values was envisioned as the key pillar to enforce peace in Europe. Nations that emerged or reemerged in Central Europe — Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland — would be members of a broader trans-Atlantic community, their security underpinned by U.S. strength. This vision was immediately cut short when the U.S. withdrew from Europe, abandoning international leadership for isolationism. Europe’s oldest democracies, Great Britain and France, both reeling from the effects of war, were unable to bear the burden of successfully stabilizing the continent. Lacking strong democratic sponsors caused some to look toward growing radical movements as political models. The civil war in Spain foreshadowed how Europe’s future might be a contest between fascism and communism.
