The Pact That Explains Everything

My grandmother was born in Chernivtsi in 1935, when it was still part of Romania. She never chose to become Soviet. That decision was made for her in a Moscow office, on a piece of paper neither she nor anyone in her town ever saw. 

That paper had a name: the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. 

On August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a treaty of non-aggression. Publicly, it was a promise not to attack each other. Privately, it carved up Eastern Europe between two dictators – Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Romania fell into the Soviet “sphere of influence.” A week later, Germany invaded Poland. Seventeen days after that, so did the Soviet Union. 

This is why August 23 is Black Ribbon Day – a day of remembrance for the victims of both Nazism and Stalinism, chosen precisely because that date marks the moment both regimes agreed, on paper, to treat millions of people as territory to be divided. 

This pact deserves far more attention than it receives, because its logic remains dangerously active today. 

Most people who have heard of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact think of it as a footnote – the awkward prelude to a war the Nazis and Soviets would eventually fight against each other. That framing lets the Soviet half of the story disappear. But the pact was not a strange one-off diplomatic accident. It was the founding document of a method Moscow would use for the next fifty years. 

Within months of signing, the Soviet Union invaded Finland, calling it a war of liberation. It forced the Baltic states into “mutual assistance pacts,” then annexed them outright the following year, staging elections with a single approved candidate list. It handed Romania an ultimatum over Bessarabia – evacuate in four days or face invasion – and then declared the occupation a liberation from “twenty-two years under Romanian landlords.” 

None of these countries asked to be liberated. All of them had their fate decided in advance, in a pact most of their citizens never knew existed until Soviet tanks arrived to enforce it. 

The pact also explains something people often miss: Soviet aggression in 1939-40 was not a defensive reaction to Nazi Germany. It was a coordinated land grab, agreed to in writing, with a regime the USSR would be at war with less than two years later. Stalin was not hedging against Hitler. He was doing business with him. 

For decades, Soviet historiography denied the pact’s secret protocols even existed. Moscow only officially acknowledged them in 1989, fifty years after the fact, and only because the Baltic states’ independence movements had made the denial impossible to sustain any longer. 

This admission did not come from Moscow’s own initiative. On August 23, 1989, fifty years to the day after the pact was signed, an estimated two million people in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined hands to form a continuous human chain stretching roughly 675 kilometers across all three capitals. The Baltic Way, as it became known, was a deliberately peaceful demonstration with one blunt message: we know what that pact did to us, and we want the world to know we know. Four months later, the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies finally admitted the secret protocols were real.  

I bring this up not as ancient history but because the method did not retire with the Soviet Union. A pretext gets manufactured. Force gets applied. The result gets called consent, or liberation, or protection. And when historians eventually produce the paperwork proving otherwise, the response is simply to wait, deny, and hope the world moves on to the next headline. 

It usually does. 

This pattern did not end in 1991. In 2014, Russia held a referendum in Crimea under military occupation and called the result a democratic choice. In 2022, it staged similar votes in occupied Ukrainian territories before formally annexing them – using language almost identical to what Moscow used in the Baltic states eighty years earlier: liberation, self-determination, protection of a threatened population. The paperwork changes. The instinct to manufacture consent after the fact does not. 

Black Ribbon Day exists so that it does not. My grandmother did not get a vote on the pact that decided her nationality. The least the rest of us can do is remember that the paper existed at all.