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Most People Picture History Wrong, These Facts Will Set them Straight

Khalid Elhassan April 25, 2020 34 min

Franklin D. Roosevelt - Joseph Stalin — The Big Three of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, at the Tehran Conference in 1943. Rare Historical Photos

14. Did the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Really Harm the Soviet Union?

Molotov, far right, and Ribbentrop, far left, with Stalin in the center. Radio Free Europe

It is taken for granted by many that the then-surprising 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Treaty, AKA the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed a week before Germany invaded Poland, was calamitous for the USSR. Stalin turned out to be disastrously wrong in trusting Hitler to honor the agreement, and in stubbornly ignoring warnings of impending German attack in 1941.

However, the fault for the ensuing disaster lay with Stalin, not with the Pact. As seen below, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in itself actually ended up serving Soviet interests, and while the Soviets did not make the best use of it, they were still better off for having signed it.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.