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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

12. How the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Benefited the Soviets

German armor plunging into the Soviet Union in 1941, at the start of Operation Barbarossa. Encyclopedia Britannica

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact bought the Soviets nearly two years in which to prepare for war. Poor as the Soviet military’s performance was in 1941, it was even less prepared for war in 1939. Moreover, the Pact, which gave the USSR nearly half of Poland, pushed the Soviet borders hundreds of miles westwards, giving the USSR that much additional buffer.

Space and distance proved decisive to Soviet survival in 1941: the Germans came within 10 miles of the Kremlin before they were turned back. Without the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Germans would have launched their invasion from a start line hundreds of miles further to the east and closer to the Soviet capital. The same effort that ran out of steam within sight of the Kremlin, would likely have pushed far beyond had it started hundreds of miles closer to Moscow.

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.