Mr. Putin regrets the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939

Mr. Putin regrets the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939

brotee mukhopadhyay

On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Invasion of Poland in 1940 in the port city of Gdansk the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir PutinVladimir Putin has taken opportunity to turn over the page of mistrust and prejudice of the past and write a fresh page. This is the first time that a statesman from Russia has acknowledged the responsibility of the most severe guilt of the communist past.

Mr. Putin has condemned the Nazi-Soviet pact signed just a week before Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland as "immoral". He has condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939 signed in Kremlin by the two foreign ministers of the respective countries. But Putin has added that ‘No-Aggression Treaty’ with Germany was signed by the then USSR as the Western European power had failed to comprehend the significance to put up a united resistance against the Nazi Germany.

This is an attempt of Russia to develop friendship with Poland. Mr. Putin has also regretted for the 1940 Poland massacre in the Polish paper Gazeta Wyborcza. But dividing Poland and the Baltic state between Germany and the USSR is a part of history.

It is also a part of the history that 21,000 of intellectuals and defence personnel were slaughtered in the Katyn forests near the city of Smolensk by the secret police of the Soviet Union who were ordered that way by none other than Stalin. In 1990, after the winding up of the communist party by the then President of the USSR Mr. Gorbachev, Russia accepted for the first time that they had a role on the massacre.