It is hard to believe but in the beginning of the XXI century the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact has come to the forefront of the political agenda. It is no longer only the historians but journalists and statesmen in Russia, Baltic and Western states who allude to the Pact. Russia’s president Putin is at loggerheads with the Estonian journalists, Estonian MPs appeal to the EU, while the Russian propaganda machine exposes anti-Russian machinations of the Balts and other adversaries of Moscow.

Shouldn’t the issue be settled by now? The Pact has been officially denounced by Moscow. All the sensitive files have been published. The Baltic states have got independence. And the Soviet Union doesn’t exist any longer. But the issue is being discussed zealously as if there is nothing more acute.

The thing is that when the historians dispute about the past, they evidently want to get to the core of the event. As for the politicians, they are too biased by interest. And their interest so far has influenced our perception of history.

Unfortunately only history of some, not even all, extinct civilizations and peoples goes undistorted by the “political lens”. It is of occurrence that politics intentionally inserted into the past is passed off as history, which is done to resolve present problems. Politicians refer to injustice of the predecessors in excuse of their own failures and excessive ambitions; they also want us to believe that former might compensates for present impotence. Russian and Baltic politicians are good at it. Alas, not only East Europe or countries with imperial or authoritarian past have experienced what politization of history is.

That is way the issue is still fiercely debated though it should have been dropped long ago. But neither the facts nor the archives that have been made public are taken into consideration.

However the historical data that has been published during the 1990s both in former USSR and the West changes our perception of the past. Basing on the documents dating back to 1930–50s, the Western specialists have found that the West had more and the Soviet Union less murky secrets than it was generally thought before.

The democratic West managed to keep its skeletons in the cupboard better than the Soviet Union did. It was not that the Soviets were so artless. On the contrary, despite the intention of the authorities there were repeated information leakages and people who got used to being misinformed had nothing else to do but to guess and make a mountain out of a molehill.

So when certain information was declassified, we learned nothing fresh new. From rumors and scarce official news and later on from revelatory journalism during Perestroika we already knew about the repressions under Stalin, horrors of the collectivization, shootings of workers in Novocherkassk. Now that data has been declassified and the real scale of atrocities has been revealed, historians have found that most often the data had been exaggerated. To a large extent this was due to the regime that kept in secrecy any information that could undermine its reputation. This generated a new conscience among people – rumors and speculations seemed more credible than official documents. And as collective historical memory is formed not by facts but by the way thesе facts are perceived by the people, now the Estonian MPs demand that Moscow officially condemns the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which actually had already been done! The trick is that as soon as one tries to write the story straight, he involuntary behaves as Stalin’s advocate - a thankless job! But to be historically objective one has to separate oneself from ideological sympathies and take impartial look on history.

Democratic societies are used to higher level of transparency and people rely on official information to a larger extent, which makes manipulating social conscience more effective. That is why our intellectuals are more inclined to believe that the USSR is to blame for the Cold War, while the Western public takes little interest in the subject. It’s all the same with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – it is largely discussed, while the Munich Agreement is neglected. And nobody has taken a trouble to unveil the interconnectedness of the two Pacts.

We can only take comfort in the hope that the present Russian authorities will keep on inventing its own historical myths and the bureaucrats will end up closing the archives, so that we might soon find ourselves in habitual and comfortable situation of myths and anti-myths where the issue of objectiveness of a historical research becomes a priori impossible.

Boris Kagarlitsky is Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements.

June 1, 2007

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