Timothy Snyder's emphasis on the Hitler-Stalin pact as the genesis of war blurs the moral responsibility that was Germany's

Timothy Snyder's article stresses the significance of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact of 23 August 1939 as the primary facilitator of the second world war, and therefore attributes major responsibility for the atrocities of the war to the Soviet Union. Such a reading of the historical events which preceded the outbreak of the war appears ostensibly plausible, and would, as Snyder suggests, prompt a reassessment of the generally-accepted western narrative, which, while not blind to Soviet misdeeds during the war, exclusively blames Nazi Germany for the horrific and unprecedented loss of human life during the second world war.

The problem with this analysis, however, is that it completely isolates the signing of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact and ignores the broader context behind the outbreak of the second world war and its continuation. Thus, it is clear that there was a tremendous disparity in the motives of the two countries that signed the pact. While the Nazis did so as an integral part of their grand strategy to conquer most of Europe to obtain their goal of Lebensraum (living space) for the superior Aryan race, the Soviets were basically forced into signing the agreemant when their talks with Britain and France regarding the possibility of forming an alliance against Nazi Germany broke down, and when Poland, understandably, refused to allow Soviet trops to march through its territory. Given the disarray in which the Red Army found itself in the wake of the purges of the late 1930s, it was patently clear, moreover, that at this point, the Soviet Union would have definitely been defeated in any military confrontation with the Germans and their allies. So, Stalin had no other viable option but to sign the treaty, which at least would allow him to gain the time necessary to try to prepare the Red Army for the inevitable clash with the Wehrmacht.

Needless to say, none of these strategic considerations are of any consolation to the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians persecuted and murdered by the Soviets in the territories they occupied and annexed in eastern Europe between 17 September 1939 and 22 June 1941. The Soviet regime harshly mistreated hundreds of thousands, but ultimately, it was not responsible for the outbreak of second world war and the ensuing mass carnage and atrocities. In the words of the doyen of Holocaust historians, Professor Yehuda Bauer, of Yad Vashem, "the second world war was started by Nazi Germany, not the Soviet Union, and the responsibility for the 35 million dead in Europe, 29 million of them non-Jews, is that of Nazi Germany, not Stalin."

By focusing primarily on the signing of the treaty, Snyder downplays the murderous intentions of the Nazi regime, their ideologically-driven, fanatical determination to destroy the Jewish people, and their long-term plans for the decimation of most of the other peoples of eastern Europe. Stalin was, indeed, a ruthless, murderous dictator, but he was no Hitler, and the Soviet Union was not Nazi Germany. To posit otherwise is to deflect the full measure of well-deserved blame from the major culprit of the second world war and to provide a scholarly basis for the historically-inaccurate "double genocide" theories, so prevalent recently in the post-communist world, which dangerously distort the history of the second world war and the Holocaust.

guardian.co.uk