Article · Conspiracies
The secret Molotov-Ribbentrop protocols: what the USSR itself admitted in 1989
Yes. On 24 December 1989 the USSR Congress of People's Deputies resolved that a secret additional protocol dividing Eastern Europe into spheres of influence had been signed together with the non-aggression treaty of 23 August 1939, and declared it legally unjustified and invalid from the moment of signing. In 1946 at Nuremberg the Soviet chief prosecutor had called the text being offered to the court a forged document. The Congress itself relied on copies: in its own words, the original had not been found.
This piece is about one claim: that on 23 August 1939 in Moscow the USSR and Germany, alongside the published non-aggression treaty, signed a secret protocol that divided Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Bessarabia in advance into German and Soviet spheres of influence. For decades the Soviet side rejected the claim. In December 1989 it was confirmed by the Soviet Union's own highest representative body.