Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, published a lengthy article Monday characterizing the Nazi-Soviet pact to divide Poland at the outset of World War II in 1939 as immoral, but he stressed that it was just one of a series of such deals that countries struck with the Nazis at that time.
Mr. Putin called the nonaggression pact, which included secret amendments defining spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, “analogous” to the agreement by Britain and France a year earlier at Munich to accede to the German invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The prime minister released his historical interpretation just before a scheduled visit to Poland on Tuesday for a commemoration of the start of World War II, 70 years ago this week.
The pact — which was followed by German and Soviet invasions of Poland — remains a source of anger there, and the article heightened expectations of what Mr. Putin would say during his visit.
Ria Novosti, an official Russian news agency, reported that Mr. Putin would use the trip to counter what the Russians call efforts by Eastern Europeans to recast the causes and lessons of World War II. Russia looks upon the war as a searing event in its history, one in which, by some estimates, 25 million Soviet citizens died.
Mr. Putin is also expected to discuss a current source of tensions — the possibility that the United States will deploy interceptor missiles in Poland — with Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk.
In his article, Mr. Putin wrote that he was compelled to discuss the pact, named Molotov-Ribbentrop for the Soviet and Nazi foreign ministers who negotiated the accord, because it was being cited today by countries who have traced their postwar Soviet occupation to this agreement.
“It is indicative that history is often slanted by those who actually apply double standards in modern politics,” he wrote.
The article, published in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza and posted in Russian on the Russian government Web site, did not backtrack on earlier Russian condemnations of the pact or apologies for the subsequent massacre of Polish officers at Katyn Forest.
But it did highlight a theme that has played on Russian state television in recent weeks: that even Poland was complicit in making deals with the Nazis. The article notes that the Polish Army occupied two provinces of Czechoslovakia at the same time the German Army invaded that country following the Munich agreement with France and Britain in 1938.
Mr. Putin argues that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was inevitable after the Western Allies had acceded to the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
He called that an effort by the West to “ ‘buy off’ Hitler and redirect his aggression to the east.”
Stalin’s government, Mr. Putin wrote, was impelled to sign the agreement because it was facing aggression in the east from Japan and did not want war on two fronts.
Mr. Putin did not mention that the Nazi-Soviet pact also restored a portion of the Russian empire lost after World War I and coveted by Stalin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/world/europe/01russia.html?_r=2&ref=world
