> Putin also signaled that Moscow would not revise
> its view that the Soviet Union was solely a victim
> of World War II -- refusing to accept arguments
> that it, too, held some responsibility for the conflict,
> due to the signing of a secret Soviet-Nazi pact that
> divided up Eastern Europe.
This is just sick. There are lots of criticisms you can make about the way the Pact was carried out, but the reality is that the Soviet Union favored a policy of "collective security" through the bulk of the 1930s, trying to ally with Britain, France, USA, et. al. against the fascists. Witness Soviet attempts to thwart fascism in Ethiopia and especially Spain, as well as opposition to Nazi designs on Czechoslovakia. After the French and British had acquiesced in (and in some cases viewed with equanimity) the re-militarization of the Rhineland; the Austrian Anschluss; the conquest of Ethiopia; the assassination of the Spanish Republic; the absorption of the Sudetenland and then the whole of Czechoslovakia -- the Soviets had plenty of reason to believe that it was the intention of Chamberlain, et. al., for the USSR to face off against Nazi Germany alone.
This was nothing short of criminal on the part of the western powers, since Britain was a far stronger military power than the Soviet Union, and it was unreasonable to expect the Soviet people to face Hitler alone. In this situation, Stalin wisely chose -- though I don't suspect it really involved much wisdom on his part, since any statesman in the same situation would have done the same -- not to commit national suicide, and to at least live to fight another day, which of course the USSR did.
There are plenty of points to be made about the way the USSR divvied up Poland with the fascists, about the behavior of Communist parties in OTHER countries in response to the Pact, and most importantly about how competently preparations were made for what everyone should have seen was inevitable. But all of this, I think, is quite beside the point that it is insufferable for sanctimonious writers in the USA, Britain, France, et. al., to demand "rethinking" from Russia on the subject of war guilt, when in fact the burden of "appeasement" (a weasel word -- it was really more like collusion, see Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel, "In Our Time," published by Monthly Review Press, http://www.monthlyreview.org/leibovit.htm ) rests squarely on the shoulders of their own countries.
- - - - - - - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com
Tell no lies, claim no easy victories