Institutional belief · History, diplomacy and state propaganda
Molotov–Ribbentrop secret protocol as a Western fabrication
Postwar Soviet institutions maintained an official historical narrative in which Western-published evidence for a secret additional protocol to the 1939 Soviet-German non-aggression pact was treated as falsified or unauthenticated, denying an authentic agreement that divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of interest.
1 episode
Current understanding
Current understanding
The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a secret additional protocol on 23 August 1939 alongside the public non-aggression treaty. It divided areas from the Baltic to the Black Sea into German and Soviet spheres of interest. On 24 December 1989 the USSR Congress of People's Deputies formally confirmed that the protocol had been signed and existed, condemned the secret arrangements and declared them legally invalid from the moment of signature. The original Soviet protocol was later recovered from the Soviet archival record.
Consequences and human impact
Consequences and human impact
The secret protocol was concealed at the time of the pact and, after German diplomatic records were published in the West, became the subject of a long Soviet state counter-narrative. In 1948 the Soviet Information Bureau answered the U.S. publication Nazi-Soviet Relations with Falsifiers of History, attacking the released documentary record as a falsification campaign while presenting the 1939 pact and subsequent Soviet moves as defensive. Under glasnost the line began to break: in August 1988 APN chairman Valentin Falin publicly said there was no basis to call the secret protocols fake. In December 1989 the Congress of People's Deputies formally acknowledged their existence and condemned their signing.
How the consequences followed
The 1948 Soviet Information Bureau pamphlet Falsifiers of History attacked the Western documentary publication as falsification but did not explicitly discuss the secret additional protocol by name. It therefore should not be quoted as an explicit verbatim denial of the protocol's existence.
The official Soviet position was already changing before the December 1989 resolution. On 16 August 1988 APN chairman Valentin Falin said there were no grounds to regard the secret protocols as fake.
The 1989 Congress relied on copies, maps, related documents and subsequent events because the Soviet original had not yet been found. The original was recovered later and is now cataloged in the Russian archival record.
from the 1948 Soviet state counter-publication to formal Soviet acknowledgment of the secret protocol in 1989
date the secret additional protocol was signed alongside the public non-aggression treaty
date the USSR Congress of People's Deputies formally confirmed and condemned the secret protocol
Quantitative figures are highlighted only when the cited evidence supports them. The scale of a related catastrophe is not automatically treated as a death toll caused solely by this belief.
Institutional episode
Soviet Union
The Soviet response to postwar publication of German diplomatic records helped sustain an official historical account in which the secret protocol was denied or treated as Western falsification. The Congress of People's Deputies completed the reversal in December 1989 by confirming that the protocol existed, condemning its signing and declaring the secret arrangements legally invalid from their inception.
Institutions
- Soviet Information Bureau
- Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Documented consequences
- Decades of state-sponsored historical narrative excluding an authentic secret agreement from the public account of 1939 diplomacy
- Continued archival concealment of the Soviet documentary record for the protocol
- Distortion of the publicly authorized explanation for Soviet policy toward Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and Bessarabia
- A major late-Soviet historical controversy entangled with political mobilization in the Baltic republics
- Formal congressional acknowledgment in 1989 that the secret arrangements contradicted the sovereignty and independence of third states
Institutional machinery
In January 1948 the U.S. State Department published captured German diplomatic records in Nazi-Soviet Relations. The Soviet Information Bureau replied with Falsifiers of History and framed the Western release as a falsification campaign while advancing a defensive account of Soviet policy in 1939. Across the following decades Soviet public historiography denied or excluded an authentic secret protocol dividing spheres of interest. Falin's August 1988 APN press conference publicly rejected the assumption that the protocols were fake, and on 24 December 1989 the Congress of People's Deputies formally confirmed that the secret additional protocol had been signed and existed.
Sources and what they establish
- Falsifiers of History — 1948 Soviet Information Bureau editionRussian State Library
- Valentin Falin — “The situation in the Baltics does not allow us to wait in inactivity”Rossiyskaya Gazeta
- Resolution on the political and legal assessment of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Treaty of 1939Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR
- Secret additional protocol on the boundary of German and Soviet spheres of interestBoris Yeltsin Presidential Library
Current Russian state-library catalog identifies the original 23 August 1939 secret protocol and its archival repository.
- 1939 — The Beginning of the Second World War archival exhibitionState Archive of the Russian Federation
Last reviewed: 25/08/2026