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The U.S. State Department Analyzes the Soviet Note on Berlin (January 7, 1959)

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On October 31, 1939, Molotov summarized Soviet views on the international situation in unusually frank terms. He said:

However, one swift blow to Poland, first by the German and then by the Red Army, and nothing was left of this ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty which had existed by oppressing non-Polish nationalities.
In the past few months such concepts as “aggressor” and “aggression” have acquired a new concrete connotation, a new meaning. It is not hard to understand that we can no longer employ these conceptions in the sense we did, say, 3 or 4 months ago.
Today, as far as the European Great Powers are concerned, Germany is in the position of a state that is striving for the earliest termination of the war and for peace, while Britain and France, which but yesterday were declaiming against aggression, are in favor of continuing the war and are opposed to the conclusion of peace. The roles, as you see, are changing.
Efforts of the British and French Governments to justify their new position on the grounds of their undertakings to Poland are, of course, obviously unsound. Everybody realized that there can be no question of restoring the old Poland. [ . . . ] The real cause of the Anglo-French war with Germany was not that the British and French had vowed to restore old Poland, and not, of course, that they decided to undertake a fight for democracy. The ruling circles of Britain and France have, of course, other and more actual motives for going to war with Germany.
These motives do not lie in any ideology but in their profoundly material interests as mighty colonial powers.
It is fear of losing world supremacy that dictates to the ruling circles of Great Britain and France the policy of fomenting war with Germany. Thus the imperialist character of this war is obvious to any one who wants to face realities and does not close his eyes to facts. [ . . . ]
But there is absolutely no justification for a war of this kind. One may accept or reject the ideology of Hitlerism as well as any other ideological system; that is a matter of political views.
Relations between Germany and the other West European bourgeois states have in the past two decades been determined primarily by Germany's efforts to break the fetters of the Versailles Treaty, whose authors were Great Britain and France, with the active participation of the United States. This, in the long run, led to the present war in Europe.

On September 28, 1939, the German Reich had concluded a series of treaties with the U.S.S.R. which contained secret protocols formalizing the partition of Poland and recognizing Lithuania as being in the Soviet sphere of influence, in return for a boundary “rectification” in favor of Germany.

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