The month of August seems to have been truly fate-shaping in Moldova’s contemporary history, with crucial events starting from the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact to the 1991 Declaration of Independence. This was discussed during the latest installment of IPN’s Impact of History Series on Monday.

Igor Boțan, the series’ standing pundit, said the Pact was the product of Germany and Soviet Union demarcating what they believed were their respective spheres of influence. “Germany was seeking to expand its vital space, and the Soviet Union was pursuing what the The Internationale proclaimed: to establish a worldwide Soviet Union”, explains the expert.

According to him, the independence of a country or a government represents its ability to exercise its political sovereignty, in contrast to the situation where its authority is limited by suzerain or imperial power. “Independence is basically political in nature, and here it’s worth noting that within the Soviet Union, Socialist Moldavia was formally a sovereign republic in a hypercentralized state, but in fact it had neither sovereignty nor independence”, added Igor Boțan.

Ion Valer Xenofontov, doctor of history, said that the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and its secret protocol stemmed from frustrations caused after the First World War. Germany came out of the war with conditions that it considered humiliating. And then there was the Bolshevik state, which was frustrated by the West’s reluctance to recognize it.

Also known as the Stalin-Hitler Pact, the non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and Soviet Union had a secret protocol to divide Europe from the Baltic Sea down to the Black Sea. “What’s interesting is that the Soviet Union strongly denied that it ever existed (…) The essence of this secret protocol was the redivision of the world, the geopolitical reconfiguration of Europe, the change of the security system established after the First World War and, whether willingly or not, this opened a Pandora’s box, triggering the Second World War”, said the historian.

Anneli Ute Gabanyi, German political scientist, said that what bewildered the peoples of the Soviet Union and Germany the most was that the this pact had been signed between the bitterest ideological archnemeses. Hitler always referred to Bolshevism as being the most horrible enemy of Germany, in the Soviet Union the same was told about Nazism.

This was the 41st installment of the Impact of History Series, run by IPN with the support of the Hanns Seidel Foundation.