Word: ribbentrop
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...early hours of Aug. 24, 1939, Stalin was in a good mood. He told me that Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, had come the previous day with a draft treaty on friendship and nonaggression for us to sign. Stalin was elated. "Hitler wants to trick us," he said, "but I think we've got the better...
...people who were philosophically opposed to Hitler -- suddenly joining forces with him in this war. Stalin thought he was buying time. The % treaty wouldn't save us from a German attack -- it would only give us a chance to catch our breath. The day he signed the pact with Ribbentrop, Stalin said, "Well, for the time being at least, we've deceived Hitler" -- showing he understood the inevitability...
...with an ounce of political sense should buy the idea that we were caught flat-footed by a treacherous surprise assault. Yet to this day some of Stalin's lackeys are trying to whitewash his failure to prepare us adequately by saying Hitler fooled us by breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact...
Nationalist fervor is most intense in the Western Ukraine, in territories largely annexed -- along with the Baltic states -- by the Soviet Union under the terms of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In republican elections last March, supporters of the Rukh movement, an umbrella organization for a host of proindependence groups, won a landslide victory in the western section. The radicals did not win a majority of seats in the republic's parliament, but their bloc of more than 100 is sizable enough to prevent the government in Kiev from getting a quorum on key votes...
...Estonians contend that, technically speaking, they are not seceding. They are simply restoring the sovereignty that Moscow guaranteed them "unconditionally and for all time" in 1920 -- then violated under the terms of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which led to Stalin's annexation of the Baltics. Estonian legislators want the issue of independence placed on the agenda for a Helsinki conference that Gorbachev has proposed to lay the foundation for his much touted "common European home." Legalists in Tallinn cite the Austrian State Treaty of 1955, which guaranteed the country's neutrality in exchange for the withdrawal of Soviet troops...