20.12.2019, Moscow.
The President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin presented to the CIS leaders archival records, wartime footages, and photos of the exhibition “1939: The Beginning of World War Two” in Saint Petersburg, RIA Novosti reports.
According to the news agency, the historical and documentary exhibition is being displayed at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library. The materials of the exhibition cover the period from September 29-30, 1938, to September 1, 1939.
The main topic of the exhibition is the so-called “policy of appeasement” that the leaders of the UK and France pursued towards Hitler before the war. It was this policy that collapsed the Versailles system of international relations and changed the balance of forces in Europe, thus dramatically reinforcing the Nazi Germany. As a result, Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939.
The documents displayed at the exhibition illustrate the configuration of forces in Europe before the beginning of World War Two as well as the equivocal and ambiguous position of the British and French officials at the French-British-Soviet negotiations in the summer of 1939. This position along with the Poland’s strong rejection of help offered by the Soviet Union predetermined the failure of the talks aimed at signing an equal military and political alliance between the USSR and these countries to create an anti-Hitler coalition.
The exhibition also displays the text of the Munich Pact that the leaders of the UK, France, Germany, and Italy signed on September 29-30, 1938, for Germany to annex Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. Poland, the next victim of Hitler’s aggression, also participated in the division of Czechoslovakia; as soon as on October 2, 1938, it occupied Cieszyn Silesia.
The exhibition also displays the note of the foreign commissar to the German ambassador stating that it was impossible for the USSR to recognize the division of Czechoslovakia and its incorporation in the Third Reich, and other documents.
An informal meeting of the CIS leaders is taking place on December 20 in Saint Petersburg as a roundtable discussion of current issues of the international agenda.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
