Talk:Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact negotiations/Archive 1

Origination
This article was started after the negotiations and background sections of the Molotov-Ribbentrop article approached 1/3 of that article's length, and were rapidly growing.

The negotiations involved numerous key details -- they involved lengthy Foreign Ministry-sized efforts of the Soviet Union, Britain, France and Germany -- many of which had to be truncated or deleted in the Molotov-Ribbentrop article, which had already ballooned in size.

Because hundreds of books and journal articles cover a topic of this breadth, its size was expanding greatly in the Molotov-Ribbentrop article.Mosedschurte (talk) 06:52, 7 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Good idea. I was thinking about doing the same.--Paul Siebert (talk) 14:42, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

No negotiations before late July
All alleged statements and opinions of Soviet officials before late July can be presented in the article as a proof of early Soviet decision to negotiate with Germany. There is no consensus among scholars on that account. See, for instance, (Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 50, No. 8 (Dec., 1998), pp. 1471-1475). Therefore in actuality these "facts" are the historians' interpretations of the events. They belong to "Commentaries".--Paul Siebert (talk) 13:06, 23 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, descriptions of both accounts -- the German and Soviet accounts -- from Roberts, are in the piece.


 * Please don't delete properly sourced articles in Wikipedia articles again.Mosedschurte (talk) 13:19, 23 February 2009 (UTC)


 * The Avalon project's counterpart is (God krizisa: 1938-1939 : dokumenty i materialy v dvukh tomakh.By A. P. Bondarenko, Soviet Union Ministerstvo inostrannykh del. Contributor A. P. Bondarenko. Published by Izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1990. Item notes: t. 2. Item notes: v.2. Original from the University of Michigan. Digitized Nov 10, 2006. ISBN 525001092X, 9785250010924). I removed all conclusions statemens made based on the Avalon documents only from the Talks section. They definitely should be re-inserted into the article, but into the "Commentaries" section.--Paul Siebert (talk) 13:21, 23 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Have a look before another Wikipedia policy violating delete.


 * Both a source describing the German account and a source describing the Soviet account are in the article. No "commentary" is contained in the article.  Just what the conflicting original accounts said.


 * And please don't engage in WP:Edit War over the deletions/Mosedschurte (talk) 13:23, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
 * The Avalon project's counterpart is (God krizisa: 1938-1939 : dokumenty i materialy v dvukh tomakh.By A. P. Bondarenko, Soviet Union Ministerstvo inostrannykh del. Contributor A. P. Bondarenko. Published by Izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1990. Item notes: t. 2. Item notes: v.2. Original from the University of Michigan. Digitized Nov 10, 2006. ISBN 525001092X, 9785250010924). I removed all conclusions and statements made based on the Avalon documents only from the Talks section. They definitely should be re-inserted into the article, but into the "Commentaries" section.--Paul Siebert (talk) 13:21, 23 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Explanations for the deletions I made are provided in the source (Roberts' article). Nekrich is a reputable historian, and his opinion must be presented in the article, but in another section. Feel free to propose your version of the "Commentaries".--Paul Siebert (talk) 13:25, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
 * With regards to WP policy, please, familiarize yourself with WP:OWN.--Paul Siebert (talk) 13:25, 23 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Please pay attention to the actual content and not engaging in WP:Edit War. Last warning (this delete would also be 3RR).  The Roberts article's description of the Soviet account is IN THE TEXT ARTICLE NOW.  Please stop deleting this properly sourced text, or we WILL be going to ANI, both over 3RR and your prior massive violations.  If you'd like to include historian commentaries, do it in the "Commentaries" section.Mosedschurte (talk) 13:30, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
 * You are right.--Paul Siebert (talk) 14:30, 23 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Are you going to do undo your last revert?Mosedschurte (talk) 14:47, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I placed the Draganov's words (with ref) where they belong to.--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:22, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Some suggestions
This is a good article, but it could use some improvements. To start with, there are errors. The article says Britain "guaranteed" after Germany renounced the German-Polish non-aggression treaty. That's really wrong. The British "guarantee" of Poland occurred on 31 March 1939 when Chamberlain announced the "guarantee" to the House of Commons, and Hitler renounced the non-aggression treaty with Poland in a speech before the Reichstag on 28 April 1939. More seriously, there are some omissions. The first is that Hitler's programme that he had worked out in the 1920s, namely "the destruction of Russia with the help of England" as he put it in a 1922 essay was bankrupt by 1937, when become clear that the British were not interested in an anti-Soviet alliance. By that point, Hitler was confused about how best to proceed, and to an large extent he subcontracted the work of foreign policy out to his aggressively Anglophobic foreign Joachim von Ribbentrop, who bore a real grunge over the social humiliations he suffered during his time as German ambassador to the court of St. James (the fact that Ribbentrop inflicted most of them on himself escaped him). By late 1938, German foreign policy was primarily anti-British rather anti-Soviet. Case in point. In January 1939, Hitler approved of the Z plan for a gigantic fleet that was meant to crush the Royal Navy by 1944. To build the Z plan fleet, Hitler raised the budget and steel allotments for the Kriegsmarine from the third to the first in the order of priorities, weakening army at the expense of his navy. The Z plan fleet was not meant to take on the Soviet Baltic fleet, and the decision to give the Kriegsmarine the first priority in military spending shows how serious Hitler was in his anti-British plans in 1939. When one understands that under Ribbentrop's influence that Hitler's foreign policy in 1939 was anti-British rather than anti-Soviet, then the apparent volte-face of the non-aggression pact makes more sense. Along the same lines, this article should mention the British plans for a "peace front" meant to "contain" Germany, which explains the Anglo-French-Soviet talks that are mentioned in the article, but not really put in their proper context. One of the biggest (and most annoying) aspects of the historiography of 1930s diplomacy is the picture of the French as mere lackeys of the British, which is wrong in so many ways. The French were much more enthusiastic about having the Soviet Union join the "peace front" rather the British, and this caused a significant amount of tension between Paris and London. The British Army's senior officers ranked Poland's army as superior to the Red Army by a factor of four to one. The British took the viewpoint that the Red Army would be useful, but not decisive in the deterrent diplomacy of 1939, and since Soviet diplomats were difficult to deal with, there was certainly a lack of urgency in Whitehall about getting the Soviet Union to join the "peace front". A great number of historians have argued that this drove Stalin to the pact with Hitler, but there is a better case since glasnost that Stalin real aim was to cause a war between Germany and the western powers that would benefit the Soviet Union. Just some ideas for a good article.--A.S. Brown (talk) 13:23, 14 June 2017 (UTC)