Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is a non-aggression treaty signed in Moscow on 23-24 August 1939 by the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, by which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union publicly pledged not to attack one another or aid a third power attacking either side. Attached to the published treaty was a secret protocol, denied by the Soviet government for decades and only publicly acknowledged after its collapse, dividing Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and later Romanian Bessarabia, into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Signed just a week before Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, the pact removed the threat of a two-front war for Germany and cleared the way for the Soviet Union's own invasion of eastern Poland later that month and its subsequent annexations in the Baltic states and Finland, functioning in practice as the diplomatic curtain-raiser to the Second World War in Europe. Germany's surprise invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 unilaterally ended the pact less than two years after it was signed.