Title: Soviet invasion of Poland
Content: as a reunification of the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples and a liberation of the Polish people from "oligarchic capitalism". The authorities strongly discouraged any further study or teaching of the subject. Various underground publications addressed the issue, as did other media, such as the 1982 protest song ""Ballada wrześniowa" by Jacek Kaczmarski. In 2009, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin wrote in the Polish daily "Gazeta Wyborcza" that the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact concluded in August 1939 was "immoral". In 2015, then President of the Russian Federation, he commented: "In this sense I share the opinion of our culture minister (Vladimir Medinsky praising

Title: Robert Coulondre
Content: times"), seeing it as evidence of turn towards isolationism and increased xenophobia in the Soviet Union. Coulondre called the "Yezhovshchina" a "crisis of growth" towards what Coulondre called "counterrevolutionary absolutism", Russian nationalism, and military and economic might. In a dispatch to Paris, Coulondre wrote the most important question facing French diplomacy was not "will Russia be with us or not?", but rather "with whom will Russia go?" As the Soviet Union had signed an alliance with France's ally Czechoslovakia in 1935, one of Coulondre's main duties in Moscow was see if was possible for the Soviets to obtain transit rights

Title: Gabriel Gorodetsky
Content: of Justice: The Judge's Perspective" (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2013). In his major work "Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia" (Yale University Press, 1999), Gorodetsky, employing rare sources from the Russian Foreign Ministry, the Soviet General Staff, the NKVD, the GRU, as well as from Bulgarian, Yugoslav, British and German archives, unfolds the events leading to the German invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941. According to Gorodetsky's version Stalin saw Hitler as his own mirror reflection, committed to realpolitik and eager to improve the Soviet Union's national status which it had lost as a result of

Title: Georges Bonnet
Content: was to be the price of the Soviet alliance. On 2 June 1939, when the Soviet government offered up its definition of what constituted "aggression", upon which the intended alliance was to come into play, Bonnet sided with the Soviets against the British, who felt that the Soviet definition of "aggression", especially "indirect aggression" was too loose a definition and phrased in such a manner as to imply the Soviet right of inference in the internal affairs of nations of Eastern Europe. On 1 July 1939, in response to a message from the Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov about what

Title: History of Russia
Content: opposing the Munich deal and repeatedly reaffirming its readiness to militarily back commitments given earlier to Czechoslovakia, the Western Betrayal led to the end of Czechoslovakia and further increased fears in the Soviet Union of a coming German attack. This led the Soviet Union to rush the modernization of its military industry and to carry out its own diplomatic maneuvers. In 1939 the Soviet Union signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact: a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany dividing Eastern Europe into two separate spheres of influence. Following the pact, the USSR normalized relations with Nazi Germany and resumed Soviet–German trade. On 17

Question: In 1939 who described the actions of Russia as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma?"
Answer: Winston Churchill