It is now illegal in Vladimir Putin’s Russia to publish the historical fact that both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia invaded Poland in September 1939 and divided that country between themselves.
The Human Rights in Ukraine website reports:
37-year-old Vladimir Luzgin was convicted in July this year by the Perm District Court and fined 200 thousand roubles. The charge was under Article 354.1 of Russia’s criminal code (‘rehabilitation of Nazism’) and concerned Luzgin’s repost of a text on his VKontakte social network page entitled ’15 facts about Bandera supporters, or what the Kremlin is silent about’.
It is probably no accident that the ‘offending text’ should be Ukrainian, and fairly nationalist, however it was specifically over the following paragraph in the repost that the criminal proceedings against Luzgin were initiated:
“The communists and Germany jointly invaded Poland, sparking off the Second World War. That is, communism and Nazism closely collaborated, yet for some reason they blame Bandera who was in a German concentration camp for declaring Ukrainian independence”.
Russia’s Supreme Court has now agreed that this paragraph constitutes “the public denial of the Nuremberg Trials and circulation of false information about the activities of the USSR during the years of the Second World War”.
In fact the Nuremberg Trials did not deny the Soviet invasion; they didn’t mention it at all.
At a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on May 10, 2015, Putin defended the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, claiming that the Soviet Union was being left to face Hitler’s Germany by itself. Russia’s culture minister Vladimir Medinsky called the pact a “colossal achievement of Stalin’s diplomacy.”
Not only did the Nazis and Soviets divide Poland between themselves, they put their plans in writing in a secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narev, Vistula and San.
German and Russian soldiers even held a joint parade to celebrate, as documented in this Nazi propaganda film:
