"On the 80th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Soviet texts of the Soviet and German secret documents of 1939-1941: the history of publication" report by Boris L. Khavkin

On March 22, 2019, within the framework of the seminar "West and East: Universalism of Culture" of the International Laboratory for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue there was given a lecture by Professor B.L. Khavkin

The lecture was devoted to the 80th anniversary of the Soviet-German Pacts: Treaty of Non-aggression (August 23,1939), German–Soviet Frontier Treaty (September 28, 1939), and secret protocols to them.
In recent years, in connection with the "cooling" of international relations, there has been an intensification of the trend towards polarization of assessments of historical events preceding the Second World War and its initial phase, the source base of which is constituted by Soviet-German documents of 1939-1941. These documents, the most discussed of which are the secret protocol to the Soviet-German Treaty of Non-aggression of August 23, 1939 (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), had a significant impact on the course of events in recent history twice: on the eve of World War II and in late 1980- x - the beginning of the 1990s, when the process of the collapse of the USSR and the "parade of state sovereignties." Soviet-German documents 1939-1941 still cause heated debate in Russian society. The history of the publication of the Soviet texts of these documents is directly connected with the journal "New and Newest History", where they were first published in 1993 by Academician G.N. Sevostyanovym and B.L. Khavkin.