Sunday Times 2
Reflections on 80th anniversary of ‘Munich Betrayal’
It was one of the most tragic days of the 20th century: on September 30, 1938, Prime Minister of Great Britain Neville Chamberlain, his French colleague Édouard Daladier, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met in Munich to make a deal on the transferring of the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia to Germany. Czechoslovak delegates were only invited to be coerced into signing the pact. This notorious agreement went down in history as the Munich Betrayal. The governments of Poland and Hungary also took part in the shameless division of Czechoslovakia.
From left to right: Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Ciano pictured before signing the Munich Agreement, which gave the Sudetenland to Germany.
The Munich Agreement crowned the essentially criminal policy of appeasement of the Third Reich. The countries that agreed to that collusion — Great Britain and France — had an illusory hope of avoiding the threat of Hitler’s aggression and tried to redirect it at the East. Among the concessions to the Nazi regime were the connivance of the remilitarisation of Hitler’s Germany, noninterference in the civil war in Spain in 1936-1939 amid flagrant Italian-German support for the Franco insurgency, the silent acceptance of the Anschluss of Austria, and the refusal to cooperate with the Soviet Union on building a collective security system in Europe.
Historians consider the events that took place in Munich on that day to be British and French capitulation before the rising Nazism, which allowed Hitler to unleash the Second World War, a global disaster that resulted in untold losses to all humankind. The USSR alone lost nearly 30 million lives. It took considerable time and incredible effort to create the anti-Hitler coalition in order to defeat Germany and liberate Europe.
We believe that the Munich Betrayal must serve as a reminder of disastrous consequences of disregard for international law, belief in one’s own exceptionalism and infallibility, and reliance on national egotism. These lessons of the past should be a warning to all of us, given the current realities. It is obvious that real security can only be equal and indivisible and should be based on the fundamental principles of international relations stipulated in the UN Charter: respect for the sovereignty of states, non-interference in their internal affairs and peaceful settlement of disputes.
Russia will continue to contribute in every possible way to the strengthening of global and regional stability and to working out common responses to the numerous challenges and threats of the present.