The monetary compensation provision adds even further weight to pre-existing evidence that Stalin's pact with Hitler was the gravest foreign policy blunder of Soviet history. Not only did it lull Stalin into a false sense of security, it also, it is now revealed, cost the Russians financially.
The revelation comes from the rediscovery of the original Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, signed by the foreign ministers of both nations, in which Stalin and Hitler agreed to the most aggressive land grab in 20th-century European history.
Some details of the pact -- including the fact that it had three secret protocols attached to it rather than one as previously supposed -- were presented at a press conference Thursday.
Copies of the documents will be published shortly, according to Alexander Yakovlev, Mikhail Gorbachev's top advisor, who appeared at the press conference with Yelstin advisor and archivist Dmitry Volkogonov.
"The truth is finally out", Yakovlev told The Moscow Times. "We found a folder with the original documents and there is a map dividing the Baltic States and Poland, and the secret protocols, not one but three".
"There are some details I did not know such as the monetary compensation for territory".
A spokesman for the Lithuanian government said they already knew about the secret provision.
"It was two robbers getting together to make a deal", said Audrius Azubalis, press attache for the Supreme Council of Lithuania said by phone from Vilnius.
Several top Communist leaders had seen the actual document since World War II but never publicized its contents, Yakovlev said. These included Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in 1975, and the head of the Communist Party's Central Committee in 1987, said Yakovlev.
The pact was signed on Aug. 23, 1939, just a week before the Nazis launched their attacked on Poland that marked the start of World War II.
The pact stunned the West as well as Communist sympathizers abroad who thought such an arrangement between the bitter anti-Communist Hitler and Stalin would never be possible. It also paved the way for the forcible incorporation of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union.
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