On this day in 1939, in a room in Moscow, two foreign ministers signed a treaty of non-aggression between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The photograph below shows the desk: papers, inkwells, a telephone, a small crowd of officials standing behind. It looks like any other piece of government business.
The published text promised ten years of peace between the two states. A secret protocol, attached and not meant to be read, drew lines across Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania and assigned them to spheres of influence. Within weeks Poland was invaded from the west and then the east. In the years that followed, the countries named in that annexe lost people by the hundreds of thousands to occupation, deportation and killing. Much of it was decided by men who never saw the places on the map.
Since 2009, 23 August has been observed in Europe as a day of remembrance for the victims of both regimes. Twenty years before that, on the fiftieth anniversary, some two million people in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania stood in a line and held hands. Today the date belongs to them.
Marguerite, on each 23 August since 2009 the remembrance is often kept simply: a candle in a window, and names read aloud in churches and civic halls from Tallinn to Warsaw. The Baltic Way itself began and ended at church squares, and in several towns the bells were rung as the line joined.
The text of the secret protocol was denied by Soviet authorities for fifty years; only in 1989 did a commission of inquiry acknowledge that it existed, working partly from German copies. A document can be real for half a century before it is allowed to be read.