Munich pact of 1938 in the assessments of Soviet and Russian historians

The article assesses the views of Russian historians on the Munich agreement of 1938 in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. At the first stage, historians, according to the spirit of the times and ideological line, fully put the responsibility for the Munich pact and its consequences on Western democracies, focusing on the role of the USSR as the sole guarantor of peace. Related subjects, such as the position of minor European countries, weakly fell into the focus of academic interest, including due to the lack of archival materials. In the post-Soviet period, historians received the opportunity to expand the research field, including new stories and documentary sources, smoothing the most acute angles in the interpretation of the events of 1938, turning to a deeper analysis of the studied subjects, and paying special attention to the Soviet, American, Balkan and other factors in the policy of appeasement at its final stage. More than before, the researchers began to pay attention to the role of the individual in history, referring to an analysis of the biographies of politicians who ruled the fate of their countries and the world, based on new sources of personal origin and documentary materials. The authors conclude that, in recent years, the interest in the Munich agreement has increased due to the politicization of this historical plot (with frequent comparison with the Soviet-German Non-aggression Pact of 1939) and its use in the so-called memory wars between Russia and European states.