Moscow Publishes Photocopies of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Secret Protocols

They also literally titled the secret amendment "Geheimes Zusatzprotokoll". And there is a photocopy of it!

TOS are written for lawyers and courts. For bilateral contracts like this there's no overarching law and legal authority, so they're more like a protocol of a verbal contract.

The Munich agreement was very detailed and formal. That made no practical difference. Everybody and their dog rushed to take a bite out of Czechoslovakia.

The complications are about drawing a line about what breaks the agreement and what does not. This is important when both parties rely on a third party to decide who broke the agreement, and justify penalties: Nobody wants uncertainty in front of a judge. In this case, neither Nazi Germany or the USSR really care about those things. If one party went over the line in a non-accidental way, there'd be would be war. It's not as if, when Germany invaded the USSR, some faux argument about the USSR breaking the agreement first would have made a difference whatsoever to third parties.

Therefore, what is best for large, highly militarized sovereign countries that solved their disagreements by trying to utterly destroy the other's regime might not work so well in civil life, where making sure we know exactly how he judiciary will interpret the contract is so important we incorporate in Delaware not just because it's cheap, but because we know how the judge will interpret the legalese.

As others have said, these agreements are meaningless, they are more like timeouts to get ready to attack. Lots of agreements were broken, when one side felt they could away with it.

As a Polish person who had Russian and German (English also :)) in school, so I can read those documents, I would say you Brits should get interested about it in 1939 not now.

Those French guys also should chip in earlier.

Don't take it personally it is a just historical joke!

Most interesting part for me as a Pole, is "Die Deutsche Reichsreugierung" and "Union der Sozialistischen Sowjetrepubliken" and the same in russian script. So how they described themselves, and the rest is quite boring non agression treaty, so they skipped "we are going to meet in the middle of Poland and then we will see 'смех' 'Umfassungsgraben'".

You can read it in English on Wikisource [1] among other places. The text itself is nothing new, it's been available for decades, it's just that few people have seen the Soviet-held original copies.

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact

Not sure. But from a rough translation if it, it is quite literally the bullet points that you've been taught in school.

"Neither party will attack the other for 10 years, with an automatic extention to this clause, if neither party denounces the other."

"In the Baltics, the northern border of Lithuania is the border of the interest of influence of both participants."

"Each party is interested in a chunk of Poland, divided by such and such river. If both parties are interested in an independent Poland, we can discuss this later."

"Any disagreements regarding this agreement should be resolved through a peaceful exchange of ideas."

Legal stuff and photocopies go hand in hand it seems.

There was a local case involving some harassing txt messages, the evidence was a series of photocopies of an iPhone on a copier....

Smart move on part of whom, Germany or USSR?

Not only a smart move but also quite typical for that time. Note that Pilsudski was a kind of dictator and the Polish government was rather aggressive with respect to all its neighbors. Therefore, the war between Germany and Poland was a collision of two dictators - Hitler and Pilsudski.

The West hoped that Hitler would attack the Soviet Union?

That would mean the West hoped that Hitler would attack Poland as that was the only possible way that Hitler could even get to the Soviet Union at the time the pact was negotiated.

The Soviet Union wanted to modernize and expand. Hitler gave them that opportunity. If anything, it was the Soviet Union that hoped that Hitler and Western Europe would duke it out thereby weakening all their enemies.

Worth noting that the Allies who justified the protection of Poland to declare war on Germany, avoided declaring war on Soviet Russia which invaded Poland on the Eastern side (about 2 weeks after).

"co-starting the 2WW, together with Germany"

It's so convenient to ignore the Munich agreement and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia by Germany, Poland and Hungary with the approval of the West and despite the USSR's objections.

"USSR attacked Poland on 17-th of September 1939 (co-starting the 2WW, together with Germany)."

German army was to complete the occupation of the Sudetenland (part of Czechoslovakia) by October 10 (1938), and an international commission would decide the future of other disputed areas. Czechoslovakia was informed by Britain and France that it could either resist Germany alone or submit to the prescribed annexations. The Czechoslovak government chose to submit.

The Soviet Union also had a treaty with Czechoslovakia, and it indicated willingness to cooperate with France and Great Britain if they decided to come to Czechoslovakia’s defense, but the Soviet Union and its potential services were ignored throughout the crisis.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Munich-Agreement

Is this when there were mass killings of poles in the forests? Or was that by the Nazis?

Why lie?

>Польский поход Красной армии (17—29 сентября 1939 года), в советской историографии освободительный поход РККА, в современной историографии также советское вторжение в Польшу

Polish march of the Red Army, liberating march of The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army in soviet historiography, also Soviet invasion of Poland in modern historiography.