World: Getting It Straight

In his Kremlin speech, Old Soldier Khrushchev did a little Orwell-style rewriting of history. “On the eve of World War II, the so-called Western democracies conducted a double-faced policy,” he cried. “They sought to prod Nazi Germany against our country . . . It was the perfidious policy of the ruling circles of Britain and France that impelled us to conclude a nonaggression pact with Germany in August 1939.”

West German Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano briskly set the record straight: “It was nothing but a joint aggression pact that brought together two people who intended from the very beginning to deceive each other. I am perfectly willing to send Herr Khrushchev a map showing the new frontier [dividing Poland] between Germany and the Soviet Union which bears the signatures of Stalin and Ribbentrop.”