THE WORLD ON THE EVE OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR: HISTORIOGRAPHICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR

The article considers various historiographical approaches to the treatment of the beginning of the Second World War. The author notes that the collapse of the great empires, defeating the imperial consciousness and the emergence of new countries from their remains and a completely new global balance of powers as the immediate consequences of the First World War reconfigured the geopolitical and strategic map of the entire European continent and have created hopes for a new global order of the post-war Europe based on equal national rights and peaceful coexistence among peoples, democratization and humanization of the European society. Unfortunately, many hopes and expectations of millions of people have been left unfulfilled pursuant to imperfections in the Versailles system of the post-war arrangement of Europe. 1918-1919 seemed the start of a new democracy in Europe, but soon the situation has changed to the opposite. In Europe totalitarian regimes were established. Two decades later, during lifetime of participants of the First World War, those very states led the whole world into the Second World War, the most terrible and bloody conflict. The paper indicated that the genesis of the Second World War received significant attention in an enormous corpus of scientific literature, whose scope is growing rapidly. The Soviet and Russian historiography focuses on the Munich Agreement (1938) as a pivotal event which “opened the way to the Second World War – the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century” and “provided justification for the USSR's rapprochement with Germany” as a forced step from J. Stalin. However, the Western historiography asserts that Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union of 1939 became turning moment which has plunged the world into war and led to the so-called Fourth Partition of Poland, the seizure by Germany of large parts of Europe (Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Yugoslavia, Greece), the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940 (the Winter War), Soviet occupation of the Baltic states, Bessarabiya and Northern Bukovyna as a logical consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The author does not exclude the possibility that the starting date of the Second World War may be revised in the near future. Brutal military campaigns of Japan in Asia (the 1930s) and Italy in Africa (1935-1936), the Japanese-German Anti-Commintern Pact of 1936, to which Italy had acceded in 1937, the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, the battle of Lake Khasan (1938), the battles of Khalkhyn Gol (1939), the Anschluss Österreichs (1938), the Munich Agreement concluded on 30 September 1938 which has led to accelerating the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union of 1939) were a prelude to the Second World War. These tragic and great events not just have paved the way for a new stage of historical development, but also have provided a long-term programme for human history.