THREE BALTIC STATES COERCED INTO SOVIET ORBIT
Moscow, Soviet Union • August 3, 1940 Early on the morning of August 24, 1939, Soviet People’s Commissar on Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, and his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, affixed their signatures to the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. As German dictator Adolf Hitler viewed it, the pact was a “strategic…