Germany–Russia relations

A German-Russian partnership is a key element in any serious pan-European integration process. It is my ardent wish that Russia and Germany may manage to preserve all the positive achievements of the late 1980s and early 1990s in today's difficult times. - Mikhail Gorbachev

Germany–Russia relations display cyclical patterns, moving back and forth from cooperation and alliance to strain and to total warfare.

Quotes

• Central Europe had a mirror-image quality after September 1939. For it had not only been Hitler who had ordered his troops to invade Poland. Under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact signed in Moscow that August, Josef Stalin had done the same, on September 17. To conservatives like Duff Cooper or Evelyn Waugh, it seemed a moment of revelation, laying bare the essential identity of the two totalitarian systems, National Socialism and 'socialism in one country'. The signatories themselves appreciated the irony of their partnership. When he flew to Moscow to sign the pact, Ribbentrop had joked that Stalin would 'yet join the Anti-Comintern Pact', Hitler and Mussolini's anti-Communist alliance. Nevertheless, the partition of Poland did not produce exactly identical totalitarian twins. The Soviet zone of occupation was in many respects a mirror image of the German zone but, as with a true mirror image, right and left were transposed.
  • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 417

• A German-Russian partnership is a key element in any serious pan-European integration process. It is my ardent wish that Russia and Germany may manage to preserve all the positive achievements of the late 1980s and early 1990s in today's difficult times.
  • Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (1995)

• Russia was now becoming a dominant factor in European diplomacy. It had copious natural resources, a large army, a nuclear arsenal and a reckless capacity for mischief-making, cyber attacks and overseas assassination. As Churchill had said in 1939, Russia might always be ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, but on one matter Putin was crystal clear. He did not like NATO’s encirclement of his borders or meddling within his ‘sphere of interest’. In this he had an increasingly sympathetic ear from Germany’s Angela Merkel and from some former Warsaw Pact leaders. Geography mattered. It was easy for Britain and France to play belligerence with Moscow. It was less easy for Germany and the still ingénue democracies to its east.
  • Simon Jenkins, A Short History of Europe: From Pericles to Putin (2018)

• Two years ago tomorrow, by an act of treachery in keeping with the long record of Nazi duplicity, the Nazi leaders launched their brutal attack upon the Soviet Union. They thus added to their growing list of enemies the mighty forces of the Soviet Union. These Nazi leaders had underestimated the extent to which the Soviet Government and people had developed and strengthened their military power to defend their country and had utterly failed to realize the determination and valor of the Soviet people. During the past two years the freedom-loving peoples of the world have watched, with increasing admiration, the history making exploits of the armed forces of the Soviet Union and the almost incredible sacrifices which the Russian people are so heroically making. The growing might of the combined forces of all the United Nations which is being brought increasingly to bear upon our common enemy testifies to the spirit of unity and sacrifice necessary for our ultimate victory. This same spirit will, I am sure, animate us in approaching the challenging tasks of peace which victory will present to the world.
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt; Message to Stalin on the Second Anniversary of the Nazi Attack on Russia, The American Presidency Project; 22 February 1943