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In many ways, Aug. 23 marks the 78th anniversary of the start of the Second World War.

On this day, in 1939, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin signed a friendship pact that included a secret protocol carving up Central and Eastern Europe between them. The treaty, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, formally triggered the start of the Second World War as it facilitated a collaborative joint Nazi-Soviet attack and occupation of Poland and later the illegal Soviet annexation of the Baltic States.

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Anyone mentioning these historical facts in Russia today risks a fine and even imprisonment in the repressive reality that historians and journalists living in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, are forced to endure.

In 2014, Putin signed a Russian law that criminalizes “the denial of the facts” and anything the Kremlin determines as the “dissemination of deliberately false information on the activities of the Soviet Union during the Second World War.”