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Treaty of Moscow
Type	Bilateral treaty
Signed	12 August 1970
Location	Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Original; signatories	Soviet Union; West Germany;
Ratifiers	Soviet Union; West Germany;

The Treaty of Moscow was signed on 12 August 1970 between the Soviet Union and West Germany.^[1]^[2] It was signed by Willy Brandt and Walter Scheel for West Germany's side and by Alexei Kosygin and Andrei Gromyko for the Soviet Union.

Description

In the 1970s, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik was a policy that "abandoned, at least for the time being, its claims with respect to German self-determination and reunification, recognising de facto the existence of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Oder–Neisse line".^[3]

Both sides expressed their ambition to strive for a normalisation of the relations between the European states while they kept international peace and to follow the guidelines of the Article 2 of the UN Charter.

The signees renounced the use of force and recognised the postwar borders, specifically, the Oder–Neisse line, which hived off a large portion of historical eastern Germany to Poland and the Soviet Union.

It also enshrined the division between East Germany and West Germany, thus contributing a valuable element of stability into the relationship between the two countries.

References

(in German) Wording of the Treaty Of Moscow.
(in Russian) Texts of FRG Treaties with Socialist Countries in 1970–1973.
The Moscow Treaty (12 August 1970) (in English) retrieved from the CVCE website. Source: United States-Department of State. Documents on Germany 1944–1985. Washington: Department of State, [s.d.], pp. 1103–5.
Europe: The End of World War II August 17, 1970 Time. (subscription required)

Footnotes

^ "The Moscow Treaty (12 August 1970)". University of Luxembourg. Archived from the original on 28 September 2012. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
^ Horst Pötzsch (2006). "Moskauer Vertrag". Deutsche Geschichte von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart (in German). Munich: OLZOG. p. 173. ISBN 3-7892-8157-3. OCLC 751019247.
^ The Federal Republic of Germany's Ostpolitik on CVCE website (Centre for European Studies).