commercial agreement "may appear as a serious step in the cause of improving not only economic, but also political relations between the USSR and Germany." Molotov wrote in Pravda that the August 19 deal was "better than all earlier treaties" and "we have never managed to reach such a favorable economic agreement with Britain, France or any other country." Early in the morning of August 24, the Soviet Union and Germany signed the political and military deal that accompanied the trade agreement, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The pact was an agreement of mutual non-aggression between the countries. It contained secret protocols dividing the states of Northern and Eastern Europe into German and Soviet "spheres of influence." At the time, Stalin considered the trade agreement to be more important than the non-aggression pact. At the signing, Ribbentrop and Stalin enjoyed warm conversations, exchanged toasts and further addressed the prior hostilities between the countries in the 1930s. They characterized Britain as always attempting to disrupt Soviet-German relations, stated that the Anti-Comintern pact was not aimed at the Soviet Union, but actually aimed at Western democracies and "frightened principally the City of London [i.e., the British financiers] and the English shopkeepers." In 2010, Timothy Snyder linked the improvement in Nazi-Soviet relations in 1939 to Stalin's objective of disrupting the Anti-Comintern Pact and waging war on Japan. Snyder said: "On 20 August 1939, Hitler sent a personal message to Stalin, asking him to receive Ribbentrop no later than the twenty-third. Ribbentrop made for Moscow, where, as both Orwell and Koestler noted, swastikas adorned the airport of the capital of the homeland of socialism. This, the final ideological shock that separated Koestler from communism, was really a sign that the Soviet Union was no longer an ideological state. The two regimes immediately found common ground in their mutual aspiration to destroy Poland ...the Soviet Union had agreed to attack Poland along with Germany. ... In August and September 1939, Stalin was reading maps not just of east Europe but of east Asia. He had found an opportunity to improve the Soviet position in the Far East. ...Stalin could now be confident that no German-Polish attack was coming from the west... The Soviets (and their Mongolian allies) attacked Japanese (and puppet Manchukuo) forces... on 20 August 1939. Stalin's policy of rapprochement with Berlin of August 23, 1939 was also directed against Tokyo. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany