this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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don't worry, the soviets joined ww2 as well
Yep, and beat the Nazis.
If by "joined WW2", do you mean "got refused from any military alliances with England, France and Poland despite a decade of trying in an attempt to unify Europe against Hitler"? Or do you mean "getting invaded by the Nazis and losing 25+mn people in the process of eliminating Nazism from Europe"?
I mean invading poland side by side with the nazis, they weren't interested in getting rid of the nazis, why do you think they had a nap?
Again, literal Nazi revisionism. The invasion of Poland was mostly a peaceful process, and the only aim was to establish pro-communist forces in the area that would ensure Poland would join the USSR against the Nazis when the Nazis attacked. The same was attempted in Finland, and what do you know, Finland actually did join the Nazis during the Continuation War. And what do you know, the USSR retreated its troops from Poland after WW2.
Poland could have entered a military alliance with the USSR for the former 10 years, Stalin went as far as offering to send ONE MILLION soldiers, together with aviation and artillery, to military allies if France, England and Poland joined in a military alliance against the Nazis. But I guess they would rather see the Nazis massacre the communists first. That strategy didn't work out as planned now, did it?
This is incredibly ahistorical revisionism. The USSR prepared for the war against Nazi Germany for many years before it started. In the second half of the 1930s, seeing the Nazi rising to power (Nazis being overt enemies of Communism, as proven by what they did to Communists and to Unions in their controlled territories), they ramped up the weapon production and their military industry, and I'll say it again in case it didn't register: they spent the entire 30s seeking out military alliances with France, England and Poland against the Nazis. They offered military help to Czechoslovakia in 1938 during the Munich agreements in which Sudetenland was given to the Nazis.
They had a non-aggression pact because Germany was an established industrial power for 100+ years at that point, while the USSR had had 19 years from 1921 after the Russian Civil War and WW1 to rebuild the country and to industrialise. They desperately needed every year they could get to reduce the industrial gap between them and the Nazis, as proven by the immense human cost to the USSR in the war against Nazis.
The Soviets literally saved Eastern Europe from an even worse fate, at immense cost of human lives (25+ million human lives lost in the USSR to Nazism), god knows how many millions more of Slavs (and other groups like Jews and Roma) the Nazis would have genocided if it hadn't been for the Soviets. Have some respect before spewing anti-communist, nazi propaganda here, please.
You missed the part in between where they made a deal with the nazis and invaded eastern Europe
I didn't miss that part because there was no "deal with Nazis". Nothing as bad as the Munich Agreement signed the previous year by England, France and Germany among others, allowing Hitler to occupy the Sudetenland, a land with more than 3mn people in Czechoslovakia (to whom the Soviet Union offered assistance but Romania and Poland denied pass to Soviet troops, possibly influenced by the fact that Poland also did a grab of land of Czechoslovakia). The USSR spent the entire 30s trying to push for a military alliance with England, France and Poland to stop Nazism, but they all refused because a good liberal would rather have Nazis first exterminate communists. Stalin went as far as offering to station 1 million troops, together with aviation and artillery, in France, in case Stalin invaded, to which England and France refused. Feel free to study the so-called "collective security policy" pushed by the USSR in Europe against Nazism.
The Soviet Union had been in a civil war until 1921 (right after a devastating WW1/, and before that it was a preindustrial nation. It had a whopping 19 years to rebuild the country from scratch and to industrialise, compared to the 100+ years of German industrialization. They desperately needed every single year of industrialization they could get in order to gain some advantage against the industrially superior Nazis, as evidenced by the 25+ million casualties the USSR suffered against the Nazis despite material help from the US. Making an agreement to postpone the war after every country in Europe refuses to enter a military alliance against Nazis just because you're a communist country, is just the logical action to defend your citizens.
Please stop pushing revisionist nazi propaganda. Without the USSR, the slavic population of Europe, including Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian, as well as many other ethnic groups, would have been genocided in vastly superior numbers than they were.
I thought Romania did?
"Rumania had agreed to permit Russian troops to pass through her territory to the assistance of Czechoslovakia as soon as the League of Nations had pronounced Czechoslovakia to be a victim of aggression" - Munich, Prologue to Tragedy by John W. Wheeler-Bennet, p. 100
Sorry, I was going with Wikipedia there, care to elaborate more on what happened then?
I'm not really sure how much more I can elaborate. I haven't read the book—I read Flemmings book, see below, and found it to reference "Munich, Prologue to Tragedy", so I went ahead and quoted it. Here is the full footnote which that part came from (with my own inserts in []):
quote
France didn't uphold their part of the 1935 Pact, so the Soviet Union never came to help Czechoslovakia under the Pact. And President [of Czechoslovakia] Benes didn't call upon the Soviet Union "outside" of the Pact:
The Cold War and Its Origins, Denna Frank Flemming, p. 84
The rest of your comment is quite consistent with my own understanding of how things went down, which I got from Flemmings book.
Ok, that's really good insight, so it boils down to France not respecting the 1935 treaty by refusing to declare Czechoslovakia as a victim of aggression?
As a Spanish, I can relate too well (sadly) to the part where the president of Czechoslovakia says "I did not dare to fight with Russian aid alone, because I knew that the British and French Governments would make out of my country another Spain", I assume they're talking of how the Soviet Union was the only country to sell weapons to Republican Spain in their fight against fascism, even as the Nazis and Italian Fascists were militarily and economically helping the reactionaries in Spain, and how France and England didn't do anything under the guise of "non-interventionism".
No. So, there are two parts here: Romania allowing Soviet troops to pass through it and French and Soviet aid to Czechoslovakia.
I can't find the part I was thinking about when I wrote "so the Soviet Union never came to help Czechoslovakia under the Pact", and just I realized that there are actually two pacts.
The treaty mentioned is either the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance or the Czechoslovak-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance. Had France decided to fight for Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union would also have. But the French didn't, and Czechoslovakia didn't fight (and therefore didn't call upon the Soviets to come to their aid), and so the Soviets didn't.
In the case that fighting had broken out, Romania would allow Soviet troops to pass through their borders, if the League of Nations declared Czechoslovakia to be a "victim of aggression" (not France).
Yes.
There a whole article about Russian disinformation on this topic here. They certainly did have a pact with the Nazis. Your argument is basically "it didn't happen, but if it did then it the West forced us into it" which is a 100% classic disinformation line. It's like when Putin says there is no war with Ukraine, but if there is it's because the West forced us to do it.
Source: euvsdisinfo
"Your comment is state propaganda! Here's some state propaganda from my side to discredit it!!" Oh I wonder, why would a European state agency directed by Josep Borrell (Social Democrat party of Spain, the PSOE), well-known NATO cocksucker (he was in the government when the Spanish government pushed the referendum to join NATO after 4 years of pro-NATO propaganda), want to create anti-communist and Russophobic propaganda?
If you read my comment, I'm not denying the existence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, I'm framing it in context. All that the article you sent says, is "Russian nationalists sometimes also put context to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, so everyone who puts context to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is reproducing what Russian nationalists say!!"
The article vaguely points to a few dubious claims* of "USSR sending Jews to Germany" (USSR being the most progressive country against antisemitism back in its time, eliminating former pogroms in the former Russian Empire, and with overrepresentation of Jewish people in government and science, and even going as far as creating a Jewish Autonomous Oblast for Jewish people who might have felt like moving to a region with higher Jewish representation). It also makes a few claims of "tech transfer" between Nazi Germany and the USSR (ignoring why the USSR would want technology to defend itself from Germany and ignoring that the US had plenty of factories in Nazi Germany for example). And it completely ignores the existence of the Collective Security attempted for the 10 prior years by the USSR.
You're just choosing to ignore everything I said in my comment because "Russian nationalists sometimes try to put context to Molotov-Ribbentrop". I'm literally a communist, I'm the first and foremost hater of fascist Putin. The fact that Russian nationalists stoke the USSR occasionally for nationalist purposes (while removing any socialist ideology from their claims to keep it nice and capitalist), doesn't mean they can't sometimes make a better historical claim to some events by pure chance.
*Edit: the "USSR SENT JEWS TO NAZI GERMANY" claim apparently refers to a "few hundred" people, including Jews, that requested asylum in the USSR from Nazi Germany and were denied asylum and returned to Nazi Germany. I don't think EU countries, who are now rejecting Russian refugees (let alone from northern Africa or middle east) by the thousands, have the high moral ground to complain about this
So you are straight up denying the existence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact?
To be clear I don't fault them for signing a NAP, I fault them for invading a bunch of eastern European countries with whom they had no quarrel because they wanted to do imperialism.
But I guess the fact that you dodged the question and immediately started spewing whataboutism proves that you're not really interested in a discussion.
No, I'm denying your framing of it
Edit: you've added two paragraphs to your comment, I'll answer to that tomorrow
You're just showing you don't know what "imperialism" is. The USSR never engaged in resource exploitation or unequal exchange with other countries, its terms of trade were always comparatively fair, especially if you compare those to the terms of trade of the western world.
The USSR didn't have any imperialist ambitions. For fucks sake, the literal first thing the Bolsheviks did in 1917 after the October Revolution, was to implement a constitution which gave the full right of self-determination and unilateral secession to all peoples of the former Russian Empire, it's literally how Poland gained independence, as well as many other countries like Finland or Ukraine. What did Poland immediately do: invading Ukraine and modern Belarus and attacking the RSFSR during the Russian Civil War because of its expansionist nationalist desires of going back to Polish-Lithuanian borders. Maybe that helps explain why the USSR didn't trust Poland not to join the Nazis, especially after 10 years of Poland, France and England rejecting to form military alliances with the USSR against Nazis? Finns, after the winter war, quite literally joined the Nazis in the continuation war, going all the way to participating in the siege of Leningrad.
After the war, most of these countries that the USSR invaded went back to being their own countries as the USSS retreated all its troops. Such imperialism, amirite? The influence of the USSR in the politics of Eastern European countries after WW2, isn't any greater than the influence of the US in western Europe, so unless you're claiming that the US was carrying out imperialism in western Europe (and would have carried it in Eastern Europe too if it weren't for the USSR), then no, the USSR didn't carry out any imperialism.
You literally have no idea what "whataboutism means, I gave a detailed explanation on why calling the Molotov-Ribbentrop a "deal with the Nazis", and stopping there without further context, is revisionist and honestly very close to Nazi propaganda. You're just saying "whataboutism whataboutism" because you're actually incapable of refuting anything I've said.
I'd say the "exchanges" they had with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland etc. were quite unequal. Expanding your territory through force is the purest form of imperialism, no matter what color your flag is.
That declaration wasn't worth the paper it was written on, as the USSR immediately turned around and tried to forcefully annex these newly independent states (and when it failed tried again some years later).
Yes Finland joined forces with the nazis after the winter war, but the USSR started the winter war attempting to conquer Finland. To blame them for joining forces with the enemy of their enemy after being invaded and losing territory is just wild.
So the argument is that the USSR was so scared of Poland joining the nazis that they made a deal with the nazis to invade it together and divide it between them? How does that make any sense?
The USSR didn't withdraw their troops from the baltic states until the 90s, a good 45 years after the end of WWII.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a deal between the USSR and nazi Germany detailing who would get what parts of eastern Europe. The existence of other deals and treaties that you think are worse does not change that reality.
If the USSR had been the staunch defender of the slavic peoples from nazis aggression that you claim they were, they would have entered into a defensive pact with the eastern states, not invaded them.
Talk of freedom and brotherhood means nothing when cooperation is gained at the barrel of a gun.
He already said capitalists, state capitalism is still capitalism, no matter if you call it communism.
The USSR was Socialist, what on Earth are you talking about?
and North Korea is democratic, it's in the name after all.
When did I say names determine structures? Even then, the DPRK is fairly democratic in actuality.
oh you are a fucking tankie, makes sense.
I'm a Marxist-Leninist, if you equate taking theory seriously to whatever caricature of a tankie you hold in your mind-palace then I don't know what to tell you.
Calling something state capitalist when capitalism heavily relies on the state by default shows you need to hit the books on how capitalism actually functions.
I have no idea what you are trying to say with this, but perhaps you should look things up before pompously trying to diss people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
Perhaps you should read theory. The USSR was State Capitalist with respect to the NEP, but was Socialist for its entire existence
People's theory is just fine. The problem for you is that they kept reading theory that was written after thr 1970s.
https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004194748/Bej.9789004194458.i-234_003.xml
I can only read 2 pages from what you linked, and am not paying 40 dollars to read the rest, certainly not when they already display a gross oversimplification and anti-Marxist definition of Capitalism (critically leaving out competition, Capital accumulation, and so forth), and therefore take a vulgar revisionist stance. There's no analysis of class dynamics, just an over-reliance on the presense of Wage Labor.
Please read theory, I can make recommendations for the basics if you'd like.
emphasis mine, their entire argument is based on the fact that the USSR lacked the class dynamics of communism, thus weren't communist.
Nobody, not even the USSR, claims they reached upper-stage Communism. They were Communist in ideology, and Socialist in structure. Their argument is a left-anticommunist argument against a claim nobody made.
Lol, you mean the state capitalists? You're not making the (weak, "whatabout") point you think you are, but hey, your confidence in your wilful ignorance in defence of those exploiting you for profit* is almost impressive! (but not really) 🙄😂
*E: and guess what, I don't even need to know where you live to say this, because every working class person on the planet is currently being exploited for profit through both labour and war, but don't let that get in the way of the bootlicking you've come here to do in self-destructive defence of your beloved capitalism (I threw up in my mouth a little)...
Calling something state capitalist when capitalism heavily relies on the state by default shows you need to hit the books on how capitalism actually functions.
Pretending something that was never stateless, classless, and moneyless but rather quite the fucking opposite (E: and was never going to end up there, either) was communism, shows you need to hit the books on how communism is actually intended to function.
The USSR never pretended it was Stateless, Classless, or Moneyless.
You have no clue what you're talking about, how Communism is "supposed" to function, how Marx, Engels, Lenin, and so forth believed it to come into function, or how the USSR functioned.
If you want basics on how the USSR functioned, I can recommend some books, or if you want a basic intro of Marxism I can recommend some works as well.
I didn't call it communism, and neither did the ruling communist parties. Transitional socialism is the proper word.