MrNobodyWhy do you think so many people on the Marxist left defend Stalinism?
freagleCould it have anything to do with saving the entire world from the Third Reich by being the leader of the only military that actually stood up and ended the Nazi reign of terror, defeated 80% of the Nazi military, marched all the way to Berlin, and through Berlin, before any allies showed up, and liberated the concentration camps?
No. It’s probably vibes.
Standing up only after you are betrayed isn’t quite as impressive as standing up because it’s the right thing to do. Soviets would have been happy to sit and do nothing until the Nazis started threatening the Soviets. But, still, yes the Soviets kicked ass
Hitler threatened the USSR over a decade before he invaded. He wrote it in Mein Kampf. It was out in the open. Stalin attempted to get Western Europe to take the threat seriously, but Western European leaders understood that the primary target of the Third Reich was the USSR and they all wanted the Third Reich to win that war. Stalin never believed that the Third Reich would be an ally, and the attempt of people to spin it that way is so intellectually dishonest it boggles the mind.
You can say whatever you want. The fact is the Soviets had a treaty with Nazi Germany and only fought back when forced
Thordros [he/him, comrade/them]I wonder, did any other countries have non-aggression pacts with Germany at the time?
My point is just that the ussr was not some righteous world hero, as was seemingly being alluded to
So did the USSR not defeat 80% of the Nazi military, liberate every territory East of Berlin that the Nazis had captures, capture Berlin, and liberate the concentration camps? Or did they do that but you need to make sure everyone is aware that they only did that to protect themselves and shouldn’t be considered heroes?
I mean, cuz what it sounds like you’re saying is that defeating the Nazis isn’t enough, you actually also have to be morally good according to a standard that you will never admit the USSR into but also could never apply to any country in the history of the world.
Enough for what? Extreme gratitude, yes. But the post is asking why so many people on the left seemingly ignore the faults of the Soviet Union. And no, winning ww2 does not justify turning a blind eye to any fault of the Soviet Union, that’s ridiculous
Seriously. How are you able to say these things without a horn of self awareness. You know what it looks like to enter a war voluntarily? It looks like the US and Israel bombing Iran. It looks like the Third Reich invading every country on the path to Russia. Like what the fuck do you imagine you are saying? The USSR knew that engaging in war with the Third Reich was a necessity as soon as they got a copy of Mein Kampf. It’s such a ridiculous statement to say that because the USSR joined the war out of necessity that therefore it is not appropriate to consider that their defeat of the Nazis was a good thing that the USSR did. Ludicrous.
Most leftists do NOT ignore the flaws of the USSR. In fact, those flaws are studied as part of the process of historical materialism. For example, every leftist knows that Stalin was a violent paranoid control freak. Every leftist knows that the repression of religion was a major mistake. Hell, even the USSR figured that one out and reversed the policy.
If you think leftists ignore the USSR’s faults, that’s on you. But if your problem is actually that you believe the faults of the USSR erase anything good that could possibly be attributed to them, then that’s a different problem and it’s intellectually dishonest to say that the only proper way of acknowledging the flaws of the USSR is to condemn the entire project, denounce it, and never use it as an example of something good. Those positions are not equivalent
They treated with the Nazis precisely because it postponed the threat.
And as freagle said, they tried to fight the Nazis first but couldn’t do so without western cooperation, which was refused. Delaying until ready to fight alone was the second best option.
Then why did they not end the treaty when UK entered the war but when the Nazis invaded the ussr?
Stop. That question assumes way too much. So let’s unpack it and reverse it on you.
Are you saying that ending the treaty when the UK entered the war would indicate to you that the USSR was a righteous ally of good and true humanity but that not ending the treat at that time would indicate to you that they were actually Nazi collaborators or at best willing to let the Nazis take over the entire world as long as they didn’t get attacked (which they knew would happen because again, the Third Reich was abundantly clear that destroying the USSR was its number 1 goal)?
Because if you can think through the answer to that, we can answer your question, which is that the USSR had always known that the UK was not ally, and it knew that because the UK and its allies, including the US, invaded Russia after WW1 to try to stop the communists from forming the USSR. The USSR, however, didn’t think the UK would be so evil as to literally turn a blind eye, and even financially support the fascists.
After the USSR sought to ally with the West to defeat the Nazis and they said “nah”, even you can see that the USSR was completely on its own to survive and the UK entering the war, while the majority of Nazi forces were on the Eastern front, did not change the strategic landscape enough to make the USSR capable of surviving an open conflict with the Third Reich in the fall of 1939.
Between 1939 (UK declaring) and 1941 (USSR declaring), the Red Army quadrupled in size. The idea that the USSR should have just decided to fight in 1939, when it was 25% the size it was when it eventually won is literally the same idea as the USSR should have lost the war but done so while adhering to your definition of morally good. It’s daft.
mathemachristian [he/him]I’m just gonna copy socialism_everyday’s excellent write up they got banned for
The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.” Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn’t want to. By the logic of “invading Poland” being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.
As a Spaniard leftist it’s so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren’t dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn’t agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won’t find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.
The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of nowadays when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:
“Polish” territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:
The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?
Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.
All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:
“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this
