The USSR and US, the biggest contributors to the defeat of the Nazis, were/are both internally very fascist. The USSR originally sided with Hitler, and the Nazi party drew their inspiration from Jim Crow in the US. US and modern Russia have just slid even further into being imperialist authoritarian regimes.
Fascism thrives wherever there is military might, and power concentrated in the hands of a few.
Fascism is when you eliminate unemployment, guarantee housing, give free healthcare and education to every single person in the country, reduce wealth inequality to the lowest levels seen in the history of the country, and kill Nazis.
The USSR originally sided with Hitler
This is an especially disgusting lie to hear as a Spaniard. In 1936 in Spain there was a coup d’etat by the fascists against the Republican government, and the ONLY country in the world to supply weapons to the republicans against the fascists was the Soviet Union, while the Nazis supplied the fascist side and directly bombed the Republicans. The Soviets were fighting Nazism and fascism in Europe before anyone else.
The Soviet Union proposed France, Poland and England in 1939 to send ONE MILLION soldiers together with artillery, tanks and aviation, in exchange for a mutual defense agreement against Hitler, but these rejected. After ten years warning Europe, the Soviet Union decided that it wasn’t going to face Nazism in a one-on-one conflict (as that would be devastating for the country and would have likely ended the Soviet Union and killed tens of millions more of people than died already in the conflict), and instead decided to pursue a non-agression pact with the Nazis to postpone the war as much as possible. The Soviets had gone as far as offering to collectively invade Nazi Germany as an alternative to the Munich agreements, which again the allies rejected.
Stop trying to rewrite history. The Soviets saved Europe from Nazism, whether you like it or not.
instead decided to pursue a non-agression pact with the Nazis to postpone the war as much as possible
A non-aggression pact which splits Poland and Eastern European countries between Stalin and Hitler via the secret protocol? It was imperialist opportunism. If you aren’t opposed to Soviet imperialism, you aren’t opposed to imperialism.
Ok, I’ll try to explain this in detail and in good faith. Please, I beg you do the effort of reading through my comment, I’ll explain the reasons why I believe Molotov-Ribbentrop wasn’t imperialism:
1) Most of the invaded “Polish” territories actually belong to modern Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus. In 1919, Poland started the Polish-Ukrainian war and invaded Ukraine, Belarus and part of the RSFSR. This so-called “carving of Poland by the Soviet Union” liberated many formerly oppressed non-Polish national ethnicities such as Lithuanians in Polish-controlled Vilnius arguably being genocided, or ceding the city of Lviv to the Ukraine SSR. Here’s a map of the territories of modern Poland that were actually invaded by the Soviets, and which ones (the vast majority) actually belong to modern Ukraine and Belarus.
And here’s a map of the pre-Molotov-Ribbentrop Poland and the majority ethnicities per region:
Please look at those two maps, and notice how the “Polish” territories invaded by the Soviet Union in 1939 were actually Ukrainian/Belarusian/Lithuanian majority and were returned to their corresponding republics after they were invaded and forcefully taken by Polish nationalists in 1919.
2) The Soviet Union had been trying for the entire 1930s to establish a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, France and Britain against the Nazis, under the doctrine of the then-People’s Commisar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov. This decade-long proposal for mutual-defence went completely ignored by France and England, which hoped to see a Nazi-Soviet conflict that would destroy both countries, and Poland didn’t agree to negotiations by itself either. The Soviet government went as far as to offer to send one million troops together with artillery, tanking and aviation, to Poland and France. The response was ignoring these pleas and offerings.
Furthermore, this armistice between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany happened only one year after the Munich Betrayal. The Soviet Union and France had a Mutual Defense Agreement with Czechoslovakia, which France (together with the UK) unilaterally violated in agreement with the Nazis when ceding Czechoslovak territories to Nazi Germany. Stalin offered France, as an alternative to the Munich Betrayals, a coordinated and two-front attack to Nazi Germany, which France rejected in favour of the Munich Agreements.
3) The Soviet Union had been through WW1 up to 1917, the Russian Civil War up to 1922 (including a famine that killed millions) in which western powers like France, England or the USA invaded the Bolsheviks and helped the tsarist Whites to reestablish tsarism, which ultimately ended with a costly Bolshevik victory; the many deaths of famine during the land-collectivization of 1929-1933, and up to 1929 was a mostly feudal empire with little to no industry to speak of. Only after the 1929 and 1934 5-year plans did the USSR manage to slightly industrialize, but these 10 years of industrialization were barely anything in comparison with the 100 years of industrialization Nazi Germany enjoyed. The Soviet Union in 1939 was utterly underdeveloped to face Nazi Germany alone, as proven further by the 27 million casualties in the war that ended Nazism. The fact that the Soviet Union “carved Eastern Europe” in the so-called “secret protocol” was mostly in self-defense. The geography of the Great European Plain made it extremely difficult to have any meaningful defenses against Nazis with weaponry and technological superiority, again proven by the fact that the first meaningful victory against Nazis was not in open field but in the battle of Stalingrad, which consisted more of a siege of a city. The Soviet Union, out of self-preservation, wanted to simply add more Soviet-controlled distance between themselves and the Nazis. You don’t have to take my word for all of this, you can hear it from western diplomats and officials from the period itself. I hope nobody will find my choice of personalities to reflect a pro-Soviet bias:
“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)
"It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938) Mission to Moscow (1941)
I could go on with quotes but you get my point.
4) The Soviet Union invaded Poland 2 weeks after the Nazis, at a time when there was no functioning Polish government anymore. Given the total crushing of the Polish forces by the Nazis and the rejection of a mutual-defense agreement from England and France with the Soviets, there is only one alternative to Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland: Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland. Seriously, what was the alternative, letting Nazis genocide even further east, killing arguably millions more in the process over these two years between Molotov-Ribbentrop and Operation Barbarossa? France and England, which did have a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, initiated war against Germany as a consequence of the Nazi invasion, but famously did not start war against the Soviets, the main reason in my opinion being the completely different character of the Soviet invasion. Regardless of this, please tell me. After the rejection of mutual-defense agreements with the Soviet Union: what was the alternative other than Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland?
I beg you answer point by point on my response because I’ve taken the time to do the actual reading on this, and I’m yet to see anything that can really challenge any of the points I’m making. Maybe you do have knowledge I’m missing and which would help me understand the history of Molotov-Ribbentrop better.
Thank you for typing out such a well-researched post.
I always appreciate discussing in good faith, and that’s what I’m here to do. We will probably never reach an agreement, but the discussion is worthwhile. I have the impression that you are emotionally invested in proving the moral good and righteousness of communism, and therefore the moral righteousness of the USSR, and will work backwards from that conclusion, pursuing you own confirmation bias. I don’t have any expectation that I can say anything to change your mind, and at the same time I realize that I’m equally susceptible to my own bias. But I respect you and I appreciate your thoughts, so I will give you mine:
Imperialists frequently call themselves “liberators”. The USSR did not concede the land to independent republics, but to it’s own states. The territory, natural resources, and wealth that was conquered and looted became part of the USSR. Historical records indicate that Soviets were almost as brutal occupiers as the Nazis. Soviets deported an estimated 1.2 million people, many of whom died or were forcibly conscripted. About 500,000 incarcerated, 150,000 killed. In the Katyn massacre alone about 22,000 prisoners of war were killed, arguably a genocide on its own, of already imprisoned and helpless people.
I don’t see any evidence this was the Soviets having a moral objection to Nazi’s, this looks like pure self-interest/self-preservation. There’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t think there’s any “good guys” in WWII, I think everyone, all Allied powers, were all acting out of self-interest, and not in an invested ethical objection to fascism. Imperialists are dangerous, because imperialism is powerful. Once Hitler started expanding, looting, enslaving, it was a massive boost to the economy and wealth and might of Nazi Germany. The Soviets were smart enough… or informed enough… to know and respect the dangerous threat that Hitler posed. The other Allies were stupid and/or ignorant, and did not know or expect how aggressively Hitler was looking to conquer Europe.
The other most popular Imperialist self-justification, besides being a “liberator”, is self defense. The US claims Iraq has WMD’s, invades. Israel claims it’s defending itself from Hamas, destroys Gaza (because those infants were such a threat). Modern Russia is almost a little too on the nose, using Soviet justification 1.5: “we need more Russian-controlled space between us and NATO”. Imperialists and Fascists need to play this morally polarized game constantly, where they themselves are morally righteous no matter what action they take, and their enemy is bad and evil or uncivilized no matter how they are being oppressed. They do moral justifications backwards: we are good, therefore, when we take action it must be good. You are bad, therefore when you are hurt by consequences, you must have deserved it.
The Nazi attack on Poland was a surprise to everyone except the Soviets. This is where the West began to suspect that the Molotov-Ribbentop Pact was more than just a non-aggression pact, ie existence of the “Secret Protocols”. “What alternative was there to Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland?” - leak the Secret Protocols and Hitler’s attack plans to the West. NOW there’s still a LOT of problems with my alternative. One week is not a lot of time, the Allied forces are unreliable, and Hitler is about to get a lot more powerful. I think you’re right, Soviets saw the situation and decided the pact was the better option. I don’t think the Soviets are evil; I think they acted in self-interest. It was better to take the opportunity to level-up their own power, in response to Hitler, than hope the flaky and useless West finally gets it together. I think Stalin made the smarter decision geopolitically, the smarter self-preservation decision was just… Imperialism.
Since you asked to take it point by point, and I could oblige, of course I must. And again I’m not expecting either of us to change our minds, but I appreciate you taking the time to take to me.
The USSR and US, the biggest contributors to the defeat of the Nazis, were/are both internally very fascist. The USSR originally sided with Hitler, and the Nazi party drew their inspiration from Jim Crow in the US. US and modern Russia have just slid even further into being imperialist authoritarian regimes.
Fascism thrives wherever there is military might, and power concentrated in the hands of a few.
Fascism is when you eliminate unemployment, guarantee housing, give free healthcare and education to every single person in the country, reduce wealth inequality to the lowest levels seen in the history of the country, and kill Nazis.
This is an especially disgusting lie to hear as a Spaniard. In 1936 in Spain there was a coup d’etat by the fascists against the Republican government, and the ONLY country in the world to supply weapons to the republicans against the fascists was the Soviet Union, while the Nazis supplied the fascist side and directly bombed the Republicans. The Soviets were fighting Nazism and fascism in Europe before anyone else.
The Soviet Union proposed France, Poland and England in 1939 to send ONE MILLION soldiers together with artillery, tanks and aviation, in exchange for a mutual defense agreement against Hitler, but these rejected. After ten years warning Europe, the Soviet Union decided that it wasn’t going to face Nazism in a one-on-one conflict (as that would be devastating for the country and would have likely ended the Soviet Union and killed tens of millions more of people than died already in the conflict), and instead decided to pursue a non-agression pact with the Nazis to postpone the war as much as possible. The Soviets had gone as far as offering to collectively invade Nazi Germany as an alternative to the Munich agreements, which again the allies rejected.
Stop trying to rewrite history. The Soviets saved Europe from Nazism, whether you like it or not.
A non-aggression pact which splits Poland and Eastern European countries between Stalin and Hitler via the secret protocol? It was imperialist opportunism. If you aren’t opposed to Soviet imperialism, you aren’t opposed to imperialism.
Ok, I’ll try to explain this in detail and in good faith. Please, I beg you do the effort of reading through my comment, I’ll explain the reasons why I believe Molotov-Ribbentrop wasn’t imperialism:
1) Most of the invaded “Polish” territories actually belong to modern Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus. In 1919, Poland started the Polish-Ukrainian war and invaded Ukraine, Belarus and part of the RSFSR. This so-called “carving of Poland by the Soviet Union” liberated many formerly oppressed non-Polish national ethnicities such as Lithuanians in Polish-controlled Vilnius arguably being genocided, or ceding the city of Lviv to the Ukraine SSR. Here’s a map of the territories of modern Poland that were actually invaded by the Soviets, and which ones (the vast majority) actually belong to modern Ukraine and Belarus.
And here’s a map of the pre-Molotov-Ribbentrop Poland and the majority ethnicities per region:
Please look at those two maps, and notice how the “Polish” territories invaded by the Soviet Union in 1939 were actually Ukrainian/Belarusian/Lithuanian majority and were returned to their corresponding republics after they were invaded and forcefully taken by Polish nationalists in 1919.
2) The Soviet Union had been trying for the entire 1930s to establish a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, France and Britain against the Nazis, under the doctrine of the then-People’s Commisar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov. This decade-long proposal for mutual-defence went completely ignored by France and England, which hoped to see a Nazi-Soviet conflict that would destroy both countries, and Poland didn’t agree to negotiations by itself either. The Soviet government went as far as to offer to send one million troops together with artillery, tanking and aviation, to Poland and France. The response was ignoring these pleas and offerings.
Furthermore, this armistice between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany happened only one year after the Munich Betrayal. The Soviet Union and France had a Mutual Defense Agreement with Czechoslovakia, which France (together with the UK) unilaterally violated in agreement with the Nazis when ceding Czechoslovak territories to Nazi Germany. Stalin offered France, as an alternative to the Munich Betrayals, a coordinated and two-front attack to Nazi Germany, which France rejected in favour of the Munich Agreements.
3) The Soviet Union had been through WW1 up to 1917, the Russian Civil War up to 1922 (including a famine that killed millions) in which western powers like France, England or the USA invaded the Bolsheviks and helped the tsarist Whites to reestablish tsarism, which ultimately ended with a costly Bolshevik victory; the many deaths of famine during the land-collectivization of 1929-1933, and up to 1929 was a mostly feudal empire with little to no industry to speak of. Only after the 1929 and 1934 5-year plans did the USSR manage to slightly industrialize, but these 10 years of industrialization were barely anything in comparison with the 100 years of industrialization Nazi Germany enjoyed. The Soviet Union in 1939 was utterly underdeveloped to face Nazi Germany alone, as proven further by the 27 million casualties in the war that ended Nazism. The fact that the Soviet Union “carved Eastern Europe” in the so-called “secret protocol” was mostly in self-defense. The geography of the Great European Plain made it extremely difficult to have any meaningful defenses against Nazis with weaponry and technological superiority, again proven by the fact that the first meaningful victory against Nazis was not in open field but in the battle of Stalingrad, which consisted more of a siege of a city. The Soviet Union, out of self-preservation, wanted to simply add more Soviet-controlled distance between themselves and the Nazis. You don’t have to take my word for all of this, you can hear it from western diplomats and officials from the period itself. I hope nobody will find my choice of personalities to reflect a pro-Soviet bias:
“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)
"It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938) Mission to Moscow (1941)
I could go on with quotes but you get my point.
4) The Soviet Union invaded Poland 2 weeks after the Nazis, at a time when there was no functioning Polish government anymore. Given the total crushing of the Polish forces by the Nazis and the rejection of a mutual-defense agreement from England and France with the Soviets, there is only one alternative to Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland: Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland. Seriously, what was the alternative, letting Nazis genocide even further east, killing arguably millions more in the process over these two years between Molotov-Ribbentrop and Operation Barbarossa? France and England, which did have a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, initiated war against Germany as a consequence of the Nazi invasion, but famously did not start war against the Soviets, the main reason in my opinion being the completely different character of the Soviet invasion. Regardless of this, please tell me. After the rejection of mutual-defense agreements with the Soviet Union: what was the alternative other than Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland?
I beg you answer point by point on my response because I’ve taken the time to do the actual reading on this, and I’m yet to see anything that can really challenge any of the points I’m making. Maybe you do have knowledge I’m missing and which would help me understand the history of Molotov-Ribbentrop better.
Thanks for reading anyway.
Thank you for typing out such a well-researched post.
I always appreciate discussing in good faith, and that’s what I’m here to do. We will probably never reach an agreement, but the discussion is worthwhile. I have the impression that you are emotionally invested in proving the moral good and righteousness of communism, and therefore the moral righteousness of the USSR, and will work backwards from that conclusion, pursuing you own confirmation bias. I don’t have any expectation that I can say anything to change your mind, and at the same time I realize that I’m equally susceptible to my own bias. But I respect you and I appreciate your thoughts, so I will give you mine:
Imperialists frequently call themselves “liberators”. The USSR did not concede the land to independent republics, but to it’s own states. The territory, natural resources, and wealth that was conquered and looted became part of the USSR. Historical records indicate that Soviets were almost as brutal occupiers as the Nazis. Soviets deported an estimated 1.2 million people, many of whom died or were forcibly conscripted. About 500,000 incarcerated, 150,000 killed. In the Katyn massacre alone about 22,000 prisoners of war were killed, arguably a genocide on its own, of already imprisoned and helpless people.
I don’t see any evidence this was the Soviets having a moral objection to Nazi’s, this looks like pure self-interest/self-preservation. There’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t think there’s any “good guys” in WWII, I think everyone, all Allied powers, were all acting out of self-interest, and not in an invested ethical objection to fascism. Imperialists are dangerous, because imperialism is powerful. Once Hitler started expanding, looting, enslaving, it was a massive boost to the economy and wealth and might of Nazi Germany. The Soviets were smart enough… or informed enough… to know and respect the dangerous threat that Hitler posed. The other Allies were stupid and/or ignorant, and did not know or expect how aggressively Hitler was looking to conquer Europe.
The other most popular Imperialist self-justification, besides being a “liberator”, is self defense. The US claims Iraq has WMD’s, invades. Israel claims it’s defending itself from Hamas, destroys Gaza (because those infants were such a threat). Modern Russia is almost a little too on the nose, using Soviet justification 1.5: “we need more Russian-controlled space between us and NATO”. Imperialists and Fascists need to play this morally polarized game constantly, where they themselves are morally righteous no matter what action they take, and their enemy is bad and evil or uncivilized no matter how they are being oppressed. They do moral justifications backwards: we are good, therefore, when we take action it must be good. You are bad, therefore when you are hurt by consequences, you must have deserved it.
The Nazi attack on Poland was a surprise to everyone except the Soviets. This is where the West began to suspect that the Molotov-Ribbentop Pact was more than just a non-aggression pact, ie existence of the “Secret Protocols”. “What alternative was there to Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland?” - leak the Secret Protocols and Hitler’s attack plans to the West. NOW there’s still a LOT of problems with my alternative. One week is not a lot of time, the Allied forces are unreliable, and Hitler is about to get a lot more powerful. I think you’re right, Soviets saw the situation and decided the pact was the better option. I don’t think the Soviets are evil; I think they acted in self-interest. It was better to take the opportunity to level-up their own power, in response to Hitler, than hope the flaky and useless West finally gets it together. I think Stalin made the smarter decision geopolitically, the smarter self-preservation decision was just… Imperialism.
Since you asked to take it point by point, and I could oblige, of course I must. And again I’m not expecting either of us to change our minds, but I appreciate you taking the time to take to me.