this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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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.
So you are straight up denying the existence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact?
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, all 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.
No, I'm denying your framing of it
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.
An organization that bombastically calls itself ‘EUvsDisinfo’, splatters a diplomatic photograph with fake blood, and preemptively dismisses counterevidence as ‘pro‐Kremlin disinformation’ does not sound like something that has an interest in exploring this matter in good faith, but I can play along (for now). Simply put, your source leaves too much counterevidence unaddressed. This, for example:
(Source and more here.)
I know that I did not address everything in your link, but frankly I really doubt that you have the time, patience, or interest in reading a thoroughly sourced and exhaustive commentary on it. For simplicity’s sake I chose to focus on the denial that the liberal capitalists wanted a reinvasion of Soviet Eurasia.
Source: euvsdisinfo
"Your comment is state propaganda! Here's some state propaganda from my side to discredit it!!"
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.
Something tells me that if I invited anticommunists to check out a source with the self‐heroizing title of ‘RFvsMisinfo’, featuring a blood‐splattered photograph from the Munich conference and various sentences presupposing that any counterevidence is ‘Western propaganda’, they would feel more than a wee discouraged, too… just saying.
Sloppy propaganda aside, it is genuinely interesting to compare and contrast the Fascists’ dealings with other dictatorships of the bourgeoisie to their dealings with the people’s republics. It isn’t useful just for dunking on anticommies. For example:
And since somebody mentioned deportations of Jews:
Admittedly, I feel like a sicko for saying that these subjects ‘interest’ me… but hey, somebody has to get their hands dirty when studying these tragedies. It’s only fitting that the one doing the job most often would also be the one who can tolerate it the best.
And we salute you for your impressive work. Thank you.
Yea... I probably wouldn't be able to do this, I couldn't deal with it.
Yeah, kinda insane how mask-off the "euvsdisinfo" thing is. At least they did the thing better with the Adrian Zenz and Uyghurs, using established media as a smokescreen to hide the fact that it was all Radio Free Asia. But I guess the US propaganda apparatus is bound to be more refined.
Thank you for the links to your other posts, interesting stuff. I don't think you're a sicko. To me, it's important to analyse the actual history of the systems we defend (and the ones we want to emancipate from) in order to better understand what we're fighting for, what we're fighting against, and how to avoid certain mistakes in the future. It's great that we have people like you in the movement.
Have you compiled all of this information somewhere easy to access?
Yes, but I stopped updating the megathread because of the character limit. Seriously, I added so much content to the thread that our software couldn’t take it anymore. I’ve been thinking about using Github as an alternative, though I am inexperienced with that platform and I am unsure if others would want me to continue my compilation there.
I mean, that's fucking amazing. Seriously, thank you.
Since it's mostly just text (and links, which are also kinda text), maybe it would just be easier to have a pastebin or something?