Oh, good topic! I always recommend Blackshirts and Reds. Another good one is Michael Hudson's Super-Imperialism. I also intend on reading Settlers soon. Can't neglect to mention Capital, the sections specifically on the conditions of labor in early Britain, with child labor, suffocation, crushing, etc. were genuinely revolting.
As a side-note, I made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list, if you find yourself generally interested in the topics I listed above.
They did. The Eastern Pact was killed by the British, French, and Polish. Poland hated Russia, and had just been at war with the USSR 2 decades ago, where they took areas in Ukraine and Lithuania. When the Soviet Union entered Poland after the Polish state fell to the Nazis, they met resistance and obviously met that resistance with force, but the way the Soviets treated the Polish and the way the Nazis treated the Polish were entirely uncomparable, the Nazis were slaughtering men, women, and children in unmarked mass graves. Goebbels even tried to blame one such massacre on the Red Army, Katyn, despite the spent ammunition clearly being marked as produced by Nazi Germany in 1941.
The Nazis took Brest, and when the Soviets arrived, the Nazis pulled back rather than directly antagonizing the Soviets and risking war before Barbarossa. This isn't complicated, had the Soviets not arrived, the Nazis would have stayed or pushed onward. As for the Nazi request for support, the Soviets only partially complied, trying to tread the line between collapsing the non-agression pact and giving as little support as possible. I didn't bother responding to this point because you were already lying elsewhere.
The Soviets informing Lithuania of the details of the non-aggression pact was a good thing. What's your point, exactly? That the nation that spent a decade trying to form an anti-Nazi alliance, was ideologically opposed to Nazism, when the Nazis were murdering communists, were secretly friends the whole time and that the war was an unexpected betrayal? This kind of nonsense anti-communism is historical revisionism and erasure of context.
It remains true that the country that did the most to try to stop the Nazi threat before World War II, and contributed the most to stopping the Nazis during it, was the Soviet Union, and it isn't close.
Sure, so again, it seems like you would've had the Soviet Union let all of Poland be subject to the Holocaust instead of half of it.
Gotcha, so you would've let the Nazis take all of Poland, with all of the consequences of that, such as extending the Holocaust to further ground. The Soviets were doing all they could to prepare, so this just reads as you preferring Poland be sacrificed so the Soviets could have maintained "moral purity."
Correct, because they didn't.
The western allies were doing tons of trade with the Nazis and sabotaged talks of alliance with the Soviets up until the war, hoping each would kill the other. This isn't controversial.
Neither country expected the treaty to last, and the areas in Poland were largely areas annexed from Ukraine and Lithuania beforehand. Is your point that the Soviets expected the Nazis to stay non-hostile until the end of World War II or even beyond it? Not only would that have been stupid, we have evidence to the contrary, that neither country expected the treaty to last.
We know that the Soviet Union was industrializing at incredibly high rates, but was still far behind Germany in total industrialization. We know that the west was trading a ton with the Nazis, and were hostile to the Soviets. We know that the Nazis and Soviets hated each other. What should the Soviet Union have done? Declare war before they were ready, and risk everyone allying with Nazi Germany? Let the Nazis take all of Poland?
The only one trying to do that legitimately was the USSR, Britain and France sabotaged talks of anti-Nazi alliance every single time. The west wanted the Nazis and Soviets to kill each other, and then finish off the weaker one if possible.
Yes, this was not an agreement to invade jointly, the USSR entered Poland 17 days after the Nazis did. This was the Soviet Union providing a "no-go" line for the Nazis in the event of Nazi invasion, largely including areas Poland had invaded and annexed from Lithuania and Ukraine a couple decades prior.
No problem!