They didn't, they prevented the attacker from taking all of Poland. The goal of Nazi invasion was to grab land and labor, to colonize Poland, not to just attack Poland. Preventing more people from being colonized by the genocidal Nazis is a good thing.
Cowbee
joined 2 years ago
So your point is that the Soviet Union should have fought the Nazis there and then, without formalizing alliance with the west who made it clear that they wished the Nazis and Soviets would kill each other? You would have had the Soviets commit suicide for Poland, rather than trying to close their industrial gap with the Nazis as much as possible and align with the west? This is incredibly silly.
As for Katyn, it's more intentional mistranslation, there was admittance of prisoner transport. None of this explains why the execution method was the exact same as the Nazis, in Nazi territory, with Nazi bullets manufactured during 1941.
I've already explained, it was a way for the Soviets to limit Nazi advances without breaking the pact. Neither country expected the pact to last very long, this wasn't a coordinated plan to take over Europe but a way to stall the Nazi advance. Your point would require the Soviets to have genuinely wished to be allies of the Nazis, and to intend on doing so throughout all of World War II.
What part of "they tried to forge an alliance with Poland to protect against Nazi attack, which Poland declined, and then prevented the Nazis from taking all of Poland and extending the Holocaust to all of Poland" was confusing for you? They did try to prevent the invasion, Poland hated the Soviets more than they feared the Nazis.
No problem!
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.
It was an agreement for the Nazis to not press beyond certain boundaries, which is what prevented Poland from being entirely colonized by the genocidal Nazis, and the intent on the Soviet side was to stall the Nazis. There were no long-term plans for alliance.