Not the OP, but even though I respect the Soviet space results, the USSR itself was an abomination, a prison of nations, a rehashed Russian empire rebased on a totalitarian creed.
The eastern half of Europe took the first opportunity to run away from its grip, including my nation.
Happy (and naive) are the people who never lived under Moscow's rule.
If you're from Eastern Europe (well, Central), like I am:
* two big totalitarian systems, the USSR and the Reich, start the war together by dismembering Poland, then divide the region according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, very nice,
* the USSR spends two years providing the Nazi war machine with necessary resources, thus indirectly aiding our local subjugation,
* then, as usual with bandits, one turns on the other,
* four years later, one loses, the other occupies half of Europe and introduces their own dystopian totalitarian systems there.
The Soviet rule was better in the sense that they didn't consider us racial subhumans, but "liberation" contains the word "liberty", and personal liberty was an extremely scarce good in the Stalinist era.
Nazi Germany started the war. Full stop. The USSR did engage in appeasement from 1939-41, after the French and British sold out Czechoslovakia (and Poland opportunistically took a piece), which the USSR wanted to defend. The USSR knew that it was very high on the Nazis' target list (ideologically, Hitler viewed the Bolsheviks as his primary enemy), so Stalin decided to make a rotten deal with him to delay the war by as long as possible. Stalin was cowardly and opportunistic, but painting this as if the USSR started WWII is absurd.
If it weren't for the Red Army, the Nazis would have physically annihilated the entire Slavic population of Eastern Europe. That was their plan.
The USSR absolutely co-started WWII, the whole meaning of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was to divide Eastern Europe into a Soviet part and a German part. Yes, they had several motives at once. So do regular gangsters. If a gangster teams up with other gangsters for a job, they are usually afraid of one another as well.
"The USSR knew that it was very high on the Nazis' target list (ideologically, Hitler viewed the Bolsheviks as his primary enemy), so Stalin decided to make a rotten deal with him to delay the war by as long as possible. Stalin was cowardly and opportunistic"
Of course the USSR knew, but they also knew that German forces would be engaged in the West, for some time at least. Moscow, together with everyone else, didn't expect France to fold so easily.
BTW I don't consider Stalin particularly cowardly, just psychopathic and evil.
"If it weren't for the Red Army, the Nazis would have physically annihilated the entire Slavic population of Eastern Europe. That was their plan."
True, I acknowledge that, and yet I loathe the USSR.
Imagine a girl caught by a murderer. A rapist comes along, saves her from the murderer, then proceeds to chain her in his house and rape her for several decades. Would you tell the girl "be at least somewhat respectful to your rapist, he saved your life"?
> The USSR absolutely co-started WWII, the whole meaning of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was to divide Eastern Europe into a Soviet part and a German part.
This is a complete rewrite of the history of WWII. The USSR did not initiate WWII. It was Nazi Germany that drove the escalating conflict and aimed to conquer Europe.
The argument you're making could be turned around to say that Poland co-started WWII when it conspired with Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia - something that Poland actually did in 1938. And by the way, at that time, the USSR was willing to go to war to defend Czechoslovakia from Nazi aggression, and it was Poland that blocked that idea by refusing to cooperate with the USSR. But that argument would be equally wrong as your argument: Poland simply acted opportunistically, while Germany was the one driving the conflict.
After the British and French sold out Czechoslovakia, the Soviets did an about face and decided to make a deal to save their own skin. Stalin was deathly afraid of a German invasion of the USSR, and wanted to make sure that Germany did not launch its war against the USSR first. Again, the driving factor in this was the knowledge that Germany was preparing for aggressive war. Without that, there simply would not have been WWII. The USSR was not planning any offensive war, nor was it in any position to launch one. Stalin was busy purging the Red Army officer corps.
Stalin was absolutely a coward on this issue. He was paralyzed by fear of a German invasion. He refused to accept the many different strands of intelligence which indicated that a German invasion was imminent. He kept sending supplies to Germany until the day of the invasion, in order to buy off the Germans. He was even told the exact date of the invasion by Richard Sorge, and he ignored it. The Red Army was caught completely flat-footed. Most of the air force was wiped out on the ground. That's not the sign of a country ready for an imminent war. Again, it was Germany driving events.
I do think you should be thankful to the USSR for saving you and your country from annihilation and extermination. They sacrificed millions of people to do so.
It's a bit harsh to demand that people are thankful for decades of oppression. Central and eastern Europe were caught between two monsters, but one of them lasted a lot longer.
The main reason that the USSR's role in the start of WW2 has been ignored for so long, is because they were part of the victorious side, and their contribution was absolutely vital to the defeat of the Nazis. But they did launch offensive wars, against Poland, Finland and the Baltic states. They're traditionally not seen as part of WW2 only because the Nazis weren't involved and they were initiated by one of the victors of the war, but they happened at the exact same time, while Germany was invading Poland and Scandinavia.
Russia's conquest of eastern Europe was no liberation.
> Russia's conquest of eastern Europe was no liberation.
This is an insane statement. Driving out the genocidal Nazi rule was absolutely liberation. Practically no one in Eastern Europe would be alive today if the Soviets had lost the war.
He literally said the Soviets “started with genocide before the Nazis even arrived” and then listed three things that aren't genocide, as a way of downplaying the fact that the Nazis planned to exterminate most of the people in Eastern Europe. Baltic peoples, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs all exist today. That would not be the case if the Soviets had lost the war.
That really depends on how you look at it. By that argument, to Ukrainians, the Nazis were the liberators. The Soviets had starved millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor, and many, including the infamous Stepan Bandera, erroneously saw the Nazis as liberators. Thing is, liberation requires actually being free afterwards. Neither the Nazis nor the Soviets were liberators. They just replaced another oppressor.
And sure, the Nazis were even worse, but we should really stop pretending that the Soviet occupation was great.
Nazi Germany was stronger and could plausibly plan continent domination, true. But the USSR was an active, albeit smaller participant. Why precisely did they attack Finland and attack and conquer the Baltic States? Hitler made them do it again?
No, that was pure imperial expansion, finding some weaker and richer states to loot and control.
I will not defend the Western powers on Munich, they betrayed us completely and reaped the whirlwind.
"I do think you should be thankful to the USSR for saving you and your country from annihilation and extermination."
Intent behind your action matters and if the intent is to enslave you, that is a very bad, criminal intent. I noticed that you didn't address my analogy with a rapist that saves you from a murderer in order to chain you down in their dungeon. This is why I will not be thankful to the USSR as a country and a system. Immediately after the front units, "SMERSH" secret police units murdered and abducted people who were on Stalins hit list, should I be thankful for that as well? Should their families be thankful for such "liberation"?
"They sacrificed millions of people"
Stalin sacrificed millions of people. He also did so on other occasions, like the mad purges of the 1930s, destroying kulaks by artificial famines or deporting various minorities into barely survivable deserts and polar regions.
Death of millions was Stalin's thing, in peace or war.
"to do so."
Again, our survival mattered to Moscow only to the extent that most rational slave masters are interested in keeping their slaves alive and productive. (The Nazis were irrational in this regard.)
The Soviet Union did not see Central Europe as sovereign nations, but as a bounty to be conquered and abused, basically colonies for extraction. This view survives today in Russia. Visit any Russian-language forum where discussion turns to Ukraine and plenty of people will express the idea that we are their escaped property that, through negligence of Gorbachev, could find itself a new "master" (voluntary alignment between countries just does not register in this worldview) and now are being used as "pawns" against "the Russian civilization".
The view that smaller nations hate their previous subjugation by Moscow and don't want to repeat it is just incomprehensible to them. In their view, we should be thankful for being liberated from Hitler, and nothing else that happened afterwards counts.
You also seem to be of the idea that nothing else that happened afterwards counts... why?
I can at least see an argument to be thankful to individual Soviet soldiers who fought Hitler. They were often driven so by the threat of penal batallions, but still. But the USSR as a system was an evil totalitarian entity intent on occupying, looting and terrorizing everyone within their reach. Only the extent of their effective reach varied, from very weak in the 1930s to rather large by 1950. No thankfulness to this abomination, ever, that is what I will die upon.
They attacked Finland for the same reason the British invaded Iceland: they knew it would not be able to remain neutral, and they wanted to ensure that the Germans could not use it. The Germans were invading neutral states left and right, and the Soviets were not about to let a country whose border was just a few kilometers from Leningrad fall under Nazi control.
Just like the Western Allies, the Soviets were acting in reaction to the insanely aggressive moves that Germany was taking. They viewed it as a life-or-death issue. Germany, the strongest state in Europe, had conducted a massive military buildup and was bent on conquering the continent.
> They attacked Finland for the same reason the British invaded Iceland
Demonstrably false. The British aim was never to annex Iceland into the UK. The British did not establish a puppet government like the Soviets tried with the Finnish Democratic Republic. Nor did they start murdering Icelandic political and societal leaders to make it unselfgovernable, like the USSR did everywhere across Eastern Europe, nor did the British start resettling people to wipe out Icelandic culture and identity. Iceland's government continued to operate independently until the British forces withdrew in 1941. Russia still hold on to the ~11% of pre-war Finland that they grabbed and they've wiped out the native population.
The talking point about threat from Germany is also hollow, to put it mildly. The USSR and Germany were allies at the time, and their secret protocol had assigned Finland to the USSR for conquest. To support Germany's invasions under their agreement, the USSR supplied massive quantities of raw resources (such as oil, cotton and grains) to bypass the economic blockade of Germany and bolster the German war machine in 1939-1941. The USSR was delivering 140 000 tons of oil each month as Luftwaffe was bombing London and was short on fuel.
"They attacked Finland for the same reason the British invaded Iceland: they knew it would not be able to remain neutral, and they wanted to ensure that the Germans could not use it."
Given that this forum has some rules about being polite, I will just stop here without saying something awful.
It is very unfortunate that Stalinist apologia is still somehow acceptable in the West. It is a direct consequence of the fact that Stalin's concentration camps were never liberated by an external force that would forever document their horrors.
This is completely bullshit. Sweden stayed neutral. Finland is a lot further from Germany than Sweden is. If Russia hadn't invaded, Finland could easily have remained neutral. It was Russia's invasion that drove Finland into German arms.
You need to quit your revisionism and Soviet apologia. The USSR was oppressive and expansionist. Not quite as much as the Nazis, but they weren't that far behind. You painting them as friendly liberators who really had no other choice but to invade and conquer, is exactly the kind of propaganda that Putin uses today to justify his wars.
The eastern half of Europe took the first opportunity to run away from its grip, including my nation.
Happy (and naive) are the people who never lived under Moscow's rule.