Obviously, my utmost respect to the brave workers and soldiers of all the ethnicities in the USSR that contributed to the slaughter of the Nazi monster, including not just Russians but Belarusians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Maris… Belarus and Ukraine took the worst part because they were occupied by the Nazis who had a policy of extermination of the Slavic peoples, it’s truly horrifying what the people of said republics had to endure.
Good moment to join a union by yourself (and/or a socialist org like the PSL) and ask or directly organize yourself together with such orgs!
I respect and appreciate Lend-Lease, I can’t tell if it saved the war, but it certainly saved hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives by providing much-needed humanitary assistance in hunger-struck WW2 USSR.
As for conciseness, I don’t believe I’ve taken too long to explain my point of view, it’s just that the geopolitics of the era are complicated, and they require lengthy explanation by themselves. I haven’t overcomplicated anything, and it’s your choice whether to read it or not, but it’s a collection of several extremely important points IMO that define the Soviet policy in the prelude of the Great Patriotic War.
As for Poland, can you pinpoint me to what exactly of my analysis you disagree with? I’d like to learn more if you have any valuable input
By Soviet sweat, blood and tears. The Soviet Union lost an unimaginable 25 million lives (with some regions like Belarus losing ONE IN THREE PEOPLE) in the struggle against Nazism. Say what you will about the Soviet Union but they are the liberators of Europe and they will have my eternal gratitude for it, especially as a Spaniard, since they were the only country in the Spanish Civil War to send weapons, tanks and planes to the antifascists. Forever will love the Soviet BT-5 tanks and the I-16 “moscas” in their labor of killing fascists in Spain!
Oh and let’s not ignore the Soviets allying with Nazi Germany to annex Poland.
This is a widely repeated misconstruction of the events in Reddit and Lemmy. I’m gonna please ask you to actually read my comment and to be open to the historical evidence I bring (using Wikipedia as a source, hopefully not suspect of being tankie-biased), because I believe there is a great mistake in the way contemporary western nations interpret history of WW2 and the interwar period. Thank you for actually making the effort, I know it’s a long comment, but please do engage with the points I’m making:
The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.” Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn’t want to. By the logic of “invading Poland” being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.
As a Spaniard leftist it’s so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren’t dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn’t agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won’t find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.
The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of nowadays when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:
“Polish” territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:
The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?
Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.
All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:
“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)
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this
So did the other allies, do you suddenly like capitalist countries?
Tankie here: I do like the English and French contribution in the European theater post-1939, but let’s remember the scale. 80% of dead Nazi soldiers were killed at the Eastern Front, and all polls in France post-WW2 clearly show that everyone knew it was the Soviets who saved their asses from Nazi extermination. We tankies make it a point to talk about the USSR’s main role in the liberation of Europe from Nazism because this role has been severely downplayed and anti-propagandized since the cold war.
I’ll reply to the “Soviets allying with the Nazis to annex Poland” in the folowing comment because it’s way too long for just one comment
Plenty of delicious struggle meals if you get creative, half of “popular” cuisine stems from them. Spanish cocido and tortilla de patata are a few examples of well-loved affordable struggle meals.
That’s when it was under Chinese ownership, remember they had to sell the US Tiktok to a Yankee company
“Fast” train, going 150km/h half the trip duration lmfao
Is there no union or organization locally that you can ask? Protest isn’t an individual action, it’s a social organized action, so you ideally should get involved with local orgs or your work’s union for this
Don’t you have a student’s union or representative? Get informed locally on your rights and possibilities.
I’m also in the EU, and I’d much rather get some posts calling for grassroots political action than the constant “elon said something Nazi again”.
Organizations like the PSL do have lists of demands and are actively building a movement around this to gain momentum. You should check them out :)
How does this affect anything?
It’s a momentum thing. one general strike won’t change the world, it’s the start of a much larger movement to get people to organize in socialist organizations like the PSL (remember socialism has always been fascism’s greatest enemy) and in unions. A one-day general strike is not a “perfect is the enemy of good” logic, it’s simply materially impossible to get everyone to rally in one week, or one month, or likely one year. It’s just a start and a show of strength.
There are such thing as medical personnel strikes. Typically, public sectors organize so-called “minimum services”, so they leave a minimum of people to stay in the hospitals / trains / buses for obvious reasons, and the rest go out to protest. A day with fewer nurses and doctors may be bad, but fascism is lethal too.
There was hope to change the system until they started killing white people, suddenly reform is out of the question. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you reached that conclusion, but some people did decades ago already, and it’s good to follow the advice of those who got to the right conclusion before you
George Floyd was famously a movement for Black Lives Matter, and there was no suggestion of general strike
Reflecting on past mistakes isn’t necessarily demoralizing, realizing that this isnt a new thing is good for future analysis. Hopefully everyone will come out too when the following George Floyd gets inevitably murdered
I commend your appreciation of the field as a science, but you should also acknowledge that 80% of what’s currently taught in the academia about economics is just wrong. Supply and demand (unfalsifiable and shitty predictive capabilities compared to the falsifiable and empirically proven labour theory of value) is just one example in the long list of econ-101 bullshit.
Regardless, as an appreciator of economics, have you checked out econophysics? The study of economics as a thermodynamical system. It’s wonderful, with predictive capabilities on for example salary distributions in capitalist economies, Paul Cockshott has a book and a few introductory videos on his YouTube channel
I’m not trying to argue about alternate history, you can speculate as much as you want about a Soviet victory with or without those trucks, I already said that it’s factual that lend-lease saved hundreds of thousands if not millions of Soviet lives. What’s this interrogation?