@moffintosh Being critical of the West is okay, but why whitewash Stalin — he was just as much a piece of shit as Hitler was. The top arguments are debatable, yet, German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty is very real. Did anyone else have a friendship treaty with the Nazis? The article in Pravda in which Stalin is very protective of Hitler is also very real. Talking about defending someone from Hitler in this light is just laughable — fighting over spheres of influence isn't protecting.
Pinning it on the West is wrong on so many levels.
See also "Big Business and the Rise of Hitler"
Soviet Union was also doing bussiness with Hitler, trains carrying commodities were moving till the very invasion, the worst part is that Germany might not have enough resources to start the invasion had this not been happening.
You mean after tge west financed them and commerced with them for years?
SU was providing training grounds to German pilots at Lipetsk air base. Soviet Union was extraditing Jews to the Nazi Germany to their imminent death, there is so much more than M-R pact.
Imma need a source for those, expecially given Stalin's speach of 1931 and the bolsheviks being generally pro national self-determination (see finland in 1918)
@moffintosh@berserker.town @m0xee@social.librem.one The Soviets did, indeed, provide training and facilities to Wiemar Germany after WW1, but:
In August 1933, Molotov assured German ambassador Herbert von Dirksen that Soviet-German relations would depend exclusively on the attitude of Germany towards the Soviet Union.[47] However, Reichswehr access to the three military training and testing sites (Lipetsk, Kama, and Tomka) was abruptly terminated by the Soviet Union in August–September 1933
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany%E2%80%93Soviet_Union_relations,_1918%E2%80%931941#Initial_relations_after_Hitler's_election@moffintosh@berserker.town Also, regarding Soviet economic assistance claims:
Economically, the Soviet Union made repeated efforts to reestablish closer contacts with Germany in the mid-1930s.[55] The Soviet Union chiefly sought to repay debts from earlier trade with raw materials, while Germany sought to rearm. The two countries signed a credit agreement in 1935.[56]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany%E2%80%93Soviet_Union_relations,_1918%E2%80%931941#Relations_in_the_mid-1930sSo, this was all in the early-mid 1930s when Hitler was being elected and shortly after Hitler was elected as Chancellor of Germany. I.e., this wasn't the full-blown Nazi Germany we are familiar with in books and movies. For all intents and purposes this was still Wiemar Germany under brand new Nazi leadership beginning the rearming process. And this trade with the USSR wasn't some good-will/supportive measure, it was that the USSR was in debt to Germany and they were trying to pay down their loans. @m0xee@social.librem.one
@adiz @m0xee God this guy's wikipedia is nuts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Tolstoy
@moffintosh@berserker.town Dubious source, sure, but I think it's pretty well documented/understood that Stalin was antisemitic. Which is whatever, lots of people were antisemitic. That's like denigrating some random "great" historical figure because he/she didn't like "gypsies"---nobody did within the historical context. It's kinda a strawman since Stalin's attitudes and Stalinist USSR's actions towards Jews isn't relevant to the core arguments at hand, and neither Stalin nor Stalinist USSR participated in Nazi Germany's genocide of Jewish folks. @m0xee@social.librem.one
@adiz @moffintosh I have a very different impression of this. I don't think that Stalin personally was antisemitic, but he wasn't against throwing Jews under the bus for the sake of appeasing his ally. I don't have any link at hand, but there were many Jews in higher ranks of NKVD and they were getting replaced as cooperation was gaining steam. So yes, there was no partaking in the genocide, but Stalin had nothing against that either.
@adiz @moffintosh
No, I'm not talking about the 30-ies, this was going on up to the very invasion, e.g. this :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German–Soviet_Commercial_Agreement_(1940)
It was happening when WW2 had already started and the friendship pact was in effect.
You're right about the flight school, this was indeed in the thirties that is exactly why I explicitly called them German pilots, not Nazi — and yet this was instrumental for the future of Luftwaffe.
Although I might, I'm not picking sides here, I'm just stating that portraying as capitalists making the Hitler Hitler and Soviet Union fighting the armies of evil is turning things upside down. They were all cooperating up to a certain point, SU wasn't trying to protect the world from Nazism, although they were fighting for spheres of influence, but that's different, right?
And you don't sign a friendship pact with the ones you view as pure evil right? Not just peace treaty how many try to make M-R pact look, a friendship pact — while WW2 was already in progress. And no, I don't find the theory that it was just to buy time plausible — you don't supply valuable resources to your enemy to buy time. The fact that SU lost territory greater than the whole France in the first months indicates that SU was very ill equipped. Soviet Union entered WW2 as Hitler's ally, that's a fact — Stalin did view Hitler as an ally, among other things there were of course some preparations for Germany's attack — no denying, but there are a lot of things indicating that Stalin didn't think of that as of the most likely scenario.
There was genuine cooperation with the Nazis from both, Western capitalist counties and the SU. "SU was always fighting Nazis" is just bullshit — that's my point.
@m0xee
@moffintosh And yes, Soviet Union was also doing bussiness with Hitler, trains carrying commodities were moving till the very invasion, the worst part is that Germany might not have enough resources to start the invasion had this not been happening. SU was providing training grounds to German pilots at Lipetsk air base. Soviet Union was extraditing Jews to the Nazi Germany to their imminent death, there is so much more than M-R pact. Pinning it on the West is wrong on so many levels.