volodya_ilich

Ok, that's really good insight, so it boils down to France not respecting the 1935 treaty by refusing to declare Czechoslovakia as a victim of aggression?

As a Spanish, I can relate too well (sadly) to the part where the president of Czechoslovakia says "I did not dare to fight with Russian aid alone, because I knew that the British and French Governments would make out of my country another Spain", I assume they're talking of how the Soviet Union was the only country to sell weapons to Republican Spain in their fight against fascism, even as the Nazis and Italian Fascists were militarily and economically helping the reactionaries in Spain, and how France and England didn't do anything under the guise of "non-interventionism".

Sorry, I was going with Wikipedia there, care to elaborate more on what happened then?

invading poland side by side with the nazis

Again, literal Nazi revisionism. The invasion of Poland was mostly a peaceful process, and the only aim was to establish pro-communist forces in the area that would ensure Poland would join the USSR against the Nazis when the Nazis attacked. The same was attempted in Finland, and what do you know, Finland actually did join the Nazis during the Continuation War. And what do you know, the USSR retreated its troops from Poland after WW2.

Poland could have entered a military alliance with the USSR for the former 10 years, Stalin went as far as offering to send ONE MILLION soldiers, together with aviation and artillery, to military allies if France, England and Poland joined in a military alliance against the Nazis. But I guess they would rather see the Nazis massacre the communists first. That strategy didn't work out as planned now, did it?

They didn't want to get rid of the Nazis

This is incredibly ahistorical revisionism. The USSR prepared for the war against Nazi Germany for many years before it started. In the second half of the 1930s, seeing the Nazi rising to power (Nazis being overt enemies of Communism, as proven by what they did to Communists and to Unions in their controlled territories), they ramped up the weapon production and their military industry, and I'll say it again in case it didn't register: they spent the entire 30s seeking out military alliances with France, England and Poland against the Nazis. They offered military help to Czechoslovakia in 1938 during the Munich agreements in which Sudetenland was given to the Nazis.

Why do you think they had a NAP?

They had a non-aggression pact because Germany was an established industrial power for 100+ years at that point, while the USSR had had 19 years from 1921 after the Russian Civil War and WW1 to rebuild the country and to industrialise. They desperately needed every year they could get to reduce the industrial gap between them and the Nazis, as proven by the immense human cost to the USSR in the war against Nazis.

The Soviets literally saved Eastern Europe from an even worse fate, at immense cost of human lives (25+ million human lives lost in the USSR to Nazism), god knows how many millions more of Slavs (and other groups like Jews and Roma) the Nazis would have genocided if it hadn't been for the Soviets. Have some respect before spewing anti-communist, nazi propaganda here, please.

because they wanted to do imperialism

You're just showing you don't know what "imperialism" is. The USSR never engaged in resource exploitation or unequal exchange with other countries, its terms of trade were always comparatively fair, especially if you compare those to the terms of trade of the western world.

The USSR didn't have any imperialist ambitions. For fucks sake, the literal first thing the Bolsheviks did in 1917 after the October Revolution, was to implement a constitution which gave the full right of self-determination and unilateral secession to all peoples of the former Russian Empire, it's literally how Poland gained independence, as well as many other countries like Finland or Ukraine. What did Poland immediately do: invading Ukraine and modern Belarus and attacking the RSFSR during the Russian Civil War because of its expansionist nationalist desires of going back to Polish-Lithuanian borders. Maybe that helps explain why the USSR didn't trust Poland not to join the Nazis, especially after 10 years of Poland, France and England rejecting to form military alliances with the USSR against Nazis? Finns, after the winter war, quite literally joined the Nazis in the continuation war, going all the way to participating in the siege of Leningrad.

After the war, most of these countries that the USSR invaded went back to being their own countries as the USSS retreated all its troops. Such imperialism, amirite? The influence of the USSR in the politics of Eastern European countries after WW2, isn't any greater than the influence of the US in western Europe, so unless you're claiming that the US was carrying out imperialism in western Europe (and would have carried it in Eastern Europe too if it weren't for the USSR), then no, the USSR didn't carry out any imperialism.

immediately started spewing whataboutism

You literally have no idea what "whataboutism means, I gave a detailed explanation on why calling the Molotov-Ribbentrop a "deal with the Nazis", and stopping there without further context, is revisionist and honestly very close to Nazi propaganda. You're just saying "whataboutism whataboutism" because you're actually incapable of refuting anything I've said.

Source: euvsdisinfo

We are the East Stratcom Task Force, a team of experts with a background mainly in communications, journalism, social sciences and Russian studies.

We are part of the EU’s diplomatic service which is led by the EU’s High Representative

"Your comment is state propaganda! Here's some state propaganda from my side to discredit it!!" Oh I wonder, why would a European state agency directed by Josep Borrell (Social Democrat party of Spain, the PSOE), well-known NATO cocksucker (he was in the government when the Spanish government pushed the referendum to join NATO after 4 years of pro-NATO propaganda), want to create anti-communist and Russophobic propaganda?

If you read my comment, I'm not denying the existence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, I'm framing it in context. All that the article you sent says, is "Russian nationalists sometimes also put context to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, so everyone who puts context to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is reproducing what Russian nationalists say!!"

The article vaguely points to a few dubious claims* of "USSR sending Jews to Germany" (USSR being the most progressive country against antisemitism back in its time, eliminating former pogroms in the former Russian Empire, and with overrepresentation of Jewish people in government and science, and even going as far as creating a Jewish Autonomous Oblast for Jewish people who might have felt like moving to a region with higher Jewish representation). It also makes a few claims of "tech transfer" between Nazi Germany and the USSR (ignoring why the USSR would want technology to defend itself from Germany and ignoring that the US had plenty of factories in Nazi Germany for example). And it completely ignores the existence of the Collective Security attempted for the 10 prior years by the USSR.

You're just choosing to ignore everything I said in my comment because "Russian nationalists sometimes try to put context to Molotov-Ribbentrop". I'm literally a communist, I'm the first and foremost hater of fascist Putin. The fact that Russian nationalists stoke the USSR occasionally for nationalist purposes (while removing any socialist ideology from their claims to keep it nice and capitalist), doesn't mean they can't sometimes make a better historical claim to some events by pure chance.

*Edit: the "USSR SENT JEWS TO NAZI GERMANY" claim apparently refers to a "few hundred" people, including Jews, that requested asylum in the USSR from Nazi Germany and were denied asylum and returned to Nazi Germany. I don't think EU countries, who are now rejecting Russian refugees (let alone from northern Africa or middle east) by the thousands, have the high moral ground to complain about this

No, I'm denying your framing of it

Edit: you've added two paragraphs to your comment, I'll answer to that tomorrow

Don't worry, western Europe is doing its thing. It's electing fascists like Putin to create even more such wars. It's the preferred alternative to Socialism for neoliberals, conservatives and social-democrats anyway

You missed the part in between where they made a deal with the nazis

I didn't miss that part because there was no "deal with Nazis". Nothing as bad as the Munich Agreement signed the previous year by England, France and Germany among others, allowing Hitler to occupy the Sudetenland, a land with more than 3mn people in Czechoslovakia (to whom the Soviet Union offered assistance but Romania and Poland denied pass to Soviet troops, possibly influenced by the fact that Poland also did a grab of land of Czechoslovakia). The USSR spent the entire 30s trying to push for a military alliance with England, France and Poland to stop Nazism, but they all refused because a good liberal would rather have Nazis first exterminate communists. Stalin went as far as offering to station 1 million troops, together with aviation and artillery, in France, in case Stalin invaded, to which England and France refused. Feel free to study the so-called "collective security policy" pushed by the USSR in Europe against Nazism.

The Soviet Union had been in a civil war until 1921 (right after a devastating WW1/, and before that it was a preindustrial nation. It had a whopping 19 years to rebuild the country from scratch and to industrialise, compared to the 100+ years of German industrialization. They desperately needed every single year of industrialization they could get in order to gain some advantage against the industrially superior Nazis, as evidenced by the 25+ million casualties the USSR suffered against the Nazis despite material help from the US. Making an agreement to postpone the war after every country in Europe refuses to enter a military alliance against Nazis just because you're a communist country, is just the logical action to defend your citizens.

Please stop pushing revisionist nazi propaganda. Without the USSR, the slavic population of Europe, including Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian, as well as many other ethnic groups, would have been genocided in vastly superior numbers than they were.

What are you trying to say with this graph? That distribution of wealth is better when it is distributed amongst less than 1% of the population of they call themselves proletarian?

You haven't interpreted the graphs correctly. That the share of the top 1% got reduced during USSR times is what the graph is showing, and it was much greater before and it's much greater after. The remaining population had a bigger share of the total wealth of the country during socialism than they did before or than they do after. Please re-read the graphs.

Or that it is somehow better if standard of living goes down for everyone just because the then nonexistent ressources are shared equally?

But that's not what happened, and you would know if you had read about the topic before making claims out of your ass. The wealth of the USSR and its citizens grew MASSIVELY during its existence. The country went from a preindustrial, almost feudal backwater, with 80+% of population being farmers working the fields with manual labor, to the second world power. The gains in living quality for citizens were absolutely massive. Free healthcare, education and public retirement pensions for everyone, millions of living units were built yearly, and were rented to families for an average of 3-5% of their income making homeless disappear, everyone was guaranteed to have a job available if they wanted to work with the average time to finding a job being 2 weeks, real consumption rose, during the worst years, at a rate of 3% per year... If you really want to study the evolution of soviet quality of life, I recommend you the book "Human Rights in the Soviet Union", by Albert Szymanski. Please, refrain from making false claims about the material living conditions in other countries that you patiently haven't made any effort to inform yourself about.

If by "joined WW2", do you mean "got refused from any military alliances with England, France and Poland despite a decade of trying in an attempt to unify Europe against Hitler"? Or do you mean "getting invaded by the Nazis and losing 25+mn people in the process of eliminating Nazism from Europe"?

Not really, and I say this being a communist myself. Capitalism just requires to extract the maximum profit from the capital investment, sometimes it leads to what you said, sometimes it leads to the opposite (e.g. no difference between i5 1st gen and i5 8th gen)

Funnily enough, I'm Spanish and the meme is somehow also accurate here?