well, it's still around. This gentleman has rounded up many of the ways to call bullshit on it.
… From 1939 through mid-1941, Soviet Russia collaborated with the Nazis in wreaking slaughter and savagery on the nations of Europe.
… There is no denying that a vast number of Soviet citizens lost their lives in World War II. Without the Russian people’s appalling suffering and sacrifice, the Allies might not have triumphed in the end.
But there is also no denying that Moscow was Nazi Germany’s partner in unleashing the war, the deadliest in human history, in the first place. Victory Day is a good opportunity to review the record of Russian culpability in plunging the world into war — a record the Kremlin’s propagandists have been trying to obscure for decades.
That this is mostly unknown to the idiots promoting communism is a fine indictment(as if we needed another) of our school system.
6 comments:
Not to mention the Russian invasion of Poland in 1919 when Lenin gambled that he could drive through Poland to conquer Germany in order to gain the heavy industry and high technology that Russia lacked.
Al_in_Ottawa
All this is absolutely true, but so is the fact that without the Russians fighting the Nazis up until 1945, we probably would not have been able to defeat the Germans.
The Germans, despite fighting a two-front war, nearly kicked us back out of Europe a second time. But for the Russians turning the Eastern Front into a charnal house and grinder of men and machines, the Germans would have had plenty of men and equipment to deal with us.
Trying to tell the story all one way or the other is just dishonest. We have enough crap dishonesty in the world now, and I'm sick of it. You have to have some intelligence, grit, and backbone to realize the history is complex and not black and white.
And taught honestly, warts and all.
Had the Russians not figured out which side their bread was buttered on, Fat Man would have been dropped on Berlin and Little Boy would have gone to Tokyo. Hitler was caught flatfooted because up until '41 he figured they were either on his side or would roll right over when he invaded. Whoops.
Without lend lease equipment from the USA, the Soviet Union may have collapsed to Germany
The Soviets killed many more Germans and lost several times as many men in combat as the rest of the Allies combined - but I'd attribute most of those deaths to Stalin's stupidity and Soviet indifference. Stalin had a bigger army on the border than all of Hitler's forces when Hitler attacked. Stalin let the Germans destroy it because he didn't believe all the intelligence warning of the attack, and still took days to believe it while the blitzkrieg was rolling over his army. The most desperate fighting by the Russians was desperate because of the men and equipment lost when they were caught by surprise, then left without orders through the critical days.
As for the Soviet dependence on Lend-Lease: Yes, they needed that materiel. Much of the time, their troops were sleeping in American tents and eating American rations, delivered to the front in Ford and GM trucks, under the air cover of P-39's and other American aircraft, and so on and on. The British were contributing a fair share, too.
On the other hand, the USSR manufactured more of their own fighters than they received from the Allies. They made 85,000 T-34's while the USA manufactured 49,000 Sherman tanks of similar capabilities. The USSR also made over 10,000 KV and IS heavy tanks, equal to or more powerful than the Tiger, versus almost no American heavy tanks, and only about 5,000 Churchill tanks, most without a gun that could penetrate the Tiger's armor. They did not just smother the Germans in men, but in nearly everything - although they used what they had poorly.
On the third hand, some of the steel for those Soviet tanks was American. The USSR maintained peace with Japan until after Germany surrendered, so Russian ships could sail back and forth between Vladivostok and our west coast, as long as they weren't carrying "war materiel". Steel ingots weren't counted as war materiel, and the Vladisvostok-Siberian Railroad route carried far more tonnage to the USSR than the Murmansk convoys and the Persian overland routes combined.
And as others have pointed out, Hitler could not have got as far as he did in the first place without Stalin's cooperation. They divided Poland - and it was the Commies, not the Nazis, that put 26,000 of the Polish leaders in a single mass grave.
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