this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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People who blame Stalin for not immediately continuing to bleed the Soviet people dry after the War and instead chosing to give the peoples under the Comecon pact space to breath and rebuild are myopic to the fact that Khrushchev not only continued Stalin's policy of not directly confronting the western powers in conflict but also concretely embedding the policy of peaceful coexistence into Soviet foreign policy during his tenure as well which would last all the way to the end of the Union.
Yep, absolutely. Stalin wasn't conciliatory towards the west. I understand the fire and desire people have to engage in open warfare with the west, but coming out of the Great Patriotic War, the number 1 task was to rebuild and not fall behind in nuclear technology. Stalin already planted the seeds for future soviet foreign policy. That's not even getting into the fact that the USSR was comprehensively democratic and not simply ruled over by those in the politburo.
I always tell people the first martial policy Stalin implemented after achieving victory over the nazi regime was an immediate demobilization of construction workers, teachers, engineers, farm workers, everyone necessary to begin immediate post-war rebuilding. There was literally zero desire to continue fighting beyond the defensive war among the Soviet people
Yep, as would make sense. You lost 27 million people to a genocidal war, and came out victorious at great human cost. Who would continue fighting?
I don't care about that but Stalin did a lot of stupid stuff on foreign policy
see Israel ,Yugoslavia - USSR split
In a hyper-reductionist and simplified paragraph, Israel was an inevitability and the collective Soviet presidium made a gamble to try and create a socialist aligned or sympathetic government but ended up losing the bet.
And the Soviet-Yugoslav split was primarily along the lines of whether or not Yugoslavia should've pursued expansionist policies that would've caused even worse deterioration of diplomatic relations in the fragile peace between the western powers and the Warsaw Pact. If Yugoslavia was allowed to annex Albania, Greece, and federate with Bulgaria and create a Balkan Federation, would the growingly anti-communist paranoid western powers not have become more rabid in stomping down on communist movements around the world? Would the DPRK have been defeated, nuclear bombs authorized to be used in all conflicts to contain the red tide? Oceans of blood spilt for a Federation that couldn't even last a few scant years after the death of Tito?
Frankly, Soviet policy has plenty to criticize yet out of all the socialist powers that have existed and still exist to this day it still stands at the vanguard of the best possible actions taken in contrast to mistakes made.
Cuba and the DPRK are not thhhat powerful yet unironically have had better foreign policy but I understand what you mean
I agree, it's an interesting enough occurrence to warrant studying what decisions, education, policies, etc. That sets them apart from other socialist states.
I agree with you about Israel, but Yugoslavia was run by miserable revisionists from the get-go, despite this board inheriting reddit's "epic bacon tito" aesthetic sympathies.
There's also the Chinese Civil War to consider. Imagine if the majority of the Red Army was bogged down in Western Europe only for the KMT to triumph over the CPC and direct the NRA to invade the Soviet Union from the east. At a bare minimum, the Chinese Civil War had to end in the communist's favor before any fantastical attempt at invading Western Europe could be entertained, which would push the timing to late 1949. And if the KMT was somehow able to crush the CPC, then obviously a red invasion into Europe can't happen because the Soviet Union needs to prepare for a potential war against the ROC.
That's highly unlikely imo, even including the pre-ww2 period. China, no matter who came out on top, did not have the industrial or military capacity to launch an invasion beyond their historical borders.
The defeat of the CPC would've definitely been a disaster that would alter history to the point its impossible to even guess what the alternative would be. But even then the KMT and the CPSU had cordial enough historical relations that the turn to becoming an Eastern anti-soviet bastion would be painful slow for the western powers by my guestimate