Memes

The communists were never allies with the Nazis. A non-aggression pact is not an alliance.

They kind of acted like allies, particularly with regards to Poland, which they split between themselves, and before you cite that it was a preemptive strike—I suppose a sort of "the Nazis-will-invade-Poland-before-us-so-we-might-as-well-have-a-chunk-of-it-right-now-to-fight-there-rather-in-our-beloved-Soviet-Motherland"—there are things like the wp:Katyn massacre. Again, Stalin's purges hurt the Soviet's ability to counter the Nazis, and I'll add maybe scared more Germans into voting for Nazis.

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The communists spent the decade prior trying to form an anti-Nazi coalition force, such as the Anglo-French-Soviet Alliance which was pitched by the communists and rejected by the British and French.

It might be due to bad PR: while Hitler was having his Nuremberg rally and the Berlin Olympics, Stalin was having his purges.

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The communists hated the Nazis from the beginning, as the Nazi party rose to prominence by killing communists and labor organizers, cemented bourgeois rule, and was violently racist and imperialist, while the communists opposed all of that.

Agreed, but both Communists and Nazis were also anti-liberal—a lot of Germans were liberal—but I suppose the KPD weren't really into coalition-building with liberals and/or democrats in those days.

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When the many talks of alliances with the west all fell short, ..., It was a last resort, when the west was content from the beginning with working alongside Hitler.

Yes, but I don't think the others involved carving up other countries, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, and the idiot British PM who was responsible for that resigned soon after it backfired, while after Molotov-Ribbentrop, Stalin continued to rule until his death in 1953.

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Harry Truman, in 1941 in front of the Senate, stated:

If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.

and some Americans believed in continued neutrality for similar reasons.

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Not only that, but it was the Soviet Union that was responsible for 4/5ths of total Nazi deaths, and winning the war against the Nazis.

and kudos to the people of the USSR.

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The Soviet Union did not agree to invade Poland with the Nazis,

I presume it was implied.

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When the USSR went into Poland, it stayed mostly to areas Poland had invaded and annexed a few decades prior.

Presumably they hit the areas defended not by the Nazis but by the Poles—i.e. the eastern part.

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Should the Soviets have let Poland get entirely taken over by the Nazis, standing idle?

wp:Poland–Russia relations#Soviet Union

For the next two decades, Poland was seen by the Soviet Union as an enemy and, along with Germany (under both the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich), as a "politically illegitimate" state created by the Allied Powers during World War I at the expense of Germany and Russia.[15][16] During the interwar period Joseph Stalin feared a coordinated Polish-Japanese two-front invasion. Numerous residents of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic also fled across the border to Poland in protest of the First Five-Year Plan's collectivization policies and the Holodomor.[16] The Soviet Union supported subversive activities of the Communist Party of Poland, the Communist Party of Western Belarus, and the Communist Party of Western Ukraine. Poland in turn sent secret agents across the border to encourage rebellion against Soviet rule, which caused Stalin to begin to associate Poles in the Soviet Union with nationalist dissident and terrorist groups. The NKVD murdered 111,091 Poles during the Polish Operation and deported many families to Kazakhstan. Fears of a Polish invasion and external espionage also gave justification to the general internal repression of the Great Purge in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the USSR and Poland concluded a formal Non-Aggression Pact in 1932.[16]

So I guess Moscow and Warsaw weren't getting along.

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wp:Soviet invasion of Poland#Soviet invasion of Poland

The Soviets demanded the right to enter these countries in case of a security threat.[50] Talks on military matters, that had begun in mid-August, quickly stalled over the topic of Soviet troop passage through Poland in the event of a German attack. British and French officials pressured the Polish government to agree to the Soviet terms.[51][52] However, Polish officials bluntly refused to allow Soviet troops to enter Polish territory upon expressing grave concerns that once Red Army troops had set foot on Polish soil, they might decline demands to leave.[53] Thereupon Soviet officials suggested that Poland's objections be ignored and that the tripartite agreements be concluded.[54] The British refused the proposal, fearing that such a move would encourage Poland to establish stronger bilateral relations with Germany.[55]

So a country that was partially-at-least ruled by the Kremlin, didn't want soldiers ruled by the Kremlin in their country again.

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I just checked this out:

wp:Konstantin Rokossovsky

(my bold)

He served in the Imperial Russian Army during World War I, and in 1918, joined the Red Army and fought with distinction during the Russian Civil War. Rokossovsky rose to hold senior Red Army commands by 1937, when he fell victim to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge and was branded a traitor, imprisoned and tortured. After Soviet failures in the Winter War, Rokossovsky was released from prison in 1940 and returned to command of an army corps.

What was this Polish commie doing in a commie prison?

more evidence of Stalin's idiocy.

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Churchill did not take the Nazis as a serious threat, and was horrified when FDR and Stalin made a joke about executing Nazis. Churchill starved millions to death in India in preventable ways, and had this to say about it:

I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.

I'll have to check that out. Maybe I've overestimated him; and yes, he at least seems to have been genocidal, though such would give fuel (might have given fuel) to non-racist isolationists in the US and neutral European countries, such as those in Switzerland and Ireland.

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Meanwhile, the soviet famine in the 1930s was the last major famine outside of wartime in the USSR, because collectivized farming achieved food security in a region where famine was common. As a consequence, life expectancy doubled:

1. anti-Communist ≠ necessarily pro-Tsarist

2. After Stalin died and Khrushchev took over, things seemed to improve.

3. Under capitalism—however regulated—Ukraine—IIUC—is a food exporter; though the the Kremlin is still making them suffer.

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The soviets knew war was coming, and so bought more time to prepare.

Besides invading Poland and fighting the Poles, I wonder what did the Soviets do in those 22⅓ months to prepare that they didn't do in the several years previous.

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Not sure what including an example of the social fascism of the SPD at the end there is supposed to do for your point.

wp:Ernst Thälmann

(my bold)

The KPD under Thälmann's leadership regarded the Social Democratic Party (SPD) as an adversary and the party adopted the position that the social democrats were "social fascists". Both the SPD and KPD were already previously split on many key issues, however, this new stance clarified it was impossible for the two parties to form a united front against the Nazi Party.

Thälmann was leader of the paramilitary Roter Frontkämpferbund. After the Nazi regime began, he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 and held in solitary confinement for eleven years. Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov originally sought Thälmann’s release;[3] after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, efforts to that end were abandoned,[4] while Thälmann's party rival Walter Ulbricht ignored requests to plead on his behalf. Thälmann was shot dead on Adolf Hitler's personal order in Buchenwald in 1944.

I hope he died with the consolation that at least maybe many "social fascists" were also executed by the Nazis.