the_dunk_tank

It's a "world war" when we exclude the two largest theaters in said war. I am a NATO stooge and my brain is very large.

Lol case and point.

The implication is that the Soviets wanted to go along with Hitler and the Nazis, but Hitler backstabbed them, not the Soviets biding time for an eventual confrontation.

Isn't that kinda somewhat true though?

Not entirely true. No more so than what the western powers had brokered as well.

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was a pact to split Poland

Wrong. Explaining this would require both a history lesson stemming from the Russian civil war and a lesson on international law with regards to what happens to a country when a government flees its country.

In very reductive and simplified terms, when the polish government abandoned Poland, the country formally ceased to exist and the land itself was formally in a state of anarchy.

With that in mind would it make sense to allow nazi Germany to March all the way to the Soviet borders in the name of "restoring order" to the entirety of the former polish republics lands?

Obviously the answer is no and you move forward to protect the workers and peasants of the ungoverned lands from being pillaged by the fascists.

Now let's add in the historical aspect. In 1921, during the Russian civil war, The Treaty of Riga was brokered between the Soviet Russia and Ukraine with the soon-to-be-declared second Polish Republic that declared peace between the countries with the caveat that the Soviets surrender western Belarus and western Ukraine to the Polish government. This is why when you look at maps of poland between the periods of the Second to Fourth republics you see large shifts in borders.

Back to the fall of the Second republic, when examining the movements of the Soviet Union into the no-mans-land of the former republic one will see that the lands the Soviets asserted stewardship over were the lands that were surrendered during the Treaty of Riga in addition to some formally Polish lands that they rushed to claim before the nazis could claim themselves.

So in summary, no there was no "secret pact to divide poland". There are real and existing reasons why it occured that both accurately and reasonably explain why the historical event happened. The myth of the "secret pact" is perpetuated by the western powers during the cold war so as to obfuscate the historical truth of the issue while both undermining the historically heroic role the Soviet Union played during the second world War and portraying the lie that fascism and communism are somehow equivalent.

and also a non aggression pact so Hitler could focus on the western front and Stalin had time to build up an army and economy.

Partially true partially false. The pact was created before a "western front" existed. It was fundamentally created due to the western powers policy of "appeasement" that pushed Hitler eastward towards conflict with the Soviet Union. This policy of appeasement culminated in allowing fascist Germany and its future allies - and poland - to carve up Czechoslovakia amongst themselves like hyenas as granted to them by the British and the French in the Munich Agreement. In the period leading up to the Munich agreement the Soviet Union was pursuing a policy of collective security and was lobbying all the countries around nazi Germany to join an anti-fascist defensive Treaty.

The lobbying for collective security failed with the western powers flat out rejecting any policy to contain nazi germany, thus leaving the Soviet Union no choice but to negotiate a non-agression pact.

The pact was broken by Hitler invading the USSR. They were never allied but they had a pact which Germany broke.

This is true.

To add to Parenti's argument why did things like nutrition, poverty, life expectancy, income inequality, etc. get worse after the Soviet Union fell apart?

why why why why why why

Thanks for bringing up the raw figures, I always think its like 10% but thats still a wild overestimate. That's why I mentioned things like food or the trucks because I do remember reading that those were quite helpful and they benefitted the civilian population as well as the Red Army. American propaganda would have you believing that Sherman tanks with red stars were rolling through Berlin with the amount of "but Lend-Lease!" that they toss about.

It's funny that American propaganda is so nazi apologist they'd have you believe the Sherman was a shitty tank compared to "zee über panzer." The Sherman was a dependable tank with some flaws and oversights but it still had some good features and it could be upgraded to make it more competitive. That's about the best you can hope for when you're jumping into a giant war with a debut design.