After the evidence I’ve shown you, calling it “invading Poland together with the Nazis” is honestly just lying. Ignoring that the territories returned were Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Belarusian for the overwhelming part is simply twisting history. It’s not “innocent poles getting oppressed by soviets”, it’s Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lithuanians being saved from Nazi invasion by Soviets. Again, answer this one question: what was the alternative to Soviet occupation of Eastern “Poland”. Please answer that.

You’re dishonest by refusing to entertaining the idea that the Soviets, as stated by Churchill, Chamberlain and Roosevelt, were not “collabbing with the Nazis”, but instead simply buying time to prepare for war. Evidence of the Soviet antifascist intervention on the opposite corner of the continent in the Spanish Civil War, the Litvinov doctrine, the collective security policy, pursued, the fact that the lands “invaded” weren’t even Polish for the most part, the mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia that made them want to start a collective war against Nazis which France refused, or asking yourself what was the alternative to Soviet occupation of the territories of Eastern Poland, none of this is enough.

And it’s not enough because you’re dishonest with your approach, because your starting point is “USSR bad, how can I justify this”, instead of “let’s look at the facts and reach a conclusion”. It doesn’t matter to you that Ukrainians and Belarusians overwhelmingly wanted to remain in the Soviet Union, you’ll still call them “unfree” because USSR bad. It doesn’t matter that the USSR saved Europe from fascism at the horrible cost of 25mn deaths, USSR bad. It doesn’t matter that literally every country in Europe had mutual nonaggression pacts with the Nazis at some point, history begins in 1939 and ends in 1941 because USSR bad. Munich Agreements don’t matter, Polish invasion of Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania doesnt matter, France rejecting to honor the Munich agreements doesnt matter, Spanish civil war doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, except for a 2-year interval in which the USSR was not at war with the Nazis.

What a serious historical analysis. Good job.

Ok, I’ve read through your comment and I’m a bit disappointed. You’re ignoring most of what I said, and your entire point is “but Poland, but Poland and but Poland”.

Your timeline conveniently starts in 1939 and ends in 1941, and you made no mention whatsoever of the Litvinov doctrine I brought up which explicitly was “seeking a collective security agreement with France and England against Nazis” for the entire 30s. You just reject the Spanish civil war as a nothingburger as if it weren’t the first antifascist war in Europe. You also don’t mention the Munich Agreements and somehow disregard the fact that France and Poland signed them with Hitler.

It’s not surprising Poland didn’t want Soviet troops in their country

Maybe it’s because Poland participated actively in the Munich agreements and got part of Czech land? By your own logic, Poland made an unforgivable deal with Hitler when invading Czechoslovakia. No blame there? History starts in 1939?

These countries weren’t free until FIVE DECADES LATER when the Soviet Union fell

Poland never belonged to the Soviet Union after the war, so your point is moot regarding Poland. As for Belarus and Ukraine, they respectively voted 83% and 71% IN FAVOR OF REMAINING IN THE SOVIET UNION IN THE 1991 REFERENDUM. What the hell are you talking about being free? Belarusian and Ukrainian people OVERWHELMINGLY DEMOCRATICALLY DECIDED TO BELONG IN THE SOVIET UNION. Please, tell me, how were Ukraine and Belarus not free?! Catalonia, for reference, recently had an independence referendum in which 50% of the population voted to leave Spain and the promoter of the referendum is a political refugee in Brussels. Please tell me in which fucking way Ukraine or Belarus weren’t free in the Soviet Union when they were two of the highest “yes” voters in the referendum.

You never addressed the public speeches by the leaders of France, USA and England admitting to what I’m saying. You never addressed the alternative to Eastern “Poland” (i.e. Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuanian territories) knowing that they would otherwise be invaded by Hitler, you never addressed the MILLION SOLDIERS that the Soviets offered and France rejected on exchange for a mutual defense agreement.

You simply ignored all of my comment, went on with the “but Motherboard-Ribbedcock” ignoring the history of the 10 previous years of consistent Soviet antifascist geopolitical position, and claim that the poor “Poles” (i.e. ethnic Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians and Lithuanians) whose territories were returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian republics, were somehow oppressed Poles who somehow could have avoided Nazi genocide if it weren’t for Soviet intervention both in 1939 and in 1941.

I honestly expected a bit more of good faith from the exchange instead of doubling down on narrowing history to a skewed version of one treaty and ignoring the DEMOCRATIC WILL OF TENS OF MILLIONS OF VOTERS in the 1991 referendum by calling them “non-free” in the Soviet Union. So much for freedom.

Have you had time to read my other comment? I would appreciate some discussion if you have anything to say, I spent quite a while writing that

What in my comments makes you think I like one bit the nationalist Russian brand of fascism going on nowadays in Moscow? It’s the polar opposite of everything the Soviets fought and died for. How about you engage with the content of my comments instead of labelling me and doing a thought-terminating cliche? You still haven’t answered to how returning the city of Lviv to Ukraine and the city of Vilnius to Lithuania is an act of imperialism.

Russian maps from 2015 show Crimea to be Russian, do you agree it’s a Russian city? My entire point is that Lviv, one of the most important cities in Ukraine, was invaded by Poland in 1919. Soviets “invading” it in 1939 effectively meant returning it to Ukraine.

Hitler famously didn’t pull Germany out of poverty, that’s just Nazi propaganda. He literally starved his people to buy weapons for genocide. Fascists famously don’t improve the living conditions of the working class, that’s what communists do, unsurprisingly.

You also didn’t mention anything about the policy of China itself, you just generally pointed to a Wikipedia article fully based on western news outlets (I wonder what motives western capitalist outlets would have to lie about socialist China?) and speak of anti-humanitarian traits.

And yes, I’m a westerner. I’m a Spaniard communist who yesterday was gluing signs on the streets of Madrid with my org calling for the Student Strike organized for the 2nd of October, and for the mass protest of the 4th of October calling for a general strike to force the government to cut ties with Israel. You’re attacking the wrong enemy here, there’s no “tankie threat” in Europe, the enemies are the far right and I’m on the right side of things. How about you worry about stopping fascism in your own country and system? China doesn’t have a blossoming fascist party.

I’m gonna please ask you to actually read my comment and to be open to the historical evidence I bring (using Wikipedia as a source, hopefully not suspect of being tankie-biased), because I believe there is a great mistake in the way contemporary western nations interpret history of WW2 and the interwar period. Thank you for actually making the effort, I know it’s a long comment:

Should European countries have just sat on their ass and let Hitler do whatever he wanted?

They kinda did and that’s entirely my point: capitalist nations won’t do much to fight fascism. World War 2 wasn’t won by capitalist western-style democracies, it was communists, 80% of Nazi soldiers were defeated in the Eastern front!

They actually tried that, the Peace For Our Time declaration in 1938 made by England after Hitler took over large parts of Czechoslovakia

The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.”

As a Spaniard leftist it’s so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren’t dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn’t agree to because of the stated reason. Please stop trying to rewrite history, the Soviets were BY FAR the most antifascist country in Europe.

The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:

“Polish” territories inavded by the USSR in 1939:

The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?

Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. The Soviet invasion effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.

All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:

“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)

“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.

"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)

Again, thank you for reading so far. I’ll be glad to engage in constructive criticism.

Believe it or not, your average far-right European voter isn’t concerned with Ukraine and doesn’t admire the invasion, they’re mostly racist misogynist islamophobes who have been progressively impoverished by every party in the political spectrum of their country for a decade and a half in a row.

Westerners hate China and hate Muslims, but for some reason care so much about Chinese Muslims. Notice how even the Wikipedia article title got changed from “Genocide” to “Persecution”, I wonder why that is.

You, as a westerner of a country actively supporting actual genocide in Palestine, the one you can actually go online TODAY and watch videos of how many kids got bombed yesterday, are criticising the Chinese government for a harsh reeducation campaign in a province that hosted radical Islamist groups carrying out terror attacks in China which killed hundreds of people. Your fucking homeland of Canada (assuming from your instance) has all but eliminated the native populations of the region, and you have the courage of crying “TaNkIe” because I think that a country that uplifted 1/10th the world population from poverty in 30 years is admirable in that regard.

“Holodomor” is just a scary word to refer to the 1931-1933 Soviet famine. Do you also use special scary words to describe capitalist-driven famines such as the Bengal Famine that the British created in India, or is it a privilege only reserved for the last serious non-war-made famine in the USSR?

Famines, believe it or not, were commonplace in preindustrial Russian Empire, which had a terribly low life expectancy. Between 1917 (Bolshevik revolution) and 1941 (Soviet Union entering WW2) life expectancy rose from 30 years to about 41. The Socialist project in Eastern Europe made some mistakes, such as errors in the collectivization of 1929-1934 during the first 5-year plan that led to unexpected sabotage and failed crops, but ultimately these mistakes were more than compensated for through social policy, universal healthcare and education, and probably most importantly, enabling the industrialization of the Soviet Union that allowed for the mechanization of agriculture and the end of famines (which by itself saved millions of lives) and the win against the Nazis 10 years afterwards (which by itself saved tens of millions of lives from the planned genocide against the slavic peoples by the Nazis according to the Generalplan Ost. The Soviet project saved tens if not millions of lives from hunger, disease, exploitation, and worst of all, colonisation and extermination by Nazis.

Russia can barely win a war against the poorest country in Europe, it has no interest or capabilities of invading Western Europe in my opinion. Regardless of that, I can’t remember one single time in which European nations have armed themselves and used their armies for a good cause. World War 1, World War 2, colonialism in Africa, South and Central America and Asia come to mind, as well as the bombing of Libya and Yugoslavia, collaboration in Afghanistan or Iraq… Surely, this one time is the right one?

Entiendo muy bien tu posición, y hasta cierto punto la comparto. Si te gustan las estructuras horizontales, me leí un libro que se llama “People’s Republic of Walmart” hablando de las posibilidades de una economía planificada pero descentralizada y horizontal, me parece un concepto tremendo de cara al futuro, y siendo de América Latina seguro que también te interesa el proyecto Cybersyn de planificación computerizada de la economía que intentó llevar a cabo Allende antes de que le asesinasen los Estados Unidos y Pinochet. Mi problema principal con las regulaciones, impuestos a la riqueza y la distribución equitativa es que no he visto ejemplos históricos de países en los que se haya podido llevar eso a cabo sin que te den un golpe de estado fascista, por ejemplo una vez más el Chile de Allende.

Yup, pretty spot-on. Thank you for translation

I’m a Spaniard who proudly participated in the sabotage of La Vuelta Ciclista in favour of Palestine just over a week ago with my communist organization, and who yesterday was glueing signs in Madrid calling for the Student Strike on the 2nd of October and the general protest on the 4th of October pushing for a general strike against genocide. You’re attacking the wrong people here, the enemies are European fascists, not European communists.

Unfortunately, both of them suffered the illegal and antidemocratic dissolution of the USSR, which led to the greatest humanitarian crisis and loss of life in Europe since WW2, with scholars such as Paul Cockshott estimating the deaths in more than 5 million after demographic analysis of the region, with Ukraine being hit especially hard due to becoming the poorest country in Europe after the dismantling of its entire economy in the 90s. Unemployment, depression, alcoholism, homelessness, drug addiction, violent crime, mental health problems and even hunger and preventable disease turned the 90s and early 2000s into some of the worst that Europe has seen in more than half a century, and I therefore condemn the capitalist government of both countries extensively for all the damage they’re doing to their own populations.

The Soviet Union invaded the famously Polish cities of looks map… Lviv (6th largest city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (10th largest city in modern Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of Lithuania)? Most of the territories invaded by the Soviets in “Poland” were actually Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian territories that had been invaded by Poland in their 1919 expansionist war against Ukraine. Or are you a Ukrainophobe saying that Lviv belongs to Poland?

For reference: Poland in 1938

And a map of the territories the Soviets invaded:

The USSR had a blatant disregard for the lives of their own people before WW2, which explains why life expectancy looks at chart …increased from 30ish years old to 40+?

Yeah, you’re actually right. Sorry for being a smug ass, I guess I’m sensitive about this part of history which is heavily misunderstood and propagandized against socialists like me, but you’re right and I’ll try to be more chill about it. Thanks for the chat

Most voted party is still far-right, at least Italians just organized a general strike against genocide in Palestine.

This applies especially well to Europe. Everyone cheering at military expenditure, let’s see how happy we are when the tanks manufactured during the socdems are in the hands of the European nazis…

As a European, I wish it were only Israel and Russian governments… AfD is polling highest in Germany, Finland elected a far-right government as did Italy, France is well on the way to do that, and possibly so is Spain. At least I’m militant in a communist organization fighting fascism in Spain, proud to have participated and coordinated the anti-genocide mass protests of a week ago, everyone who’s reading this: organize, organize and organize. Join local worker struggles and international worker solidarity with Palestinians, unionize yourself and your coworkers, push for general strike against the genocide in Palestine and for better rights for workers