ljadw wrote:
1): this is not correct : Germany was not saved from strangulation because of the pact with the SU .After 22 june 1941,there was no pact with the SU,and Britain and France were forced to use other means than the blockade to defeat Germany . The theory that Germany was saved by the deliveries from Stalin is as correct as the theory that the SU was saved by the LL deliveries : thus :not crrect
Maybe the USSR was not "saved" because of the LL, but she could not have reached Germany without it either.
ljadw wrote:2) This is hindsight and should not be used :every one was doing empire building;Poland also; in 1920,Poland was advancing to Kiew,and later, it demanded colonies .
One should remember, that prior the WW1 Russia had been colonizing Poland brutally for more than a hundred years. Of course the Poles wanted to pay back. Also the now Western parts of Byelorussia and Ukraine had lots of Poles living there - often as a largest population group, if not as an outright majority.
ljadw wrote:The German attack on Poland ,which resulted in the outbreak of WWII,created a situation where it was possible for the SU to extend its influence . Stalin would have been a fool not to do this .
The German attack did not "create a situation were it was possible for the USSR to extend her influence". The German AND soviet attacks were deliberately planned and made possible by the M-R pact.
ljadw wrote:...
Besides:Stalin took back territories which in the past belonged to the Russian Empire ,while Hitler invaded countries which never were a part of Germany .
How soviet way of thinking! Naturally those countries (not "territories"!) did never BELONG to the Russian Empire, they had simply been occupied. Quite a different thing!
ML59 wrote:Other than Hitler's dream of an eastern "lebensraum", i.e. a gigantic colonial empire directly bordering with the Reich, almost all the European countries during interwar years were actively seeking nationalistic policies that sometimes turned to open ethnic cleansing or repression of ethnic minorities. Poland, Hungary, Romania, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Czechoslovakia were all engaged in pursuing strictly nationalistic or hyper-nationalistic goals.
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All powers of that time followed their own imperial or nationalistic goals, with the exclusions of Lichtenstein and Switzerland, maybe.
I'm not quite sure what "nationalistic policies" during the interwar years you are referring to in the case of Finland. Please clarify.
AFAIK there was no "nationalistic policy" of Finland then. Of course there were some smallish political minorities with such policies, but the Finnish governments did not have them.
Sid Guttridge wrote:Hi ML59,
That may be so, but it doesn't seem to address the thread's question.
Besides, even if others behaved badly, it doesn't excuse the USSR or Nazi Germany.
Furthermore, the USSR and Nazi Germany differed fundamentally from all the minor Central/Eastern/Balkan minor powers you mention. The latter were in disagreement over where to draw their mutual borders, not the existence of each others' independent national existence. By contrast, through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Nazi Germany and the USSR agreed to extinguish the independent national existence of at least four states. The first of these was Poland and this was done within six weeks of the Pact being signed.
Putin was being fundamentally dishonest about the nature of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. It was not defensive, as neither contracting party had a mutual land border with the other. It was offensive against several minor states that had the misfortune to lie between them. Within 10 months, all had been swallowed up, mostly by the USSR.
Cheers,
Sid.
Exactly - except there were five states to be extinguished: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.
ML59 wrote:...
Furthermore, I have also difficulties in understanding why should be the existence of any of the big and very racist colonial Empires of that time, like that of France, UK , Belgium and Nederland, to name the largest ones, to be considered fully legitimate and "legal" and consider as un-just and immoral only the empires, real or not, pursued by Russians or Japanese. All colonial "racist" empires were morally unjust, and that was already apparent just after WW1, when for the first time, after the Bolshevik revolution, socialist and communist egalitarian ideas started to spread out and actually formed the basis of much political movements seeking for freedom from colonial rule.
The "old" empires were already beginning to be seen as old fashioned, harmful and morally unjust. The British Empire had already started to disintegrate. That process was going to be long and difficult. The existence of those old relics and remnants of a different era was not a valid excuse for the soviets and the Japanese to do the same crime now.
ML59 wrote:Back to the main topic, what SU did after the German invasion of Poland was to occupy the area east of the Curzon line that was already indicated and accepted, in 1920, by France, Great Britain and USA as the correct border between Soviet Russia and Poland (with the exemption of Byalistock, occupied by the Soviets even if being to the west of that line). The fact that Poland never accepted, in 1920 or in 1943-44 to recognize that border, doesn't mean that their aspiration in annexing all the area east of that line had any other reason than expanding the size and power of the Polish state, ruling about 10 millions of non-polish citizens, notwithstanding the much talked about president Wilson's Fourteen Points and the Self-determination of Peoples principle.
The Poles had a point in not accepting the Curzon line. The areas in question had mixed population of at least Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Jews. AFAIK the Poles were in most parts the largest ethnic group, if not the outright majority. The soviets (Russians) had the least rights to the areas.
ML59 wrote:At the end, that pact cannot be judged differently from most of the other pacts signed by the major powers in XIX or early XX century. It was a cynical, pragmatic, temporary solution for two different sets of geo-strategical needs that served well, if only very briefly, the interest of the two parties. Nevertheless, its importance has not to be overestimated, it didn't create any new alliance or continental block, it was not pre-requisite for the German attack to Poland and didn't keep USSR out of a major conflict and probably never intended to do so. It was a tool to gain time and space, something that USSR dearly needed before facing a war in Europe. The bolshevik strategy, at that time, was still favoring the idea of staying out of the European war as much as possible in order to be ready to confront, after all the contending countries bled themselves white, the surviving power on the continent from a position of force. Unfortunately for them the collapse of France in only two months created a completely new and unpleasant scenario that rendered basically obsolete the pact in a matter of few months.
I must disagree with you partly
- the M-R pact was created to start a war. Some other pacts tried to avoid a war. Totally different!
- the M-R pact DID create a new alliance - deliberately made to please the greed of those two dictators
- the M-R pact WAS prerequisite for the German - and soviet - attack on Poland. Without it Hitler wouldn't have dared to
- the M-R pact was a tool for Stalin to get Germany into war with the West, which was his plan. That was a total success for Stalin
I agree with you, that the rapid collapse of France was a disappointment for Stalin.
ML59 wrote:Dear durb,
the pact was signed by Germany and USSR, not Finland or Poland. So, to say that it was wrong because it meant the acceptance of the inclusion of Finland in the Soviet sphere of interest is quite pointless and irrelevant in the context. I believe you're well aware that great powers were (and still are) used to divide the world in "spheres of influence" where one of them believe to have the right of imposing its own political, economic, military agenda at the expense of other great powers. So, in which respect is Molotov-Ribbentrop pact different from the Churchill-Stalin pact that divided East Europe in British/Western and Soviet Sphere of influence? For which reason you believe Stalin didn't support the Greek communist ELLAS armed insurrection against Greek royalist and British forces?
Although both pacts were immoral, the difference of course is, that the M-R pact was created to start a war. The C-S pact was created to handle the situation after the war the previous pact had created.
ML59 wrote:...
Finland was just a small piece in much greater chess game; it has been fortunate enough to survive WW2, their very bad political choice of putting herself on the side of Germany could have caused a major disaster, luckily the Russians had their hands fully occupied in dealing with the Germans and were happy enough to put Finland out of the war as soon as possible and move all troops to the main theaters of operation. Nevertheless, they basically dictated the Finnish internal political agenda for almost 50 years, and for that it was not necessary to occupy the country.
It was not a "very bad political choice", since Finland did not have a choice! To avoid the looming new soviet attack the only possibility was to seek for help from the only possible source - Germany.
After the war the soviets were expecting Finland to follow the example of Poland, Hungary and so on, but for various reasons the soviets were not successful in that either - mostly because Finland was not occupied by the soviet army.
It was therefore NOT the soviet plan to leave Finland alone, it was something they settled for afterwards.