Skip Navigation

You're viewing a single thread.

2 comments
  • Good grief… if the U.S.S.R. was the Reich’s ‘ally’ then so was Poland, France, the United Kingdom, and every other piss bucket in Europe.

    To quote my thesis:

    It was no doubt disgraceful that Soviet Russia should make any agreement with the leading Fascist state; but this reproach came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich. […] [The German–Soviet] pact contained none of the fulsome expressions of friendship which Chamberlain had put into the Anglo–German declaration on the day after the Munich conference.

    Indeed Stalin rejected any such expressions: “the Soviet Government could not suddenly present to the public German–Soviet assurances of friendship after they had been covered with buckets of filth by the [Fascist] Government for six years.” The pact was neither an alliance nor an agreement for the partition of Poland. Munich had been a true alliance for partition: the British and French dictated partition to the Czechs. The Soviet government undertook no such action against the Poles.

    They merely promised to remain neutral, which is what the Poles had always asked them to do and which Western policy implied also. More than this, the agreement was in the last resort anti‐German: it limited the German advance eastwards in case of war, as Winston Churchill emphasized. […] [With the pact, the Soviets hoped to ward] off what they had most dreaded—a united capitalist attack on Soviet Russia. […] It is difficult to see what other course Soviet Russia could have followed.

    — A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War

    The Kremlin wasn’t staffed with amnesiacs; they had the common sense to know that the capitalists were going to reinvade Soviet Eurasia. The question was when; intelligence reports were often contradictory, which was why Moscow hesitated before fighting back.


    \ Also, that Wikipedia link does not support the Redditor’s claim.

    • Unfortunately, I don't any people smugly reading that reply and agreeing clicked the link