Ne margaritas suis iaces quaeso. Plurimis gloria Linguae Latinae non data, uti homines indocti. Dicamus cum maioribus nostris: Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi!
I mean, it's that or your building burns down and you get nothing. He'd usually just sell it right back at a mark-up, so it's not really that bad of a deal.
This isn't really unique to Ancient Rome -- municipal firefighting is a relatively recent phenomenon, so prior to that you'd have [fire insurance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_insurance_mark), and a firefighting brigade would only put out your house if you had the insurance (and only from their company).
Fire insurance was invented after the Great Fire of London by Nicholas Barbon, one of the first great economists. Benjamin Franklin started the first successful fire insurance company in America.
(I oversimplified this because I'm lazy -- if anyone wants to add more, feel free)
The detail about only putting out insured houses is actually a major misconception, and is likely a rumour that has never really been true. Tom Scott has a video explaining the lack of sourcing for these claims.
The crux of the refutation is this: in urban centres, fire brigades operate to contain the blaze and prevent it from spreading, not to save individual houses.
Edit: a word.
My point is that it's not the firefighting that people had an issue with. Just like it's not the defeat of the Nazis that people disliked the Soviet Union for.
Compared to what the Nazis did and were planning to do, I think any sane person in the Baltics and Poland would greet Stalin as a liberator, a bad choice is better than suicide.
Depends on who you ask really. I've seen people recount accounts of Eastern European people who hated the Soviets more than the Nazis.
Of course the likelihood is that the person was a collaborator but you got to remember that much of Eastern Europe had history with the Soviets and none of it was pretty. Poland and the Baltics especially. The whole thing was a mess.
But I guess most people would have preferred the Soviets to the Nazis.
The thing is that the Soviets won and had 40 years to enact their vision.
The Nazis held the land for 6/4 years and didn't carry out a tenth of what they planned on doing.
Even so the Soviets at their worst were infinitely better for your country than the Nazis would've been.
And they carried out ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, impoverishment, a police state, massacres. I don't think the Soviets and the Nazis differed that much, and none of them was any good for your country.
Let's make some basic accounting here, 6 years of Nazi occupation (5 really, they were out of Poland by 1945) killed a fifth of their population and destroyed Warsaw with scars left to this day. If the Soviets were "alike" the Nazis then Poland would've been extinct by the 50s.
The scale isn't comparable at all, just search up what Generalplan Ost wars, there is simply no way to put Soviet Occupation and Nazi Occupation on the same scale, the Nazis were just that much worse than pretty much everyone in the century.
Then look at the total numbers, not just poland. You will see that the Soviets killed many millions, just like the Nazis. Then, address my other points. Both soviets and nazis used a police state, used concentration camps, used brute force to subdue the people. How is that different?
The Soviets didn't have industrialized death camps, I would say that's a pretty major point. Police State, sure, they were both totalitarian states, but if you went along with supporting Stalin you were usually fine as a common Soviet Citizen, meanwhile it doesn't matter if you support Hitler, if you happened to be born a certain way then they will kill you.
Basically a Soviet victim had much greater control over whether they ended up dead or not compared to a Nazi victim, because the Nazis were going after physical and mental factors beyond your control, while for the Soviets most of time you could just pretend to go along with Stalinism.
A Concentration camp is not a Death camp, even if the Concentration camp has a high death rate it was still not inherently made to massacre millions the moment they step out of the train like Auschwitz. We can't really underplay the kind of evil that Nazism was when there isn't a comparison in an industrialized society to how they did things. The Soviets did not have their equivalent to the "Wannsee Conference".
I am quite aware I am comparing being shot in the stomach and shot in the heart here, but if there is one thing I won't take is the Death Camps being at all compared to any equivalent in modern history. The closest you might get would be the Cambodian Killing Fields and even then I can't say for sure as I haven't studied the matter in depth yet.
Were they able to fully enact their vision tho? Many countries under their rule revolted/resisted their overreach and the Soviet aim was to dominate all of Europe but the US/UK push from the west stopped them at Germany. If they didn't do that, all of mainland Europe would have been under the Soviets and more people would have suffered under them. Especially those in the western countries as they would have been seen as the epitome of capitalism.
The sad thing was that many underestimated how serious the Nazis were, plus antisemitism and fear of communism was bigger for many people at that time.
I mean just look at the composition of the Axis: Germans, Italians, Slavs (Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia) asking for sane people there is a lot to ask, they were contradicting themselves at all levels.
And if I look at current polls in central Europe the story repeats, with right wing populists getting voted in because people think calling them Nazis or fascists is an exaggeration ...
I mean, he’s not wrong. The Soviets did a lot of horrible things but compared to the Nazis they were absolutely liberators. The British empire was also horrible yet we’re still liberators for the same reason. We all know how horrible Stalin is, yet the Nazis killed 3 times as many people in a shorter amount of time.
That's kind of a strange definition for a "liberator". If there had been a country that was even worse than the Nazis and put all occupied peoples into concentration camps immediately, would the Nazis be liberators?
>I mean, he’s not wrong. The Soviets did a lot of horrible things but compared to the Nazis they were absolutely liberators.
Being slightly better than the Nazis does not make one a liberator.
>The British empire was also horrible yet we’re still liberators for the same reason.
Bruh... For Western Europe maybe. Say that to an Indian (The whole subcontinent really) and you'll be lucky if you only get yelled at.
>We all know how horrible Stalin is, yet the Nazis killed 3 times as many people in a shorter amount of time.
Ehhh the numbers are debatable... The Holocaust was horrific in scale but so were Stalin's purges and famines. War deaths are not easy to attribute to either side. Let's just leave the 2 numbers at "comparable".
The Nazis began the European war, 90+% of the war deaths in Europe are on them and the other axis powers. The only ones that aren’t are the winter war, the Soviets initial invasion of Poland and the baltics in 1939, and any pows who the allies had the resources to take care of but chose not to. That’s not many people at all compared to the Nazis who killed 30+ million. Stalin killed 10-12 million people during his time as leader of the USSR, for context.
You are forgetting that the Soviets allied with the Nazis in the invasion of Poland, the start of the war. So the start of the war is on them too. You can't just say Poland and Baltics and that's all. Their culpability is much more.
They didn’t ally with them, they had a non-aggression pact. They also invaded Poland several days after the Nazis did. Plus, the UK and France are just as culpable since they allowed Germany to rearm and helped them annex Czechoslovakia and Austria. The rise of Nazi Germany was a pan-European failure by all the major powers and their distrust of one another. Plus, even if the Soviets hadn’t signed a non-aggression pact Germany probably would’ve invaded Poland anyway because their ultimate goal was an invasion of the ussr.
No? The USSR signed a deal with Hitler after its attempts to create an anti-fascist coalition in Europe failed, Zhukov was also calling for an attack on Germany in 1940.
Is that why there was soviet oil in the German tanks conquesting France?
Is that why they invaded half of Poland and massacred polish troops?
Hated Hitler so much they helped him.
Yes, let’s not forget that the Soviet Union was simply retaking land inhabited by Ukrainians and Belarusians that were taken by Poland during the Polish-Soviet War
Ive always loved this theory from the tankies.
Yes we allied with Nazi Germany to destroy Poland, and coordinated our attacks to crush their military, and privately agreed on borders before we even invaded, and split up the rest of Europe into spheres of influence…
but we were just doing it to rescue ethnic russians oppressed 🤷♂️
We actually hated Nazis even though we held a celebration parade with them in Poland
USSR's been doing business with the nazis since the very beginning. Guess where did the Germans carry out their military exercises. They've been doing that since the very end of WWI and did not even flinch to stop once Hitler took over
“ In an exchange of captured Polish territories in compliance with the terms of the protocol, already on September 17 the Red Army and Wehrmacht held a joint military parade in Brest; occupation of the city was then transferred by Germany to the Soviet troops.[123] In the following battles with the rest of the Second Polish Republic's army, the Soviet Union occupied the territories roughly corresponding to its sphere of interests, as defined in the secret additional protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.”
I too hold celebration parades with my sworn enemies and congratulate them on their military conquests.
"Anti-fascist coalition". Yea sure, that was genuine and not just an act. Like when they asked Poles to let them march all their army to Czechoslovakia, they totally weren't about to use it to install a communist government like they did later on.
Nah man, they were the one pushimg arm to arm with fascism. In my opinion, considering communism is system impossible to achive by any means, we should call USSR red fascist as they used exactly the same methods, with just a little diffrent propaganda.
That is just a straight up lie. The only ones who were initially interested in fighting the fascists were the communists, but everywhere in europe they were being ignored or sometimes even sabotaged by the democratic countries who only started acting against fascism when they had no other choice.
>The only ones who were initially interested in fighting the fascists were the communists, but everywhere in europe they were being ignored or sometimes even sabotaged by the democratic countries
I wonder why? Look at the history of communists in Germany. They weren't willing to collaborate with social democrats and other leftist groups and got squashed by the Nazis. The commies only wanted to take power for themselves.
No wonder the rest of Europe was not willing to side with the commies. In their eyes, commies were just as willing to undermine their democracies as the fascists.
That was more of a response to the democratic countries alienating them. It was the Soviets who were ready to jump in and help the Czechs, and it was the communists who were the only ones to supply the republican army in Spain. The Brits had convinced the other countries to not sell weapons to the Republicans (which included the democratic government) in the Spanish Civil War whilst they secretly helped the fascists and did nothing to stop Italy and Germany from sending men and equipment. They also convinced France to sabotage pre-existing weapon shipments so they were useless to the Republicans (like delivering planes with no fuel and no guns in them). The democratic countries up till about 1936 were more scared of the Soviets than the Germans and Italians. There are newspaper headlines from my country from not even a year before the war where they are praising the brave and noble Germans for helping the Finns fight the savage red horde.
The Soviets had been diplomatically isolated as soon as the Russian Civil War happened. The Allird powers even sent an expedition force to attempt to stop them. The Red Scare was in full effect, and the Soviets very early on were painted as the great evil. It remained this way up till the WWII and even during the war, some countries/leaders were still advocating for their isolation. So this makes it pretty obvious why a rapidly industrialising state which was still technologically behind the other great powers would take help from whoever offered it to them. As they always thought that they were under an existantial threat by the former Allies (in part due to internal propaganda).
Well, maybe if Soviets didn't try to march on Western Europe through Poland, people would be more willing to cooporate with them. Giving new names to authorative regimes was propably the last concern
They allied with the Germans after two decades of isolation and hostility from the other countries, and lets not forget that it was the Poles who marched along the Germans when they invaded the Czechs whilst the Soviets were the ones actually willing to defend the Czechs.
Yes, Poland invaded Czechoslovakia when Germany invaded, which was bad. They were taking the land considered "polish" and populated by Poles, but still a dick move. Slovakia took some land from Poland with Germany as well, a lot of landgrabs when nations are reshaping themselves after empires fall apart.
Still there was a reason why countries were hostile and unwilling to work with Soviet Moscow. Nothing can change that. And I doubt russian willingness to "defend" Czecholsovakia would result in anything other than russian occupation, just like after the war
The reason was that most of the countries in Europe were scared of communism way before the Soviet Union came into existence. The pre-WWI great powers had been actively surpressing the communists as the communists (and other socialists) threatened the position of the ruling class. This is also one of the reasons why the Allies sent an invasion force as soon as the Russian Civil War war started.
> whilst the Soviets were the ones actually willing to defend the Czechs.
The Soviets only wanted to do it to gain power. Make no mistake, Stalin wasn't doing it because of the goodness of his heart, he wanted Czechoslovakia for very much the same reason Germans did. That's also why Czechoslovaks refused his help.
The soviet union didn't do shit.
Hot new take I think historians should explore more:
In ww2 the soviets couldn't win without the western allies but the western allies could win without the soviets. The western allies had the man power, manufacturing, and naval power to defeat Germany on their own. It would have taken longer but it was an eventuality.
The soviet union helped invade Poland and even supplied Hitler with supplies while France was falling. The soviets only were on the allied side because they were invaded. Not by choice or principle but because Hitler forced them to be against him. The soviet union did nothing worth celebrating as selfless or deserving of praise. They merely defended themselves after being the bad guys. Then raped tons of people across Europe and land grabbed all of eastern Europe including Poland an allied nation.
Indeed, both of them were fuckers, but since Zukov is closer to my date and personally responsible for the conquest and rape of my country, I can excuse the other guy
My great grandparents died in the Holocaust, what’s your point? What a weird thing to bring up after posting this shit.
Downplaying the contribution of millions of Soviet troops and civilians who fought and died in the liberation of eastern Europe from the genocidal Nazi regime is a really weird (and disgusting) way of “honoring” your relatives.
Eastern Europe would be a genocided hellscape if Nazi Lebensraum wasn’t put to a definitive stop by allied troops.
I wouldn’t call this Nazi posting if it wasn’t downplaying the sacrifice of allied troops who gave their lives fighting the Nazis, and prevented tens of millions of additional people from falling victims to genocide.
There were a lot of brave Soviet soldiers...but that doesn't make it "liberation", just "new, slightly less shitty management".
Liberation implies liberty.
Not building a literal wall to keep people in.
USSR don't deserve shit for ending WW2 and "helping" liberate eastern europe, we were perfectly fine before this shitbags decided to arm germany and help them conquer and genocide us. Not to mention this ""liberation"" ended with 50 years of brutal military ocupation. My relatives fought against both 3rd Reich and USSR, so it would be disrespectfull to honor people responsible for death of my ancestors and many of the most brave allied solidiers, like Witold Pilecki.
And both of them said that in perfect English.
Yes, God’s language
If so, then Crassus probably spoke in über posh upper class London accent, and Zhukov spoke as he just milked a cow somewhere down in Mississipi.
I prefer Jason Isaac's version, personally. That being steel-and-brews, hard-iron Yorkshire.
I think, the Red Army would prefer Jason Isaac's version too, if they asked.
They would complain he didn’t have enough medals on his chest
for said movie, being already a satire, they actually toned down some of the historical facts because they were deemed too over-the-top, which is wild
Kind of like how Ridley Scott couldn't show gladiators endorsing local businesses.
Nolite mentiri cum illis verbis ! Lingua dei latina est !
Ne margaritas suis iaces quaeso. Plurimis gloria Linguae Latinae non data, uti homines indocti. Dicamus cum maioribus nostris: Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi!
Are you guys summoning a demon or some shit?
*Jod
"i wouldn't say freed more like under new management" - Joseph Stalin probably
“A good historical reference is like food… not everyone gets it.” -Joseph Stalin perhaps
“Ha ha, that’s some funny stuff right there! Did you hear that, Yagoda, Yehzov, a great joke at my expense?!? Ha ha!” - Joseph Stalin certainly.
I mean, it's that or your building burns down and you get nothing. He'd usually just sell it right back at a mark-up, so it's not really that bad of a deal. This isn't really unique to Ancient Rome -- municipal firefighting is a relatively recent phenomenon, so prior to that you'd have [fire insurance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_insurance_mark), and a firefighting brigade would only put out your house if you had the insurance (and only from their company). Fire insurance was invented after the Great Fire of London by Nicholas Barbon, one of the first great economists. Benjamin Franklin started the first successful fire insurance company in America. (I oversimplified this because I'm lazy -- if anyone wants to add more, feel free)
The detail about only putting out insured houses is actually a major misconception, and is likely a rumour that has never really been true. Tom Scott has a video explaining the lack of sourcing for these claims. The crux of the refutation is this: in urban centres, fire brigades operate to contain the blaze and prevent it from spreading, not to save individual houses. Edit: a word.
My point is that it's not the firefighting that people had an issue with. Just like it's not the defeat of the Nazis that people disliked the Soviet Union for.
Yes... "Liberated". Sure Zukhov.
More like under new authoritarian management lol
Compared to what the Nazis did and were planning to do, I think any sane person in the Baltics and Poland would greet Stalin as a liberator, a bad choice is better than suicide.
Depends on who you ask really. I've seen people recount accounts of Eastern European people who hated the Soviets more than the Nazis. Of course the likelihood is that the person was a collaborator but you got to remember that much of Eastern Europe had history with the Soviets and none of it was pretty. Poland and the Baltics especially. The whole thing was a mess. But I guess most people would have preferred the Soviets to the Nazis.
The thing is that the Soviets won and had 40 years to enact their vision. The Nazis held the land for 6/4 years and didn't carry out a tenth of what they planned on doing. Even so the Soviets at their worst were infinitely better for your country than the Nazis would've been.
And they carried out ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, impoverishment, a police state, massacres. I don't think the Soviets and the Nazis differed that much, and none of them was any good for your country.
Let's make some basic accounting here, 6 years of Nazi occupation (5 really, they were out of Poland by 1945) killed a fifth of their population and destroyed Warsaw with scars left to this day. If the Soviets were "alike" the Nazis then Poland would've been extinct by the 50s. The scale isn't comparable at all, just search up what Generalplan Ost wars, there is simply no way to put Soviet Occupation and Nazi Occupation on the same scale, the Nazis were just that much worse than pretty much everyone in the century.
Then look at the total numbers, not just poland. You will see that the Soviets killed many millions, just like the Nazis. Then, address my other points. Both soviets and nazis used a police state, used concentration camps, used brute force to subdue the people. How is that different?
The Soviets didn't have industrialized death camps, I would say that's a pretty major point. Police State, sure, they were both totalitarian states, but if you went along with supporting Stalin you were usually fine as a common Soviet Citizen, meanwhile it doesn't matter if you support Hitler, if you happened to be born a certain way then they will kill you. Basically a Soviet victim had much greater control over whether they ended up dead or not compared to a Nazi victim, because the Nazis were going after physical and mental factors beyond your control, while for the Soviets most of time you could just pretend to go along with Stalinism.
You've never read The Gulag Archipelago.
A Concentration camp is not a Death camp, even if the Concentration camp has a high death rate it was still not inherently made to massacre millions the moment they step out of the train like Auschwitz. We can't really underplay the kind of evil that Nazism was when there isn't a comparison in an industrialized society to how they did things. The Soviets did not have their equivalent to the "Wannsee Conference". I am quite aware I am comparing being shot in the stomach and shot in the heart here, but if there is one thing I won't take is the Death Camps being at all compared to any equivalent in modern history. The closest you might get would be the Cambodian Killing Fields and even then I can't say for sure as I haven't studied the matter in depth yet.
Were they able to fully enact their vision tho? Many countries under their rule revolted/resisted their overreach and the Soviet aim was to dominate all of Europe but the US/UK push from the west stopped them at Germany. If they didn't do that, all of mainland Europe would have been under the Soviets and more people would have suffered under them. Especially those in the western countries as they would have been seen as the epitome of capitalism.
The sad thing was that many underestimated how serious the Nazis were, plus antisemitism and fear of communism was bigger for many people at that time. I mean just look at the composition of the Axis: Germans, Italians, Slavs (Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia) asking for sane people there is a lot to ask, they were contradicting themselves at all levels. And if I look at current polls in central Europe the story repeats, with right wing populists getting voted in because people think calling them Nazis or fascists is an exaggeration ...
Hard to greet someone as a liberator as his soldiers are dragging your grandma into the shed to rape her.
I said as an overall comparison, we are still talking about Stalin here but Hitler is just a whole other level.
New, slightly-less-bad jailer /= liberator.
I mean, he’s not wrong. The Soviets did a lot of horrible things but compared to the Nazis they were absolutely liberators. The British empire was also horrible yet we’re still liberators for the same reason. We all know how horrible Stalin is, yet the Nazis killed 3 times as many people in a shorter amount of time.
That's kind of a strange definition for a "liberator". If there had been a country that was even worse than the Nazis and put all occupied peoples into concentration camps immediately, would the Nazis be liberators?
Yeah I suppose so
>I mean, he’s not wrong. The Soviets did a lot of horrible things but compared to the Nazis they were absolutely liberators. Being slightly better than the Nazis does not make one a liberator. >The British empire was also horrible yet we’re still liberators for the same reason. Bruh... For Western Europe maybe. Say that to an Indian (The whole subcontinent really) and you'll be lucky if you only get yelled at. >We all know how horrible Stalin is, yet the Nazis killed 3 times as many people in a shorter amount of time. Ehhh the numbers are debatable... The Holocaust was horrific in scale but so were Stalin's purges and famines. War deaths are not easy to attribute to either side. Let's just leave the 2 numbers at "comparable".
The Nazis began the European war, 90+% of the war deaths in Europe are on them and the other axis powers. The only ones that aren’t are the winter war, the Soviets initial invasion of Poland and the baltics in 1939, and any pows who the allies had the resources to take care of but chose not to. That’s not many people at all compared to the Nazis who killed 30+ million. Stalin killed 10-12 million people during his time as leader of the USSR, for context.
You are forgetting that the Soviets allied with the Nazis in the invasion of Poland, the start of the war. So the start of the war is on them too. You can't just say Poland and Baltics and that's all. Their culpability is much more.
They didn’t ally with them, they had a non-aggression pact. They also invaded Poland several days after the Nazis did. Plus, the UK and France are just as culpable since they allowed Germany to rearm and helped them annex Czechoslovakia and Austria. The rise of Nazi Germany was a pan-European failure by all the major powers and their distrust of one another. Plus, even if the Soviets hadn’t signed a non-aggression pact Germany probably would’ve invaded Poland anyway because their ultimate goal was an invasion of the ussr.
*gasp* COMMIE! You *dare* disagree with the enlightened-centrist hive mind?!
Soviets were the ones who eagerly clapped and cheered as the fascism pushed itself around Europe with knees and elbows for 2 years
No? The USSR signed a deal with Hitler after its attempts to create an anti-fascist coalition in Europe failed, Zhukov was also calling for an attack on Germany in 1940.
Is that why there was soviet oil in the German tanks conquesting France? Is that why they invaded half of Poland and massacred polish troops? Hated Hitler so much they helped him.
Yes, let’s not forget that the Soviet Union was simply retaking land inhabited by Ukrainians and Belarusians that were taken by Poland during the Polish-Soviet War
Ive always loved this theory from the tankies. Yes we allied with Nazi Germany to destroy Poland, and coordinated our attacks to crush their military, and privately agreed on borders before we even invaded, and split up the rest of Europe into spheres of influence… but we were just doing it to rescue ethnic russians oppressed 🤷♂️ We actually hated Nazis even though we held a celebration parade with them in Poland
USSR's been doing business with the nazis since the very beginning. Guess where did the Germans carry out their military exercises. They've been doing that since the very end of WWI and did not even flinch to stop once Hitler took over
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany%E2%80%93Soviet_Union_relations,_1918%E2%80%931941 Read
“ In an exchange of captured Polish territories in compliance with the terms of the protocol, already on September 17 the Red Army and Wehrmacht held a joint military parade in Brest; occupation of the city was then transferred by Germany to the Soviet troops.[123] In the following battles with the rest of the Second Polish Republic's army, the Soviet Union occupied the territories roughly corresponding to its sphere of interests, as defined in the secret additional protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.” I too hold celebration parades with my sworn enemies and congratulate them on their military conquests.
"Anti-fascist coalition". Yea sure, that was genuine and not just an act. Like when they asked Poles to let them march all their army to Czechoslovakia, they totally weren't about to use it to install a communist government like they did later on.
Nah man, they were the one pushimg arm to arm with fascism. In my opinion, considering communism is system impossible to achive by any means, we should call USSR red fascist as they used exactly the same methods, with just a little diffrent propaganda.
TBH, I look at fascism as not an ideology, but a playbook for undermining a democratic system, so in that sense, they are fascist.
>I look at fascism as not an ideology, but a playbook for undermining a democratic system, so in that sense, they are fascist. Truly incredible
It does cut against the grain though that's why I have to hedge.
That is just a straight up lie. The only ones who were initially interested in fighting the fascists were the communists, but everywhere in europe they were being ignored or sometimes even sabotaged by the democratic countries who only started acting against fascism when they had no other choice.
>The only ones who were initially interested in fighting the fascists were the communists, but everywhere in europe they were being ignored or sometimes even sabotaged by the democratic countries I wonder why? Look at the history of communists in Germany. They weren't willing to collaborate with social democrats and other leftist groups and got squashed by the Nazis. The commies only wanted to take power for themselves. No wonder the rest of Europe was not willing to side with the commies. In their eyes, commies were just as willing to undermine their democracies as the fascists.
Ehhh, this is dumb. Communists fought Nazis in the street for years in the 20's.
Please look deeper than that. They fought the Nazis like hooligans to take power themselves. They had their own versions of the SA and shit.
Allowing them to train in Russia is an odd definition of "fighting."
That was more of a response to the democratic countries alienating them. It was the Soviets who were ready to jump in and help the Czechs, and it was the communists who were the only ones to supply the republican army in Spain. The Brits had convinced the other countries to not sell weapons to the Republicans (which included the democratic government) in the Spanish Civil War whilst they secretly helped the fascists and did nothing to stop Italy and Germany from sending men and equipment. They also convinced France to sabotage pre-existing weapon shipments so they were useless to the Republicans (like delivering planes with no fuel and no guns in them). The democratic countries up till about 1936 were more scared of the Soviets than the Germans and Italians. There are newspaper headlines from my country from not even a year before the war where they are praising the brave and noble Germans for helping the Finns fight the savage red horde. The Soviets had been diplomatically isolated as soon as the Russian Civil War happened. The Allird powers even sent an expedition force to attempt to stop them. The Red Scare was in full effect, and the Soviets very early on were painted as the great evil. It remained this way up till the WWII and even during the war, some countries/leaders were still advocating for their isolation. So this makes it pretty obvious why a rapidly industrialising state which was still technologically behind the other great powers would take help from whoever offered it to them. As they always thought that they were under an existantial threat by the former Allies (in part due to internal propaganda).
Well, maybe if Soviets didn't try to march on Western Europe through Poland, people would be more willing to cooporate with them. Giving new names to authorative regimes was propably the last concern
They allied with the Germans after two decades of isolation and hostility from the other countries, and lets not forget that it was the Poles who marched along the Germans when they invaded the Czechs whilst the Soviets were the ones actually willing to defend the Czechs.
Yes, Poland invaded Czechoslovakia when Germany invaded, which was bad. They were taking the land considered "polish" and populated by Poles, but still a dick move. Slovakia took some land from Poland with Germany as well, a lot of landgrabs when nations are reshaping themselves after empires fall apart. Still there was a reason why countries were hostile and unwilling to work with Soviet Moscow. Nothing can change that. And I doubt russian willingness to "defend" Czecholsovakia would result in anything other than russian occupation, just like after the war
The reason was that most of the countries in Europe were scared of communism way before the Soviet Union came into existence. The pre-WWI great powers had been actively surpressing the communists as the communists (and other socialists) threatened the position of the ruling class. This is also one of the reasons why the Allies sent an invasion force as soon as the Russian Civil War war started.
> whilst the Soviets were the ones actually willing to defend the Czechs. The Soviets only wanted to do it to gain power. Make no mistake, Stalin wasn't doing it because of the goodness of his heart, he wanted Czechoslovakia for very much the same reason Germans did. That's also why Czechoslovaks refused his help.
And allowed them to train military tactics in Russia.
some bot like comments missing the point like a drunk person at public toilets.
The soviet union didn't do shit. Hot new take I think historians should explore more: In ww2 the soviets couldn't win without the western allies but the western allies could win without the soviets. The western allies had the man power, manufacturing, and naval power to defeat Germany on their own. It would have taken longer but it was an eventuality. The soviet union helped invade Poland and even supplied Hitler with supplies while France was falling. The soviets only were on the allied side because they were invaded. Not by choice or principle but because Hitler forced them to be against him. The soviet union did nothing worth celebrating as selfless or deserving of praise. They merely defended themselves after being the bad guys. Then raped tons of people across Europe and land grabbed all of eastern Europe including Poland an allied nation.
Indeed, both of them were fuckers, but since Zukov is closer to my date and personally responsible for the conquest and rape of my country, I can excuse the other guy
Look the rape by the red army was horrible, but I think Nazi occupation is far worse.
For only the WWII period you can say nazis were worse true. But that in no way excuses the soviets nor does it make them liberators or saviours.
the venn diagram of “stalin was just as bad as hitler” and “hitler wasn’t actually as bad as people think” is a circle.
This comparison is, sincerely, stupid. Reactionaries choose their own reactions.
What’s with the Nazi posting lately?
It's not Nazi posting to acknowledge that the Soviets were bastards right up there with the Nazis in terms of oppressing people.
My grandparents are holocaust survivors. I'd appreciate if you didn't call me a Nazi.
Dunno about you. Your bullspice is nazi as funk.
My great grandparents died in the Holocaust, what’s your point? What a weird thing to bring up after posting this shit. Downplaying the contribution of millions of Soviet troops and civilians who fought and died in the liberation of eastern Europe from the genocidal Nazi regime is a really weird (and disgusting) way of “honoring” your relatives. Eastern Europe would be a genocided hellscape if Nazi Lebensraum wasn’t put to a definitive stop by allied troops. I wouldn’t call this Nazi posting if it wasn’t downplaying the sacrifice of allied troops who gave their lives fighting the Nazis, and prevented tens of millions of additional people from falling victims to genocide.
There were a lot of brave Soviet soldiers...but that doesn't make it "liberation", just "new, slightly less shitty management". Liberation implies liberty. Not building a literal wall to keep people in.
USSR don't deserve shit for ending WW2 and "helping" liberate eastern europe, we were perfectly fine before this shitbags decided to arm germany and help them conquer and genocide us. Not to mention this ""liberation"" ended with 50 years of brutal military ocupation. My relatives fought against both 3rd Reich and USSR, so it would be disrespectfull to honor people responsible for death of my ancestors and many of the most brave allied solidiers, like Witold Pilecki.
The USSR tried to ally with Western Europe in the 30s against Hitler but the Allies wanted to do appeasement instead
So, the USSR's solution to this problem was to do super appeasement?
wat
If appeasement was bad because it was letting Hitler get away with shit he shouldn’t have, what was the strategy behind helping him invade Poland?
"The strategy" was "we want a buffer zone lol"
And look where that got them. Chamberlain might’ve been weak concerning the Sudetenland, but at least he didn’t hand Hitler extra ammo.
The Soviet troops were brave like Crassus's firefighters