Posted on 08/30/2023 2:02:52 PM PDT by Eleutheria5
In this BBC Documentary historian David Reynolds reassesses Stalin’s role in the life and death struggle between Germany and Russia in World War Two, which he argues was ultimately more critical for British survival than ‘Our Finest Hour’ in the Battle of Britain itself
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>>His military was melting until the USA started providing it with 90% of it’s food, most of its’ aluminum and high alloy steels, and-and-and.
The list of military equipment, food, raw materials, etc. provided to the USSR by the USA was truly breathtaking. Read the tables chapter in Major Jordan’s Diaries. Chapter 8.
Many decades ago I took a political science course taught by a VERY anti-communist professor. Such professors probably don’t even exist today.
Anyway, this professor encouraged us to look at all sides of issues, not just the side we grew up with.
He spent some time discussing the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact. He pointed out that Britain and France inadvertently drove the USSR into that pact. Here’s why. The Soviets should have been invited to the 1938 Munich conference. Hitler wanted the Sudetenland. And the Sudetenland was much closer to the USSR than it was to Britain or France. Stalin should have been invited. Yet Stalin was snubbed.
So Stalin figured that if he didn’t ally with Hitler, he might be next. Hitler would invade the USSR, and the western allies would again do nothing. That turned out to be faulty reasoning on Stalin’s part. But it made sense at the time.
Please note that this professor was not defending Stalin! He was instead trying to get us to understand how Stalin thought. Not a bad approach.
I have followed your FR posts here for years. And I was always happy to see them, as you make sense and often add a special insight.
But your last post to me was insulting trash. Instead of offering a decent counter-argument to what you thought I said, you chose schoolyard insults. Perhaps you are are having a bad day. Or perhaps you posted in haste. That happens to all of us.
Regardless, I believe I’ll pass on engaging with you at this time.
Even then, according to this documentary, he was micro-managing his generals for political reasons, and that caused them to suffer disastrous defeats on the battlefield. When he finally gave them their head and got rid of the apparatchiks standing over them, they started winning. Hitler, in contrast, doubled down on his idiotic interference with military plans. But without America’s help supplying them both, neither England nor the USSR would have been able to continue.
Even the people of Georgia hate him to this day.
Her famous quote “The children won’t go without me. I won’t leave the King. And the King will never leave.”
What a freaking absurd click-bait title!
Stalin led us to prosperity and peace,
Unerring as the course of the sun.
May you be granted a long life,
Stalin, friend and comrade, loyal and smart.
In golden letters, we are writing
The all-union Stalinist code!
These great and glodrious words
Will never be erased through the years:
"A man always has the right
To study, rest and work."
Vast country, my homeland,
Full of forests, fields and rivers!
I don't know of another country
Where a man would want to live.
Actually, the Sudetenland was closer to France (300 miles) than it was to the USSR (about 500 miles) And the USSR didn’t share a border with either Germany or Czechoslovakia, whereas France bordered Germany, so the Western powers probably figured Stalin didn’t belong at the Munich conference..
Stalin had actually been sending peace feelers to Hitler as early as 1935.
He is to democrats.
Sudetenland was ethnic German Czech territory bordering Germany.
The part left-leaning historians like to leave out is that Stalin depleted his stockpiles of war materiel in the penis-measuring contest with Herr Hitler over Stalingrad. The USSR would have had nothing left to fight with except sharpened sticks and snowballs if not for the heroic efforts of Churchill to establish a supply route through one of the most treacherous seas in the world to Arkhangelsk (in the dead of winter, right under the Tirpitz’s nose, and at great loss to the Allied shipping fleet) and the USA loaning not quite $10 BILLION (in 1941 dollars) to the USSR under Lend-Lease.
They had so much American equipment that the saying back then was the the Soviet army rode into combat in the back of Studebaker trucks.
Really interesting - thanks for posting. The more detail one gets on these historical events the more their complexity is revealed. With even more detail in some of the subsequent comments. But even if the situation was more nuanced, I’m still of the opinion Stalin was an unprincipled thug, and the Eastern Front was just another price the Russian people had to pay for his reign of evil.
I don’t disagree with either of you.
Bit like comparing cancer to heart disease, I suppose. Reasonable minds can differ.
I have a rather personal animosity to Hitler, for general reasons related to throwing the bulk of my extended family into ovens, so he’s my pick.
We’ll forgive you on that later reason !
I’ve discussed this subject with others, please feel free to offer your opinion to what I’ve written below, if you feel so inclined...
My opinion is that the best possible outcome to WW1 was for either the Germans to have won or stalemated with England (but obvious German idiocy, which made it impossible to occur by luring us into the war in 1917). If the Kaiser remained on the throne, the likelihood of Hitler rising to absolute power within 15 years was greatly diminished. In fact, with the threat of Soviet Russia, it would’ve forced the royal cousins to unite and deal with the Communists early on and might’ve defeated them and restored the czar. Hence, no Hitler (beyond perhaps a mid-level political office, and no way to blame “the Joooos !” for all of Germany’s post-WW1 misfortunes) and Lenin, Stalin, et al, being killed or executed, preventing tens of millions of deaths (and not counting all the other Communist-inspired insanity that flowed from the USSR as a source).
As it was, WW2 was merely the continuation of WW1. Then again, if it hadn’t been for Hitler and the Holocaust and the other millions of Jews killed/starved to death in Russia, would Israel have been founded as it was ? What a question to ponder. The prevention of the mass murder of Jews and no established Israeli state (in my above theory), or vice-versa ? Of course, it was destined to happen, but perhaps better a later establishment with millions of saved lives. All those historical “what-ifs.”
It’s a good documentary, despite the title, and the “rhetorical question” is answered in the negative towards the end: that his many crimes and idiocies were forgiven on account of the fact that he was on the winning side and ended up with half of Europe by the short and curlies, and also because unlike Hitler he owned up to his mistakes and changed strategies.
More like the guy who started WWII with his Non-Agression Pact with Hitler.
Full of starving Ukrainian peasants
Gulags, purges, and BS
Comrade Stalin sure can break eggs
But no omelet yet produced
In Georgia he’s hometown hero
Funny no one there thinks so
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