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.
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.
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.