The communists were never allies with the Nazis. A non-aggression pact is not an alliance. The communists spent the decade prior trying to form an anti-Nazi coalition force, such as the Anglo-French-Soviet Alliance which was pitched by the communists and rejected by the British and French. The communists hated the Nazis from the beginning, as the Nazi party rose to prominence by killing communists and labor organizers, cemented bourgeois rule, and was violently racist and imperialist, while the communists opposed all of that.
When the many talks of alliances with the west all fell short, the Soviets reluctantly agreed to sign a non-agression pact, in order to delay the coming war that everyone knew was happening soon. Throughout the last decade, Britain, France, and other western countries had formed pacts with Nazi Germany, such as the Four-Power Pact, the German-French-Non-Agression Pact, and more. Molotov-Ribbentrop was unique among the non-agression pacts with Nazi Germany in that it was right on the eve of war, and was the first between the USSR and Nazi Germany. It was a last resort, when the west was content from the beginning with working alongside Hitler.
Harry Truman, in 1941 in front of the Senate, stated:
If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.
Not only that, but it was the Soviet Union that was responsible for 4/5ths of total Nazi deaths, and winning the war against the Nazis. The Soviet Union did not agree to invade Poland with the Nazis, it was about spheres of influence and red lines the Nazis should not cross in Poland. When the USSR went into Poland, it stayed mostly to areas Poland had invaded and annexed a few decades prior. Should the Soviets have let Poland get entirely taken over by the Nazis, standing idle? The West made it clear that they were never going to help anyone against the Nazis until it was their turn to be targeted.
Churchill did not take the Nazis as a serious threat, and was horrified when FDR and Stalin made a joke about executing Nazis. Churchill starved millions to death in India in preventable ways, and had this to say about it:
I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.
Meanwhile, the soviet famine in the 1930s was the last major famine outside of wartime in the USSR, because collectivized farming achieved food security in a region where famine was common. As a consequence, life expectancy doubled:
The Nazis and soviets were never allies. A non-aggression pact is not an alliance, and the non-aggression pact between the soviets and the Nazis was unique among the other non-aggression pacts in that it was on the eve of war. The soviets knew war was coming, and so bought more time to prepare.
They didn’t, they agreed to “spheres of influence” that the other group was to not enter in case of outbreak of war. The soviets did not “split Poland” with the Nazis, the soviets only went in weeks after the Nazis did. Most of the area the Soviets took are areas in modern Lithuania and Ukraine that the Soviets were re-taking. Poland had annexed them in the Polish-Soviet War and the Polish-Lithuanian War earlier.
They had an agreement on a mutual benefit or common goal, that’s an ally. Not a friend, but an ally.
Vegeta hates the z-fighters but he hated freiza more. Batman and the Joker against the Joker Who Laughs.
That’s an ally, even if it is temporary or hate each other they’re still allies.
Russia even released documents themselves showing such things.
You guys are seriously severely sensitive to anything you can’t even speak truth.
“iTs bEcAuSe ThE wESt dInDt aLly wITh tHeM”
Okay that’s fine, they still were an ally to Germany. Part of the pact agreement was to not help enemies of the other. If two characters in Survivor or Squid Game said that, you’d call them allies lol
Stalin offered a united front to fight the Nazis, they only accepted a non aggression pact when they knew they were on their own, so they needed to industrialize and prepare, and they did, and they defeated the nazis at a massive cost of life. Literally all of this could have been prevented if the French and the British just agreed to join the USSR, but those two had been genociding the globe for centuries at that point so of course they didn’t give a shit if all Slavs were exterminated as long as communism died with them.
Non aggression pacts are not the same as allying with the Nazis. It also wasn’t a betrayal when the Nazis invaded. Destruction of the slavs and Lebensraum in eastern Europe was Hitler’s inevitable goal he ranted about it in meinkamf for fuck sake everyone knew it was happening eventually. The non aggression pact was necessary to delay the inevitable long enough to industrialise and build up a force to fight the Nazis largely alone as the western powers had continuously refused to form an anti nazi pact since 1933. The soviets were also the last major power to sign a non aggression pact with the Nazis. The USSR broke the nazi beast took the majority of the casualties and killed the most Nazis.
Well, depending on what year we are talking, those that had “read and re-read Mein Kampf until he almost memorized it” like Litvinov in 1928 probably would have, but “[a]s late as 1936 […] Benes, Herriot, Daladier, Eden and others had not read it.” Not to mention “In October 1938—after Munich—Neville Chamberlain instructed the Foreign Office to translate some excerpts for him” (Pope, Maxim Litvinov, pp. 317–18. Quoted in Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, chapter 4, note 14)
Oh my god look at all the allies hitler had. /s Even the US wanted to help them out with operation paperclip. Maybe the fact that the Soviets killed 75% of Nazis was just a bit of nazi infighting in your eyes.
[edit] lol whoops by the time I found the image and posted, cowbee had already made a much better comment with the same image
The fact the majority of the global south didn’t see comparable life expectancy spikes of the same degree as socialist countries and the fact life expectancy plunged post socialism in eastern Europe really points to the system having a great effect on life expectancy.
the global south were experiencing multiple famines due to the British at that time.
And the life expectancy plunged after the collapse of the USSR as multiple countries with NEW goverments just didnt know what to do and it took them decades to stabilize
Colonial famines only explain the starting point. The real explanation is that the Global South largely stayed locked into capitalist extraction chains. Core economies required cheap labor and raw materials from the periphery. That structural position kept mortality high and blocked independent development. Socialist states broke that dependency. They redirected surplus into public health, housing, and food security. The outcomes of this are obvious, life expectancy doubled in a generation, infant mortality collapsed. The material basis improved because production answered human needs instead of profit margins. The idea of post soviet governments simply being confused and not knowing better is a nice fantasy but is completely detached from reality. The mortality spike was not administrative error. It was policy. Shock therapy dismantled central planning. State enterprises were liquidated. Housing guarantees were revoked. Social services were defunded. Mass unemployment followed overnight.
The new governments knew exactly what they were building. They replaced planned distribution with market extraction. The human toll was accepted as transition cost. Capitalism does not stumble into crisis. It manufactures crisis through deliberate dispossession.
His point isn’t that stupid though, would you rather be 70 and have grown up in Gaza or be 70 in a none apartheid state. Obviously everybody wants to live as long as possible. Either way I kinda don’t care about the 1940s and why people are so obsessed with arguing about them is beyond me especially since I’m not an academic. We have our very own unique set of political problems we have to deal with now.
also that we started to educate people on how wounds can get infected, how deadly diseases are if not prevented and treated and we adopted hygiene and sterility precautions in hospitals
Sure, but the fact remains that the establishment of socialism under Lenin and solidified under Stalin had a dramatic impact on how these advances were distributed to the people, enabling a far greater access to medical care and necessities than before.
To be clear, you’re talking about this period here, when the USSR defeated fascism and the average life expectancy rose from 35 to 60?
Chilling.
Ah yes, the part where the USSR defeated fascism ***[right fucking after it allied with and was subsequently betrayed by fascism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact].
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain 🙄
The communists were never allies with the Nazis. A non-aggression pact is not an alliance. The communists spent the decade prior trying to form an anti-Nazi coalition force, such as the Anglo-French-Soviet Alliance which was pitched by the communists and rejected by the British and French. The communists hated the Nazis from the beginning, as the Nazi party rose to prominence by killing communists and labor organizers, cemented bourgeois rule, and was violently racist and imperialist, while the communists opposed all of that.
When the many talks of alliances with the west all fell short, the Soviets reluctantly agreed to sign a non-agression pact, in order to delay the coming war that everyone knew was happening soon. Throughout the last decade, Britain, France, and other western countries had formed pacts with Nazi Germany, such as the Four-Power Pact, the German-French-Non-Agression Pact, and more. Molotov-Ribbentrop was unique among the non-agression pacts with Nazi Germany in that it was right on the eve of war, and was the first between the USSR and Nazi Germany. It was a last resort, when the west was content from the beginning with working alongside Hitler.
Harry Truman, in 1941 in front of the Senate, stated:
Not only that, but it was the Soviet Union that was responsible for 4/5ths of total Nazi deaths, and winning the war against the Nazis. The Soviet Union did not agree to invade Poland with the Nazis, it was about spheres of influence and red lines the Nazis should not cross in Poland. When the USSR went into Poland, it stayed mostly to areas Poland had invaded and annexed a few decades prior. Should the Soviets have let Poland get entirely taken over by the Nazis, standing idle? The West made it clear that they were never going to help anyone against the Nazis until it was their turn to be targeted.
Churchill did not take the Nazis as a serious threat, and was horrified when FDR and Stalin made a joke about executing Nazis. Churchill starved millions to death in India in preventable ways, and had this to say about it:
Meanwhile, the soviet famine in the 1930s was the last major famine outside of wartime in the USSR, because collectivized farming achieved food security in a region where famine was common. As a consequence, life expectancy doubled:
The Nazis and soviets were never allies. A non-aggression pact is not an alliance, and the non-aggression pact between the soviets and the Nazis was unique among the other non-aggression pacts in that it was on the eve of war. The soviets knew war was coming, and so bought more time to prepare.
Why did they agree to split Poland then?
Sounds like an alliance to me.
They didn’t, they agreed to “spheres of influence” that the other group was to not enter in case of outbreak of war. The soviets did not “split Poland” with the Nazis, the soviets only went in weeks after the Nazis did. Most of the area the Soviets took are areas in modern Lithuania and Ukraine that the Soviets were re-taking. Poland had annexed them in the Polish-Soviet War and the Polish-Lithuanian War earlier.
This did not happen outside of your fevered Mcarthyist dreams
They had an agreement on a mutual benefit or common goal, that’s an ally. Not a friend, but an ally.
Vegeta hates the z-fighters but he hated freiza more. Batman and the Joker against the Joker Who Laughs.
That’s an ally, even if it is temporary or hate each other they’re still allies.
Russia even released documents themselves showing such things.
You guys are seriously severely sensitive to anything you can’t even speak truth.
“iTs bEcAuSe ThE wESt dInDt aLly wITh tHeM”
Okay that’s fine, they still were an ally to Germany. Part of the pact agreement was to not help enemies of the other. If two characters in Survivor or Squid Game said that, you’d call them allies lol
This might be the most obviously stupid thing I ever read
That’s because it was a non-aggression pact. Other such pact have it too, the Soviet–French Non–Aggression Pact or the Anglo-Thai Non-Aggression Pact, or the Portuguese–Spanish Treaty of Friendship and Non-Aggression all seem to have had it. These do not make them allies.
Stalin offered a united front to fight the Nazis, they only accepted a non aggression pact when they knew they were on their own, so they needed to industrialize and prepare, and they did, and they defeated the nazis at a massive cost of life. Literally all of this could have been prevented if the French and the British just agreed to join the USSR, but those two had been genociding the globe for centuries at that point so of course they didn’t give a shit if all Slavs were exterminated as long as communism died with them.
Non aggression pacts are not the same as allying with the Nazis. It also wasn’t a betrayal when the Nazis invaded. Destruction of the slavs and Lebensraum in eastern Europe was Hitler’s inevitable goal he ranted about it in meinkamf for fuck sake everyone knew it was happening eventually. The non aggression pact was necessary to delay the inevitable long enough to industrialise and build up a force to fight the Nazis largely alone as the western powers had continuously refused to form an anti nazi pact since 1933. The soviets were also the last major power to sign a non aggression pact with the Nazis. The USSR broke the nazi beast took the majority of the casualties and killed the most Nazis.
Well, depending on what year we are talking, those that had “read and re-read Mein Kampf until he almost memorized it” like Litvinov in 1928 probably would have, but “[a]s late as 1936 […] Benes, Herriot, Daladier, Eden and others had not read it.” Not to mention “In October 1938—after Munich—Neville Chamberlain instructed the Foreign Office to translate some excerpts for him” (Pope, Maxim Litvinov, pp. 317–18. Quoted in Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, chapter 4, note 14)
It’s always a massive flex to be able to link epubs you’ve created, haha. Great work!
Oh my god look at all the allies hitler had. /s Even the US wanted to help them out with operation paperclip. Maybe the fact that the Soviets killed 75% of Nazis was just a bit of nazi infighting in your eyes.
[edit] lol whoops by the time I found the image and posted, cowbee had already made a much better comment with the same image
a long life is not necessarily a good one and some contributions and trade ie Medicinals, Antibiotics, etc were not caused by Stalin
Correlation not Causation
If you want to see a liberal turn on a dime to become pro-death, simply be a communist and extend people’s lives
Ah yes because Stalin invented penicillin too and quite literally hospital sterilization too and health standards too
A health invention in a vacuum is useless.
If you have health inventions but then withhold them from poor people, average livespan will increase very little.
If you have health inventions and then make a system that supplies those to everyone, average lifespan will increase very much.
in 1945, penicillin became widely available, we have no proof that stalin caused it
God ordained “there shall be abundant penicillin” in 1945 and there was penicillin.
🤣
more like “yay we found out how to mass produce commercial penicillin” “no no no our Leader Comrade Stalin did”
No? Socialism made a life-saving medicine more widely available.
The fact the majority of the global south didn’t see comparable life expectancy spikes of the same degree as socialist countries and the fact life expectancy plunged post socialism in eastern Europe really points to the system having a great effect on life expectancy.
the global south were experiencing multiple famines due to the British at that time.
And the life expectancy plunged after the collapse of the USSR as multiple countries with NEW goverments just didnt know what to do and it took them decades to stabilize
Colonial famines only explain the starting point. The real explanation is that the Global South largely stayed locked into capitalist extraction chains. Core economies required cheap labor and raw materials from the periphery. That structural position kept mortality high and blocked independent development. Socialist states broke that dependency. They redirected surplus into public health, housing, and food security. The outcomes of this are obvious, life expectancy doubled in a generation, infant mortality collapsed. The material basis improved because production answered human needs instead of profit margins. The idea of post soviet governments simply being confused and not knowing better is a nice fantasy but is completely detached from reality. The mortality spike was not administrative error. It was policy. Shock therapy dismantled central planning. State enterprises were liquidated. Housing guarantees were revoked. Social services were defunded. Mass unemployment followed overnight.
The new governments knew exactly what they were building. They replaced planned distribution with market extraction. The human toll was accepted as transition cost. Capitalism does not stumble into crisis. It manufactures crisis through deliberate dispossession.
Neoliberal shock doctrine seems deliberate to me, not a lack of expertise in government
His point isn’t that stupid though, would you rather be 70 and have grown up in Gaza or be 70 in a none apartheid state. Obviously everybody wants to live as long as possible. Either way I kinda don’t care about the 1940s and why people are so obsessed with arguing about them is beyond me especially since I’m not an academic. We have our very own unique set of political problems we have to deal with now.
It was also the fact that healthcare was made universal, housing drastically improved, and famine was ended.
also that we started to educate people on how wounds can get infected, how deadly diseases are if not prevented and treated and we adopted hygiene and sterility precautions in hospitals
Sure, but the fact remains that the establishment of socialism under Lenin and solidified under Stalin had a dramatic impact on how these advances were distributed to the people, enabling a far greater access to medical care and necessities than before.