this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
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Fascism is when you eliminate unemployment, guarantee housing, give free healthcare and education to every single person in the country, reduce wealth inequality to the lowest levels seen in the history of the country, and kill Nazis.
This is an especially disgusting lie to hear as a Spaniard. In 1936 in Spain there was a coup d'etat by the fascists against the Republican government, and the ONLY country in the world to supply weapons to the republicans against the fascists was the Soviet Union, while the Nazis supplied the fascist side and directly bombed the Republicans. The Soviets were fighting Nazism and fascism in Europe before anyone else.
The Soviet Union proposed France, Poland and England in 1939 to send ONE MILLION soldiers together with artillery, tanks and aviation, in exchange for a mutual defense agreement against Hitler, but these rejected. After ten years warning Europe, the Soviet Union decided that it wasn't going to face Nazism in a one-on-one conflict (as that would be devastating for the country and would have likely ended the Soviet Union and killed tens of millions more of people than died already in the conflict), and instead decided to pursue a non-agression pact with the Nazis to postpone the war as much as possible. The Soviets had gone as far as offering to collectively invade Nazi Germany as an alternative to the Munich agreements, which again the allies rejected.
Stop trying to rewrite history. The Soviets saved Europe from Nazism, whether you like it or not.
A non-aggression pact which splits Poland and Eastern European countries between Stalin and Hitler via the secret protocol? It was imperialist opportunism. If you aren't opposed to Soviet imperialism, you aren't opposed to imperialism.
Ok, I'll try to explain this in detail and in good faith. Please, I beg you do the effort of reading through my comment, I'll explain the reasons why I believe Molotov-Ribbentrop wasn't imperialism:
1) Most of the invaded "Polish" territories actually belong to modern Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus. In 1919, Poland started the Polish-Ukrainian war and invaded Ukraine, Belarus and part of the RSFSR. This so-called "carving of Poland by the Soviet Union" liberated many formerly oppressed non-Polish national ethnicities such as Lithuanians in Polish-controlled Vilnius arguably being genocided, or ceding the city of Lviv to the Ukraine SSR. Here's a map of the territories of modern Poland that were actually invaded by the Soviets, and which ones (the vast majority) actually belong to modern Ukraine and Belarus.
And here's a map of the pre-Molotov-Ribbentrop Poland and the majority ethnicities per region:
Please look at those two maps, and notice how the "Polish" territories invaded by the Soviet Union in 1939 were actually Ukrainian/Belarusian/Lithuanian majority and were returned to their corresponding republics after they were invaded and forcefully taken by Polish nationalists in 1919.
2) The Soviet Union had been trying for the entire 1930s to establish a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, France and Britain against the Nazis, under the doctrine of the then-People's Commisar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov. This decade-long proposal for mutual-defence went completely ignored by France and England, which hoped to see a Nazi-Soviet conflict that would destroy both countries, and Poland didn't agree to negotiations by itself either. The Soviet government went as far as to offer to send one million troops together with artillery, tanking and aviation, to Poland and France. The response was ignoring these pleas and offerings.
Furthermore, this armistice between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany happened only one year after the Munich Betrayal. The Soviet Union and France had a Mutual Defense Agreement with Czechoslovakia, which France (together with the UK) unilaterally violated in agreement with the Nazis when ceding Czechoslovak territories to Nazi Germany. Stalin offered France, as an alternative to the Munich Betrayals, a coordinated and two-front attack to Nazi Germany, which France rejected in favour of the Munich Agreements.
3) The Soviet Union had been through WW1 up to 1917, the Russian Civil War up to 1922 (including a famine that killed millions) in which western powers like France, England or the USA invaded the Bolsheviks and helped the tsarist Whites to reestablish tsarism, which ultimately ended with a costly Bolshevik victory; the many deaths of famine during the land-collectivization of 1929-1933, and up to 1929 was a mostly feudal empire with little to no industry to speak of. Only after the 1929 and 1934 5-year plans did the USSR manage to slightly industrialize, but these 10 years of industrialization were barely anything in comparison with the 100 years of industrialization Nazi Germany enjoyed. The Soviet Union in 1939 was utterly underdeveloped to face Nazi Germany alone, as proven further by the 27 million casualties in the war that ended Nazism. The fact that the Soviet Union "carved Eastern Europe" in the so-called "secret protocol" was mostly in self-defense. The geography of the Great European Plain made it extremely difficult to have any meaningful defenses against Nazis with weaponry and technological superiority, again proven by the fact that the first meaningful victory against Nazis was not in open field but in the battle of Stalingrad, which consisted more of a siege of a city. The Soviet Union, out of self-preservation, wanted to simply add more Soviet-controlled distance between themselves and the Nazis. You don't have to take my word for all of this, you can hear it from western diplomats and officials from the period itself. I hope nobody will find my choice of personalities to reflect a pro-Soviet bias:
“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact's signing)
"It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938) Mission to Moscow (1941)
I could go on with quotes but you get my point.
4) The Soviet Union invaded Poland 2 weeks after the Nazis, at a time when there was no functioning Polish government anymore. Given the total crushing of the Polish forces by the Nazis and the rejection of a mutual-defense agreement from England and France with the Soviets, there is only one alternative to Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland: Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland. Seriously, what was the alternative, letting Nazis genocide even further east, killing arguably millions more in the process over these two years between Molotov-Ribbentrop and Operation Barbarossa? France and England, which did have a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, initiated war against Germany as a consequence of the Nazi invasion, but famously did not start war against the Soviets, the main reason in my opinion being the completely different character of the Soviet invasion. Regardless of this, please tell me. After the rejection of mutual-defense agreements with the Soviet Union: what was the alternative other than Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland?
I beg you answer point by point on my response because I've taken the time to do the actual reading on this, and I'm yet to see anything that can really challenge any of the points I'm making. Maybe you do have knowledge I'm missing and which would help me understand the history of Molotov-Ribbentrop better.
Thanks for reading anyway.
Thank you for typing out such a well-researched post.
I always appreciate discussing in good faith, and that's what I'm here to do. We will probably never reach an agreement, but the discussion is worthwhile. I have the impression that you are emotionally invested in proving the moral good and righteousness of communism, and therefore the moral righteousness of the USSR, and will work backwards from that conclusion, pursuing you own confirmation bias. I don't have any expectation that I can say anything to change your mind, and at the same time I realize that I'm equally susceptible to my own bias. But I respect you and I appreciate your thoughts, so I will give you mine:
Imperialists frequently call themselves "liberators". The USSR did not concede the land to independent republics, but to it's own states. The territory, natural resources, and wealth that was conquered and looted became part of the USSR. Historical records indicate that Soviets were almost as brutal occupiers as the Nazis. Soviets deported an estimated 1.2 million people, many of whom died or were forcibly conscripted. About 500,000 incarcerated, 150,000 killed. In the Katyn massacre alone about 22,000 prisoners of war were killed, arguably a genocide on its own, of already imprisoned and helpless people.
I don't see any evidence this was the Soviets having a moral objection to Nazi's, this looks like pure self-interest/self-preservation. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't think there's any "good guys" in WWII, I think everyone, all Allied powers, were all acting out of self-interest, and not in an invested ethical objection to fascism. Imperialists are dangerous, because imperialism is powerful. Once Hitler started expanding, looting, enslaving, it was a massive boost to the economy and wealth and might of Nazi Germany. The Soviets were smart enough... or informed enough... to know and respect the dangerous threat that Hitler posed. The other Allies were stupid and/or ignorant, and did not know or expect how aggressively Hitler was looking to conquer Europe.
The other most popular Imperialist self-justification, besides being a "liberator", is self defense. The US claims Iraq has WMD's, invades. Israel claims it's defending itself from Hamas, destroys Gaza (because those infants were such a threat). Modern Russia is almost a little too on the nose, using Soviet justification 1.5: "we need more Russian-controlled space between us and NATO". Imperialists and Fascists need to play this morally polarized game constantly, where they themselves are morally righteous no matter what action they take, and their enemy is bad and evil or uncivilized no matter how they are being oppressed. They do moral justifications backwards: we are good, therefore, when we take action it must be good. You are bad, therefore when you are hurt by consequences, you must have deserved it.
The Nazi attack on Poland was a surprise to everyone except the Soviets. This is where the West began to suspect that the Molotov-Ribbentop Pact was more than just a non-aggression pact, ie existence of the "Secret Protocols". "What alternative was there to Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland?" - leak the Secret Protocols and Hitler's attack plans to the West. NOW there's still a LOT of problems with my alternative. One week is not a lot of time, the Allied forces are unreliable, and Hitler is about to get a lot more powerful. I think you're right, Soviets saw the situation and decided the pact was the better option. I don't think the Soviets are evil; I think they acted in self-interest. It was better to take the opportunity to level-up their own power, in response to Hitler, than hope the flaky and useless West finally gets it together. I think Stalin made the smarter decision geopolitically, the smarter self-preservation decision was just... Imperialism.
Since you asked to take it point by point, and I could oblige, of course I must. And again I'm not expecting either of us to change our minds, but I appreciate you taking the time to take to me.
Hey, thanks for the good faith response, it's good being able to discuss such things, thanks for taking the time. I think we have a few disagreements, and I honestly think that some of them stem from the fact that the Soviet Union and communism in general have been so vilified in western countries (in which I happen to live and where I guess you do too) that a lot of the assessments and claims in your comment are historically tenuous. Let me explain.
It seems that our disagreement stems from a different understanding of the nature of the Soviet Union and the meaning of the word "imperialism". To me, imperialism isn't simply "get more land", that's expansionism. Imperialism is linked to colonialism and requires the exploitation of people in the colonial regions (known as periphery) for the extraction of wealth and resources towards the occupier state/s (imperial core). As explained before in my post, I don't think that the occupation of Poland falls under the definition of imperialism, because it wasn't carried out with the purpose of subjugation and economic exploitation.
We can really get into details about this if you want, I have a few good sources such as "Is the Red Flag Flying" by Albert Szymanski which goes into details in the economic relations between USSR and eastern-block countries, and Robert C. Allen's "Farm to Factory" which explains the nature and evolution of the Soviet economy over its history. In these works, it's kind of really proven that the USSR never really extracted resources or labour from the rest of countries of the Eastern Block, but rather backwards: the Union traded with Eastern Block countries using international prices of goods, and majorly exported raw goods and non-manufactured, low value-added goods; and imported manufactured, high value-added goods: the USSR was subjecting ITSELF to the short end of unequal exchange (look up that concept if you don't know what I mean by it, it's interesting and useful in understanding economic exploitation of poor countries by rich ones). This amounts to a subsidizing of the other countries at the expense of Soviet citizen man-hours, very different from the claims of the USSR "looting natural resources and wealth" that you made in your comment. I honestly think this is simply wrong and mostly still upheld as a consequence of made-up anticommunist propaganda from the cold-war era, but if you're really interested on it I already pointed you to two sources that discuss this in detail, of course I'd be open to seeing other sources making the opposite claim, but I suspect those sources will simply be vibes-based and stemming from the western world, as it so often happens with anticommunist discourse. I have yet to see actual data supporting the claim of "Soviets extracting wealth from Poland" other than a brief period of war reparations after WW2 which ended in the 50s.
I'm sorry, but this is extremely untrue. Bringing up the isolated Katyn massacre, which left around 20k deaths (mostly military and bourgeoisie) and isn't even really confirmed to have been carried out by the Soviets (though of course western historians hold that claim), and comparing it to Nazi genocide and deliberate extermination campaigns that left literal tens of millions of deaths as a consequence of racial supremacy beliefs, is a deeply unfair comparison and seems to me very minimizing of the dangers and the scope of historical facts like the Holocaust or the Hungerplan. The fact that people died during the occupation of eastern European territories has more to do with the class-struggle nature of these occupations than with any claims of imperialism. These oppressions against landowners, former military and politicians, capitalist owners, etc. had happened all over the Soviet Union internally as a consequence of Socialist revolution and class war. To you, some tens of thousands of deaths probably seem unjustifiable. To me, the life expectancy of peasants being kept at 28 years by wealthy landowners is a much more deadly and violent form of oppression that, running the numbers, really murders many more individuals than the campaigns of land collectivization. Yes, people die in revolutions, but many more are saved by the improvements in living standards and by the lack of exploitation of the Global South that communist countries of the Eastern Block did. Poland in the 1930s was a rabidly nationalist and capitalist country, which had unpromptedly invaded free countries just shy of 2 decades ago in the Polish-Ukrainian war.
I think you would be wrong to say that there's no evidence of the Soviets having moral objections to Nazism. Stalin, as early as 1924, was well aware of the core understandings of fascism and crtiticised it heavily in public speeches, and fascism was widely criticised and featured in Soviet propaganda as an enemy of the working class. Furthermore, I happen to be a Spaniard. The Spanish Civil War started in 1936 when the Fascists in the country organised a (failed) coup against a broad leftist coalition in the then Republic of Spain, which divided the country in two and started the war. The West collectively decided to pursue a non-intervention policy while they saw the Nazis bombing the republicans. The only country in the world to offer weapons, tanks, artillery and aviation to the Republicans in their anti-fascist struggle was the Soviet Union. Remember: this is 1936, and this is literally as far from the USSR as you can get in Europe. Was this done also out of self-preservation and not as a standing against Fascism? Comparing the patently antifascist actions of the Soviet Union all over the 1930s to the milquetoast or complacent response of western powers, I think it's safe to say that, at the time, the Soviet Union was the most antifascist country in Europe.
While what you're saying is kinda true, I think it's more a justification that all states use, regardless of being imperialist in nature or not. Then again, that's why I brough quotes from Churchill, from Roosevelt, and from Neville Chamberlain. If this is purely a Soviet fabrication and machination with imperialist goals, why did the rest of Europe agree with it at the time?
Furthermore, my point wasn't exclusively "it was in self-defense", it's more about the difference in economic, industrial and military power between the Soviet Union and western European nations. As you know, nations such as France, the UK, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy or Spain, developed massively over the 18th, 19th and 20th century through the exploitation of their colonies in Africa, South America and Asia. It is the main reason why these nations industrialized so early and so potently (less so Italy and Spain). Nazi Germany was an industrial behemoth with almost 2 centuries of industrial development behind its back. The Soviet Union was the heir state of a primitive, feudal backwater Russian Empire. It was heavily unindustrialized with around 85% of the population in 1917 being peasants, and the country had been thoroughly destroyed in WW1 as a consequence as well as in the Russian Civil War when 17 nations including UK, France or the USA invaded the Bolsheviks and supported the Tsarists because of anticommunist principles. The country didn't recover its pre-war levels until 1929, moment when they started to rapidly industrialize through the first 5-year plans. By 1939 and Molotov-Ribbentrop, the Soviets had around 10 years of wildly fast but still insufficient industrial development, and they simply were NOT READY to start a one-to-one war against the nazis. 27 MILLION Soviet citizens eventually died in the war against Nazism, if that's not proof enough that they DESPERATELY needed time to industrialize and prepare for war, I don't know what is.
So, essentially, after the British, French and Polish had systematically rejected mutual-defense agreements with the Soviets because they wanted to see them crushed by Nazism, the right thing to do by the USSR was to unilaterally join a war against Nazi Germany when the entire West had turned its back on it? Literally, the Soviets did every fucking effort possible to reach a mutual defense agreement, and the west's response was to blindside the Soviet Union in the Munich Agreements (called Munich Betrayal in Czech btw) and to allow the Nazis to invade Czechoslovakia (with whom the West had a mutual-defense agreement and the Soviets promised to honour if the Western countries did as well). Is this really serious geopolitical analysis, or just goodism applied to difficult international times?Again: I'm not the one saying this, it's the very Western politicians like Churchill or like Chamberlain saying this!
Finally, I'll finish my comment with the following statement and a followup question: The Soviet Union NEVER performed labour or wealth extraction in the Global South. It did not import cheap raw materials, and it did not export high value-added goods. If it was an imperialist power like the rest: why did the Soviet Union, being the second largest industrial power, not abuse these mechanisms to enrich itself?