What was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet campaign in Poland about?
u/FrigginSargonMan - originally from r/GenZhou
I know the traditional narrative around the events is, that the USSR and Nazi Germany agreed to mutually invade and divide Poland.
I'm very skeptical about this narrative though, so what was the Pact in reality and why did the ussr actually send troops into Poland?
u/thesh019 - originally from r/GenZhou
Basically, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was an effort by the Soviet Union to buy time. The way they saw it, they had no capacity at the time to stand alone against the Axis, and Munich had convinced them that the Western allies didn't have the nerve for a fight. Stalin had a plan to support Czechoslovakia to prevent them from ceding the Sudetenland, but the Western Allies wouldn't join and Czechoslovakia backed down.
As for the Soviet Union annexing part of Poland, it is worth noting that those lands were not universally Polish. Much of their population was ethnically Byelorussian or Ukrainian, and the Soviet Union had long held that those lands were legitimately part of the Belarussian and Ukrainian SSRs. That plus the simple fact that if the USSR didn't take them Germany would made the choice obvious.
u/ZarathustrasApe420 - originally from r/GenZhou
Also, literally every other country in Europe (including France and England) signed appeasement/non-aggression pacts with Nazi Germany before the USSR did. Stalin begged western Europe for an alliance but the Bourgeois powers wanted the Fascists in Germany to put down Communism for them. The Western European Bourgeois powers and the American bourgeoise were both fully behind Hitler's vision for Eastern Europe and only got mad when he went after their turf too.
u/GSPixinine - originally from r/GenZhou
And Poland took those parts in the Polish-Soviet War in 1923, the Soviets took them back.
u/dornish1919 - originally from r/GenZhou
Polish-Soviet War
What's disgusting is how westerners act like Poland was so heroic for stealing these lands and fighting against the "commie menace". Then they act shocked because the USSR dared to commit the sin of taking their own land back.
u/XDBruhgoblin97 - originally from r/GenZhou
Don't forget that Poland as a country didn't even exist at the time of the invasion, because the government had completely collapsed and fled the country. Because Poland didn't exist the Germans didn't have to adhere to the M-R pact because it only applied to Poland, which no longer existed.
u/JoeyC42 - originally from r/GenZhou
Prior to Stalin signing the molotov-Ribbentrop pact, he went to every western power and begged them to start an anti fascist coalition against Germany because he knew it would become a world war. They all declined because their capitalists were profiting off of hitlers reign. So, Stalin signed this non-aggression pact with Hitler because he knew he, and the ussr as a whole, would do the majority of the fighting. He needed time to strengthen the hell out of his army, and this pact delayed the beginning of the bloodshed.
FYI plenty of other countries, including western powers, signed multiple non-aggression pacts with Hitler down the line. The only reason you were mainly taught about the MR pact was specifically to demonize Stalin and label him as a fascist. If you are currently being taught about this then ask your teacher about the pacts between France and Hitler. And ask about the man made Bengali famine by Churchill during ww2. It killed upwards of 7 million Bengalis and this was because Churchill was a racist pos, Stalin ended up sending food supplies to India to try his best and help them.
u/kandras123 - originally from r/GenZhou
In addition to what u/thesh019 said, I’d like to add that it also pushed the border significantly farther from Moscow; and considering how close the Germans got to Moscow, a closer German border might have resulted in a drastically different war.
u/PaiosFranen - originally from r/GenZhou
First of all, the USSR didnt divide up anything. If you actually read the Secret Protocol of the pact, youll realize the division wasnt in territories to invade, but in spheres of INFLUENCE. What does this mean? It means that, for example, Romania, which was in the soviet sphere of influence, could not have been invaded by or allied with Nazi Germany without Germany breaking the pact and thus declaring war on the USSR. The pacts objective was to create a wall of neutral buffer states between the USSR and Nazi Germany, in order to delay the war as much as possible, since the USSR wasnt ready to fight Hitler. In fact, if you read the communications between Molotov and Ribbentrop, its clear the USSR didnt want to occupy their part of Poland (which btw were soviet lands stolen by Poland during the Civil War), but keep a rump Polish state there as a buffer state.
However, what happened is the polish government escaped to Romania, and from there to the UK. The problem is that Romania was neutral, and thus, it couldnt allow the polish government, which was at war with Nazi Germany, to stay or pass through their country without them declaring war on Germany too. So the only way they could let the poles in their country was by interning them, meaning that they werent a government anymore. Thus, legally speaking, the Polish State had ceased to exist. And since the Secret Protocol of the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact referred to Poland as "the Polish State", not "the Polish lands", this part of the pact was now invalid. And so the USSR had no choice but to occupy eastern Poland, since the alternative was to just let Nazi Germany occupy it and march right up to the Soviet border, which they could legally do without breaking the pact.
The whole thing was a legal mess, caused by the polish government cowardly fleeing and leaving their troops and people behind. If you want to read more on this i recommend the book "Blood Lies" by Grover Furr, which debunks many antiStalin myths including the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact.
u/Toenails22 - originally from r/GenZhou
Grover Furr’s bloodlies book has an excellent section explaining it all. Here's the pdf :)
[deleted] - originally from r/GenZhou
[removed]
u/TurdFerguson1000 - originally from r/GenZhou
This isn't a good take. If the USSR had any interest in recreating the borders of the Russian Empire, then why didn't they annex Finland after their victories
over them in the Winter War and Continuation War? Why weren't the old territories of Congress Poland annexed, when they could have easily chosen to do so at the end of the Great Patriotic War? The land that they occupied (mind you, only about three weeks after the initial German forays into Poland on September 1st, 1939) wasn't even Polish to begin with, but filled with ethnic Belarussians and Ukrainians that had previously been part of those respective socialist republics but then had their land taken by Poland and its reactionary military government at the conclusion of its war with the Soviets in the 1920s. The land taken from Romania was A. Taken from a reactionary monarchist state allied with the Germans, and B. Not secured to recreate the Russian imperial borders but rather because it was traditionally Ukrainian and Moldavian territory that they sought to reintegrate with their respective socialist republics (this is also true of the easternmost Czechoslovakian territory taken at the end of the war with Germany, which wasn't filled with many Czechs or Slovaks but in which many Ukrainian people had resided for centuries prior). Territory taken from Finland was largely intended to simply bolster the defensive capacity of Leningrad from a prospective attack or siege (which ultimately did come to pass from 1941-1944), and while I'm not very well-read on the history of the Baltic States within this period of time, people I've talked to on the Baltic SSRs sub have showcased evidence which suggests that many Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians willingly petitioned to join the USSR out of a mixture of fears of being occupied by the Germans (who were hell bent on exterminating many of them, and ultimately did during their occupation of Eastern territories from 1941-1945) and out of loathing for their existing governments at the time, which similar to Poland, were largely reactionary, military-dominated governments that had done little to alleviate economic hardships caused in part by the Great Depression. And regardless of all that, the simple fact remains that the Soviets weren't the genocidal maniacs agitating for things like Generalplan Ost, and used their non-aggression pact with Germany as a means of helping people like Jews and Romani to escape from territory that otherwise would have been taken over by the Nazis, and in which they would have been enslaved or killed.
The truth about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is that it was merely a non-aggression pact between the USSR and Germany, which the former sought in order to give itself time to better prepare for a war with Germany, while the Germans were busy fighting the British and the French elsewhere (if such a thing is to be considered an "alliance," then that would have made numerous countries like Britain, France, Poland, Latvia, etc. all allies of Germany as well, as each of them possessed non-aggression pacts with Germany throughout the 1930s as well). During the Sudeten Crisis and in the lead up to the German invasion of Poland, the Soviets had sought to create anti-fascist alliances with these states, Britain, and France, and had offered to station soldiers in Poland and Czechoslovakia to deter German occupations of those countries, but every such offer was rejected, leaving the Soviets with little choice but to seek a temporary peace with the Germans to bolster their own military capabilities in the meantime.