> The CPGB’s loyalty to Moscow also triggered its morally darkest moments – the switches of line dictated by the Communist International (Comintern) in the 1920s and 1930s; the U-turn following the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939, which arguably did more damage to the party than any other event in its history
The USSR signed the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 because England signed the Nazi-UK pact of 1938 in Munich. Molotov wanted and would have preferred a pact with the UK and the west, and had made such diplomatic offers and was rebuffed. Finally for the Soviet Union's survival Molotov signed a non-aggression pact in 1939 while kicking industrial production into overdrive at home. If the "Nazi-Soviet pact" is a "morally darkest moment", what was Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time"?
You've been using HN primarily to pursue political and ideological battles. Would you please stop doing that? It isn't what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it.
The poor Soviets, how they were "forced" to sign the damn pact with the Nazis, a pact that saw them get a huge chunk of Poland not long after that and some other part of Romania (my country) in June 1940. If these are the pacts that they were "forced" to sign I'm really wondering what were those pacts in which they had the strong hand.
Also, for those HN-ers who want to really get a good, more truthful look at the causes behind WW2 I heartily recommend Ernst Nolte's "European Civil War". From the wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Nolte):
> Nolte contends that the great decisive event of the 20th century was the Russian Revolution of 1917, which plunged all of Europe into a long-simmering civil war that lasted until 1945. To Nolte, fascism, communism's twin, arose as a desperate response by the threatened middle classes of Europe to what Nolte has often called the “Bolshevik peril”.
You obviously know a lot about history and your HN comments are usually fine, but there's a pattern where, when commenting on historical tragedies, you have become sarcastic and provocative. Could you please not do that on HN anymore? This is an international community striving for a civility that is constantly fragile. If you flame-throw straight into explosive material (which I'm sad to say you've done more than once), you do damage.
We always tell people that HN threads should be like good conversation, but there's one way in which that isn't true. When we're sitting around talking about intense stuff with friends or compatriots, there's a latitude for intense expression that we don't have here. That's because in a large internet community like HN, the bonds between members are much weaker, and there are many tribes and competing loyalties among us. Talking about, for example, how the British never really suffered, is the kind of thing that can stir up conflict all over again (albeit, fortunately, in a trivial teapot). In such a place, we all need to bring our diplomatic skills. I'm sure you can use those and still share your historical insights.
> what was Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time"?
To be fair, he is (now) widely derided for his policy of appeasement.
Also, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had the little caveat of partitioning Poland... To the benefit of both signatories. Not to mention the invasion of the Baltic states.
The attempted tripartite alliance between the UK, France, and the USSR would have also given up Eastern Poland to the Soviet Union. If the UK and France drew the line to Hitler's aggression in Poland, it would have been quite hypocritical to agree to give it to Stalin, instead.
The Munich Agreement was the recognition of a Nazi fait accompli as a last-ditch effort to avert war. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a joint conspiracy to wage a war of territorial conquest against Poland and the Baltic states. Hardly morally equivalent.
The Munich Agreement explicitly excluded the Soviet Union because the Western Allies hoped that Hitler would set his sights on the Communists and leave the West alone. By the time of the Molotov pact the USSR really had little to no choice.
The invasion of Poland by the USSR was criminal but whether Poland got divided or not was probably going to have little impact on the more general course of WWII at that point, in 1938 perhaps it still could have been averted (at least at the scale at which it occurred). Actually up until the pact in 1939 Stalin was still hoping for an alliance with the West.
>The USSR signed the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 because England signed the Nazi-UK pact of 1938 in Munich.
This is just historical revisionism. The Soviets didn't care about Czechoslovakia. Stalin decided to throw his lot in with Hitler for three reasons:
1) He wasn't happy with the way troop commitments were shaping up were the USSR to help the allies resist a German invasion of Poland. The UK and France were only pledging a handful of divisions and apparently expecting the Soviets to do most of the bleeding.
2) The government of Poland was divided among a coterie of "colonels" who weren't unified enough to provide a robust defense, but they were mostly unified in their reluctance to allow Soviet troops into Poland on the way to the German border, fearing (quite reasonably, as it turned out) the Soviets would never leave. So even assuming they didn't just gobble up Poland, Soviet troops would be out of position when the war started.
3) Greed. Pure, unadulterated greed. It was an easy way to snatch up half of Poland while France and the UK were busy dealing with Germany. If all went well the three countries would fight to an exhausted standstill, leaving the Soviets in a very strong strategic position.
>Finally for the Soviet Union's survival Molotov signed a non-aggression pact in 1939 while kicking industrial production into overdrive at home.
You might be able to make the case for this if the USSR hadn't invaded Poland, but that's not what happened.
>If the "Nazi-Soviet pact" is a "morally darkest moment", what was Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time"?
That's false equivalence. Chamberlain and Daladier certainly sold the Czechs down the river, but they weren't busy dividing up Europe with the Germans like Stalin eventually did.
Stalin's deal with Hitler had to be one of the biggest blunders in world history, which he compounded by ignoring obvious increases in German troop strength in the spring of 1941. The USSR was very, very lucky the Brits didn't sue for peace after the fall of France.
Germany played the divide and conquer game to their fullest advantage, knowing how deep the divisions are between the U.K. and the Soviet Union. An alliance between the Soviet Union and the UK would have easily averted the war. Absent such a multilateral construct, the pacts were just a way to buy time. Everyone knew they wouldn't hold for more than a few years.
I'd like to say that I am a British (born and raised in England) Communist. This does not mean that I support the actions of Stalin, nor Mao, nor Che or Castro. I also don't think we should play numbers games with ideologies or figures of history. Both the USSR and Nazi Germany committed various horrible acts, and so did the British Empire.
There are various strains of Communists who either (i) believe that the actions of those 20th c. regimes were failures, and the points of failures must be investigated and fixed or (ii) believe that the approach taken by these nations (Marxism-Leninism) was not based on sound principles or (iii) are not proponents of orthodox Marxism at all, such as anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists or to some extent anarcho-Communists.
To lump all Communists together as a monolithic block which supports those actions of past people is ahistorical and wrong. Many do support the actions, though many also do not.
>There are various strains of Communists who either (i) believe that the actions of those 20th c. regimes were failures, and the points of failures must be investigated and fixed or (ii) believe that the approach taken by these nations (Marxism-Leninism) was not based on sound principles or (iii) are not proponents of orthodox Marxism at all, such as anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists or to some extent anarcho-Communists.
I always find it fascinating that, when defending failed Communist states, Communists tend to revert to a variation of the No-True-Scotsman. The previous Communist regime, with all its murderous barbarism, simply wasn't Communist enough or was the "wrong" Communism to begin with!
Readit News
The USSR signed the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 because England signed the Nazi-UK pact of 1938 in Munich. Molotov wanted and would have preferred a pact with the UK and the west, and had made such diplomatic offers and was rebuffed. Finally for the Soviet Union's survival Molotov signed a non-aggression pact in 1939 while kicking industrial production into overdrive at home. If the "Nazi-Soviet pact" is a "morally darkest moment", what was Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time"?
Also, for those HN-ers who want to really get a good, more truthful look at the causes behind WW2 I heartily recommend Ernst Nolte's "European Civil War". From the wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Nolte):
> Nolte contends that the great decisive event of the 20th century was the Russian Revolution of 1917, which plunged all of Europe into a long-simmering civil war that lasted until 1945. To Nolte, fascism, communism's twin, arose as a desperate response by the threatened middle classes of Europe to what Nolte has often called the “Bolshevik peril”.
We always tell people that HN threads should be like good conversation, but there's one way in which that isn't true. When we're sitting around talking about intense stuff with friends or compatriots, there's a latitude for intense expression that we don't have here. That's because in a large internet community like HN, the bonds between members are much weaker, and there are many tribes and competing loyalties among us. Talking about, for example, how the British never really suffered, is the kind of thing that can stir up conflict all over again (albeit, fortunately, in a trivial teapot). In such a place, we all need to bring our diplomatic skills. I'm sure you can use those and still share your historical insights.
You should be able to understand that it's a hypothesis you find convincing without evangelizing it as "truthful."
To be fair, he is (now) widely derided for his policy of appeasement.
Also, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had the little caveat of partitioning Poland... To the benefit of both signatories. Not to mention the invasion of the Baltic states.
The attempted tripartite alliance between the UK, France, and the USSR would have also given up Eastern Poland to the Soviet Union. If the UK and France drew the line to Hitler's aggression in Poland, it would have been quite hypocritical to agree to give it to Stalin, instead.
The Munich Agreement explicitly excluded the Soviet Union because the Western Allies hoped that Hitler would set his sights on the Communists and leave the West alone. By the time of the Molotov pact the USSR really had little to no choice.
The invasion of Poland by the USSR was criminal but whether Poland got divided or not was probably going to have little impact on the more general course of WWII at that point, in 1938 perhaps it still could have been averted (at least at the scale at which it occurred). Actually up until the pact in 1939 Stalin was still hoping for an alliance with the West.
This is just historical revisionism. The Soviets didn't care about Czechoslovakia. Stalin decided to throw his lot in with Hitler for three reasons:
1) He wasn't happy with the way troop commitments were shaping up were the USSR to help the allies resist a German invasion of Poland. The UK and France were only pledging a handful of divisions and apparently expecting the Soviets to do most of the bleeding.
2) The government of Poland was divided among a coterie of "colonels" who weren't unified enough to provide a robust defense, but they were mostly unified in their reluctance to allow Soviet troops into Poland on the way to the German border, fearing (quite reasonably, as it turned out) the Soviets would never leave. So even assuming they didn't just gobble up Poland, Soviet troops would be out of position when the war started.
3) Greed. Pure, unadulterated greed. It was an easy way to snatch up half of Poland while France and the UK were busy dealing with Germany. If all went well the three countries would fight to an exhausted standstill, leaving the Soviets in a very strong strategic position.
>Finally for the Soviet Union's survival Molotov signed a non-aggression pact in 1939 while kicking industrial production into overdrive at home.
You might be able to make the case for this if the USSR hadn't invaded Poland, but that's not what happened.
>If the "Nazi-Soviet pact" is a "morally darkest moment", what was Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time"?
That's false equivalence. Chamberlain and Daladier certainly sold the Czechs down the river, but they weren't busy dividing up Europe with the Germans like Stalin eventually did.
Stalin's deal with Hitler had to be one of the biggest blunders in world history, which he compounded by ignoring obvious increases in German troop strength in the spring of 1941. The USSR was very, very lucky the Brits didn't sue for peace after the fall of France.
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Communist project probably cost more to the lands of ex-Russian Empire, in lives, than the total population of the UK today.
Then there's all the crypto colony stuff.
There are various strains of Communists who either (i) believe that the actions of those 20th c. regimes were failures, and the points of failures must be investigated and fixed or (ii) believe that the approach taken by these nations (Marxism-Leninism) was not based on sound principles or (iii) are not proponents of orthodox Marxism at all, such as anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists or to some extent anarcho-Communists.
To lump all Communists together as a monolithic block which supports those actions of past people is ahistorical and wrong. Many do support the actions, though many also do not.
I always find it fascinating that, when defending failed Communist states, Communists tend to revert to a variation of the No-True-Scotsman. The previous Communist regime, with all its murderous barbarism, simply wasn't Communist enough or was the "wrong" Communism to begin with!