Explanation
The losses of Germany on the eastern front are widely believed to be the most significant factor in defeating Nazi Germany and the USSR won the battle of Berlin, the final battle before the German capitulation. Thus Europe widely believed (for a good reason) that the USSR was the main contributor in defeating Germany. With the cold war the perception of the USSR became a lot worse in western countries like France and with increasing anti-USSR sentiment the view flipped to viewing the USA as the deciding factor. The USSR (and the Russian Federation today, even if its government is very anti USSR) viewed itself as the most important force in defeating Germany, especially because the USSR had the biggest amount of deaths. It is worth noting that the USSR was at least commercially allied with Nazi Germany until June 22, 1941 and there was an agreement between the nations on which parts of Europe each could invade and which where reserved for the other.
This is a widely repeated misconstruction of the events in Reddit and Lemmy. I'm gonna please ask you to actually read my comment and to be open to the historical evidence I bring (using Wikipedia as a source, hopefully not suspect of being tankie-biased), because I believe there is a great mistake in the way contemporary western nations interpret history of WW2 and the interwar period. Thank you for actually making the effort, I know it's a long comment, but please do engage with the points I'm making:
The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: "The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia's assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused." Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn't want to. By the logic of "invading Poland" being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.
As a Spaniard leftist it's so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren't dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn't agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won't find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.
The invasion of "Poland" is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn't invade what we think of nowadays when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:
"Polish" territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:
The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you'd consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?
Additionally, the Soviets didn't invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.
All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn't allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that's a given), and offered to send a million troops to France's border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren't allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:
“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)
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this
Lo dijiste muy bien, camarada
Gracias, compa <3
So let me get this straight. Poland refused to a defensive alliance with russia. So russia invades poland to "protect" them from the nazis. Now... where have i heard this story before.
Oh yeah, from modern russia.
No. As made explicit on my previous comment, the Soviets invade Poland to put extra distance between themselves and the Nazis, since there are essentially no natural defensive positions in the Great European Plain. You can read the arguments of Chamberlain and Churchill that I included in my comment.
I don't see why you bring up the modern Russian Federation, though, what kind of link are you trying to make?
Once imperialist. Always imperialist. Forcing subjugation on the claims of defense is not a valid argument.
Also, during the war, russia was invading finland... what is your argument against that? Its clear the soviets was utilizing the chaos of the germans to grab their own land.
This is some tankie bullshit.
"They didn't invade Poland, modern Poland is to the West, they invaded lands that belong to Ukraine and Belarus"
My brother in Christ - the entire country of Poland moved to the West because the Soviets annexed the east and demanded Germany cede territory to Poland when redrawing the map after WW2. This displaced millions of ethnic Germans who had lived there for centuries. The annexed land was then given to the Belarus and Ukrainian SSRs to administer, and inherited by these new countries when the USSR broke apart.
Your argument is like saying the US didn't invade Mexico because that land is now part of Texas.
Poland had invaded these territories in the Russian Civil War and annexed them, as you see on one of the maps I provided those territories had ethnic majorities of Belarusian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian peoples at the time, what makes you think they were Polish territories?
They were Polish territories because Poland held and administered them. They were also part of the PLC before the Russian empire seized them...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland
We can argue all day about what conditions grant a right to a territory. Or we can cut the bullshit and stop pretending that the Soviets sending the Red Army across the Polish border to conquer land, while raping the inhabitants, was anything but an invasion.
And that's where we stop arguing. There is no evidence of higher rates of sexual assault by Soviet troops than by any other, and the whole "rapist hordes" stems from Nazi wartime propaganda and has been picked up by racists like you. You stop being able to defend "polish ownership" over majority Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian territories by ethnicity when confronted with evidence, and resort to racist Nazi propaganda of "rapist hordes".
Thanks for bringing up Lviv. Simply put, it was under Polish control since 1272 when it went to King Casimir III during a war of succession only to lose it to the Soviets in 1939. I completely sympathize with Ukrainians losing their land and sovereignty but I think they should respect that of their neighbors too, don't you think?
Regardless of other countries refusing to work with the Soviets in the defense against Nazis, the alternative shouldn't be divvying up Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Bessarabia, and Lithuania among themselves via military force in a German-Soviet Boundary Friendship Treaty.
And what should the alternative be? Because the other only possible alternative was allowing the Nazis full control of those lands. For comparison, the Katyn massacre in Poland likely carried out by the Soviets during occupation consists of figures numbered in the tens of thousands, and Nazi extermination in Poland killed several millions. What's the desired occupation?