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This is a bone of contention and a heavily discussed subject, because the world is not a black-and-white place. The Red Army was indeed a savior. It is thanks t

This is a bone of contention and a heavily discussed subject, because the world is not a black-and-white place. The Red Army was indeed a savior. It is thanks to those masses of poor soldiers, of which eight millions died, that the horror of WWII last only five years or so. All Europe and all world indeed should be grateful to them. On the other hand, there was the Stalinist regime, ruthless rule, killing one's own people and others - for power and control. Whenever someone makes any judgement about Russians, they make a generalizing mistake. On top of that, I'd be very careful when making judgements about people's behaviors in extreme situations, it's quite easy to make that at a distance.

quantumofmalice 9y ago
If you can stomach it, you can read this: EDIT: removed link due to questions about author's truthfulness
- ivanech 9y ago
  The author of this book should be treated with extreme skepticism. His stated goal is to "free this world we call home from the Jewish slavery it now finds itself in for these past hundred years" by writing about the "real Holocaust" [i]. He writes about "racial reality" and "Jewish masters who want to flood Sweden with Third World trash" [ii]. His agenda is Nazi apologism and bald-faced antisemitism. [i] https://chechar.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/the-hellstorm-project/ https://chechar.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/the-hellstorm-proje... [ii] http://thomasgoodrich.com/ http://thomasgoodrich.com/
  - quantumofmalice 9y ago
    Yeesh, I wasn't aware of that. Thank you for the info, I removed the link.
    - ivanech 9y ago
      No problem! It looks like the places that sell the book do their damnedest to make the author look like any other historian.
- sofal 9y ago
  Yikes, that link sent me down a rabbit hole of white nationalism and Holocaust denial. No thanks.
def_true_false 9y ago
> The Red Army was indeed a savior. Many who ended up in the soviet sphere of influence would beg to differ.
- simonh 9y ago
  Oh come on, that post was very clearly made knowingly within that context.
- rbanffy 9y ago
  It's not like there were better alternatives at the time.
  - bobthechef 9y ago
    That's fallacious thinking. Even if we assumes that nothing could be done to stop the Soviets (and that is debatable: some have argued that the US was fully capable of pushing back against Soviet domination in the eastern Bloc, but instead caved in to Soviet demands), the result was a nasty occupation by the Soviets. "No alternative" does not mean it wasn't objectively bad. We're not talking about running out of your favorite ice cream topping here and having to compromise for your second favorite topping.
    - rbanffy 9y ago
      Would the Allies stand a chance if the Soviets didn't help? Would the Allies stand a chance if the Soviets allied with the Axis?
      - lostlogin 9y ago
        Yes and then no (or not without US help). The British empire outproduced, manufactured, mined etc the Germans for basically the entire war. The question is more about why it took so long for the allies to get the upper hand. The idea of ‘the plucky underdog’ is a myth, Britain was very much a superpower with a massive, resource rich empire behind it. https://www.amazon.de/Britains-War-Machine-Weapons-Resources/dp/0141026103 https://www.amazon.de/Britains-War-Machine-Weapons-Resources...
tszymczyszyn 9y ago
It is true that Russians helped in ending WWII but as others pointed they were also one of the initial aggressors and allies of the Reich. If not for that the war might as well end faster.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- lostlogin 9y ago
  How? The invasion of Russia lead to the meat grinder that destroyed Germany. How would the allies have turned Germany without the Russians?
- vkou 9y ago
  The war would have ended even faster had Britain and France not let Chechoslovakia get partitioned. They proved themselves completely unreliable, and unsurprisingly, after a failed attempt to turn West, Stalin signed a deal with the devil. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was not signed without context. The USSR sought out, and was rejected from an alliance with Britain and France.
wpowiertowski 9y ago
Being Polish makes me very proud of the bravery of Witold Pilecki at the same time Russian army did some horrible things during the „saving” of eastern Europe. However if you look at the numbers they also paid the ultimate price in number of casualties: https://vimeo.com/128373915 https://vimeo.com/128373915
badpun 9y ago
> The Red Army was indeed a savior. It is thanks to those masses of poor soldiers, of which eight millions died, that the horror of WWII last only five years or so. All Europe and all world indeed should be grateful to them. That is under a big assumption that Stalin's USSR was actually better than Hitler's Germany. Since there were lots of people who fled Soviet-occupied parts of Poland into German-occupied ones (hoping that life under Hitler will be less of a horror), this is not really clear whether the cure was not worse than the disease.
- olavk 9y ago
  It would very much depends on who you were. If you had German ancestry you would be better off under the Germans, if you were Jewish you were far worse off. A lot of people in the former USSR occupied areas like the Baltics or Ukraine actually greeted the Germans as liberators, but they quickly changed their mind when they realized the Germans considered Slavs subhumans.
  - b0rsuk 9y ago
    Hitler had this list of peoples to exterminate: * Jews * Romanies ("gypsies") * Slavs (Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Czechs, modern Macedonians, Serbs, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Slovenians...) Jews took the biggest blow, but Hitler didn't plan to stop there. And not all of it was even ethnic. For example, he hated homosexuals and disabled people. He was going to clean the race. Communists were a target, too. The reason he didn't exterminate everyone at the same time is that he needed slaves and collaborators in the transitional period. People down the list could be used to exterminate those higher up (indirectly, but sometimes directly). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
    - greedo 9y ago
      As well as almost any Polish professionals: Teachers, professors, lawyers, government officials, religious figures. The goal of the Germans was to dismantle almost all of Polish society and replace it with German society.
perl4ever 9y ago
I recently learned something interesting - the gas van was apparently invented in the Soviet Union in the late 30s, shortly before the Nazis started using similar execution methods. Google Translate says "...he was following the instructions of the NKVD Ministry of Defense and that without them it would be impossible to perform so much the number of executions to which the arrested were sentenced by three threes at a time" See: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1265324 https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1265324
ferkad 9y ago
Just do not forget they joined Germany in the invasion of Poland in September 1939. Only because of the termination of Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact by Nazies Soviets were forced to fight them.
- OnlyOnlyOnly 9y ago
  Russia and Germany planned the division of Europe and invasion of Poland. Stalin just was too clever for Hitler. Instead of attacking at the same time as agreed, he waited to make Hitler the only agressor. He also before talked to the British and French and knew they would defend Poland. Stalins plan was for the capitalst nations to destroy each other then rule them. As Russia tried when marching towards a destroyed and weak Germany only stopped by the Polish in 1921.
- myth_drannon 9y ago
  And before that Germany and Poland joined forces together to invade Czechoslovakia....
  - bobthechef 9y ago
    Your insinuation is kind of grotesque.
    - yareally 9y ago
      It's not insinuation, but a part of history that's overlooked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaolzie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaolzie "The Zaolzie region was created in 1920, when Cieszyn Silesia was divided between Czechoslovakia and Poland. Zaolzie forms the eastern part of the Czech portion of Cieszyn Silesia. The division did not satisfy any side, and persisting conflict over the region led to its annexation by Poland in October 1938, following the Munich Agreement. After German invasion of Poland in 1939, the area became a part of Nazi Germany until 1945. After the war, the 1920 borders were restored."
    - lucozade 9y ago
      What insinuation are you referring to? To my knowledge there's no evidence that Germany and Poland colluded in the annexation of Czechoslovakia but Poland definitely did take the opportunity to annex part of it. And the Germans weren't particularly unhappy about that as it played very well for them internationally.
_m4r 9y ago
> The Red Army was indeed a savior. It is thanks to those masses of poor soldiers Regarding that point, when Soviets were "freeing" Poland after Hitler's fall, it was really common for them to raid houses of polish civilians. They didn't only steal and kill, but also rape women, children, infants alike (even impale them on sticks). I'm living on territories close to the one of extermination camps and soviets really brought us more harm than nazis durning WW2. Red army was created mostly from really uneducated villagers that lived in conditions similar to those in middle ages.
- olavk 9y ago
  > soviets really brought us more harm than nazis durning WW2 I presume you are not counting the three million Polish Jews who were murdered by the nazis?
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/01/27/it-could-soon-be-a-crime-to-blame-poland-for-nazi-atrocities-and-israel-is-appalled/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/01/27...
  - bobthechef 9y ago
    Or the 3 million Polish gentiles that were also killed? Remember that Poland lost 6 million citizens.
  - _m4r 9y ago
    This is very wide topic and I would like to not discuss it over Internet because I've had plenty of similar discussions with people I've met, and it would really require us to write essays :| Soviets killed about six million of polish people (until 1956). Not to mention harm that was done to the polish culture, dignity, economy, science for the 45 years.
    - _m4r 9y ago
      > So you would like to make your statements, but not to have them challenged? Oh dear, I didn't even point single statement yet.
batushka2 9y ago
Red Army was no savior - it STARTED WW2 together with Nazies by atacking Poland! Before, 'saviours' attacked Finland. Red army is worst or at least equal to Nazies. World should be grateful to US and Lend-Lease Act, without it Red Army would have ceased to exist.
bobthechef 9y ago
You have to take into account Soviet intent. Stalin was not interested in liberating Poland or the other countries occupied by the Nazis per se. Stalin was interested in Soviet domination. He had already tried to conquer Poland in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920 (in which Pilecki fought, as the article mentions). They lost to the Poles. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was essentially a temporary agreement (that really, neither the Nazis nor the Soviets intended to stick to ultimately) that explicitly had as its aim the division and dismemberment of Poland between Germany and Russia. "Soviet liberation" may mean that the Soviet occupation of Poland and the countries of the Eastern bloc had the result of removing the Nazis, but the ultimate goal was not liberation but also occupation. That many Russians died to secure Soviet control over Central/Eastern Europe is not proof that the Soviets were self-sacrificial liberators, but rather that in Soviet, and ultimately Russian, culture, human life is much more dispensable to those in power than it is in the West. The Tsars, and their Soviet successors, were tyrants who could decide the fate of any subject. To this day, the Russian leadership has no problem in carrying out assassinations of politically problematic people, even abroad. The Soviet-installed government in Poland following WWII operated according to similar principles and under Soviet directives, though not to the same extremes as the Soviet leadership. Pilecki is one of many who were brutally tortured and executed by the communists, many of them members of the Home Army. Both Nazis and Soviets took part in exterminating swathes of Polish society they saw as a threat or an inconvenience to their rule (e.g. Katyn massacre), during and also, in the case of the Soviets, following the War.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  "ut rather that in Soviet, and ultimately Russian, culture, human life is much more dispensable to those in power than it is in the West." It is easy to lay blame at the feet of a handful of leaders and forget that in centuries the Russian people put their arms, their strength, their blood behind such. It is easy to focus on a single tiny person within the scope of history and say of course this person had no power and no complicity in evil and forget that the totality of the Russian people are complicit in the actions of their leaders.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago

quantumofmalice 9y ago

If you can stomach it, you can read this: EDIT: removed link due to questions about author's truthfulness

ivanech 9y ago
The author of this book should be treated with extreme skepticism. His stated goal is to "free this world we call home from the Jewish slavery it now finds itself in for these past hundred years" by writing about the "real Holocaust" [i]. He writes about "racial reality" and "Jewish masters who want to flood Sweden with Third World trash" [ii]. His agenda is Nazi apologism and bald-faced antisemitism. [i] https://chechar.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/the-hellstorm-project/ https://chechar.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/the-hellstorm-proje... [ii] http://thomasgoodrich.com/ http://thomasgoodrich.com/
- quantumofmalice 9y ago
  Yeesh, I wasn't aware of that. Thank you for the info, I removed the link.
  - ivanech 9y ago
    No problem! It looks like the places that sell the book do their damnedest to make the author look like any other historian.
sofal 9y ago
Yikes, that link sent me down a rabbit hole of white nationalism and Holocaust denial. No thanks.

def_true_false 9y ago

> The Red Army was indeed a savior. Many who ended up in the soviet sphere of influence would beg to differ.

simonh 9y ago
Oh come on, that post was very clearly made knowingly within that context.
rbanffy 9y ago
It's not like there were better alternatives at the time.
- bobthechef 9y ago
  That's fallacious thinking. Even if we assumes that nothing could be done to stop the Soviets (and that is debatable: some have argued that the US was fully capable of pushing back against Soviet domination in the eastern Bloc, but instead caved in to Soviet demands), the result was a nasty occupation by the Soviets. "No alternative" does not mean it wasn't objectively bad. We're not talking about running out of your favorite ice cream topping here and having to compromise for your second favorite topping.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    Would the Allies stand a chance if the Soviets didn't help? Would the Allies stand a chance if the Soviets allied with the Axis?
    - lostlogin 9y ago
      Yes and then no (or not without US help). The British empire outproduced, manufactured, mined etc the Germans for basically the entire war. The question is more about why it took so long for the allies to get the upper hand. The idea of ‘the plucky underdog’ is a myth, Britain was very much a superpower with a massive, resource rich empire behind it. https://www.amazon.de/Britains-War-Machine-Weapons-Resources/dp/0141026103 https://www.amazon.de/Britains-War-Machine-Weapons-Resources...

tszymczyszyn 9y ago

It is true that Russians helped in ending WWII but as others pointed they were also one of the initial aggressors and allies of the Reich. If not for that the war might as well end faster.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lostlogin 9y ago
How? The invasion of Russia lead to the meat grinder that destroyed Germany. How would the allies have turned Germany without the Russians?
vkou 9y ago
The war would have ended even faster had Britain and France not let Chechoslovakia get partitioned. They proved themselves completely unreliable, and unsurprisingly, after a failed attempt to turn West, Stalin signed a deal with the devil. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was not signed without context. The USSR sought out, and was rejected from an alliance with Britain and France.

wpowiertowski 9y ago

Being Polish makes me very proud of the bravery of Witold Pilecki at the same time Russian army did some horrible things during the „saving” of eastern Europe. However if you look at the numbers they also paid the ultimate price in number of casualties: https://vimeo.com/128373915 https://vimeo.com/128373915

badpun 9y ago

> The Red Army was indeed a savior. It is thanks to those masses of poor soldiers, of which eight millions died, that the horror of WWII last only five years or so. All Europe and all world indeed should be grateful to them. That is under a big assumption that Stalin's USSR was actually better than Hitler's Germany. Since there were lots of people who fled Soviet-occupied parts of Poland into German-occupied ones (hoping that life under Hitler will be less of a horror), this is not really clear whether the cure was not worse than the disease.

olavk 9y ago
It would very much depends on who you were. If you had German ancestry you would be better off under the Germans, if you were Jewish you were far worse off. A lot of people in the former USSR occupied areas like the Baltics or Ukraine actually greeted the Germans as liberators, but they quickly changed their mind when they realized the Germans considered Slavs subhumans.
- b0rsuk 9y ago
  Hitler had this list of peoples to exterminate: * Jews * Romanies ("gypsies") * Slavs (Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Czechs, modern Macedonians, Serbs, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Slovenians...) Jews took the biggest blow, but Hitler didn't plan to stop there. And not all of it was even ethnic. For example, he hated homosexuals and disabled people. He was going to clean the race. Communists were a target, too. The reason he didn't exterminate everyone at the same time is that he needed slaves and collaborators in the transitional period. People down the list could be used to exterminate those higher up (indirectly, but sometimes directly). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
  - greedo 9y ago
    As well as almost any Polish professionals: Teachers, professors, lawyers, government officials, religious figures. The goal of the Germans was to dismantle almost all of Polish society and replace it with German society.

perl4ever 9y ago

I recently learned something interesting - the gas van was apparently invented in the Soviet Union in the late 30s, shortly before the Nazis started using similar execution methods. Google Translate says "...he was following the instructions of the NKVD Ministry of Defense and that without them it would be impossible to perform so much the number of executions to which the arrested were sentenced by three threes at a time" See: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1265324 https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1265324

ferkad 9y ago

Just do not forget they joined Germany in the invasion of Poland in September 1939. Only because of the termination of Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact by Nazies Soviets were forced to fight them.

OnlyOnlyOnly 9y ago
Russia and Germany planned the division of Europe and invasion of Poland. Stalin just was too clever for Hitler. Instead of attacking at the same time as agreed, he waited to make Hitler the only agressor. He also before talked to the British and French and knew they would defend Poland. Stalins plan was for the capitalst nations to destroy each other then rule them. As Russia tried when marching towards a destroyed and weak Germany only stopped by the Polish in 1921.
myth_drannon 9y ago
And before that Germany and Poland joined forces together to invade Czechoslovakia....
- bobthechef 9y ago
  Your insinuation is kind of grotesque.
  - yareally 9y ago
    It's not insinuation, but a part of history that's overlooked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaolzie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaolzie "The Zaolzie region was created in 1920, when Cieszyn Silesia was divided between Czechoslovakia and Poland. Zaolzie forms the eastern part of the Czech portion of Cieszyn Silesia. The division did not satisfy any side, and persisting conflict over the region led to its annexation by Poland in October 1938, following the Munich Agreement. After German invasion of Poland in 1939, the area became a part of Nazi Germany until 1945. After the war, the 1920 borders were restored."
  - lucozade 9y ago
    What insinuation are you referring to? To my knowledge there's no evidence that Germany and Poland colluded in the annexation of Czechoslovakia but Poland definitely did take the opportunity to annex part of it. And the Germans weren't particularly unhappy about that as it played very well for them internationally.

_m4r 9y ago

> The Red Army was indeed a savior. It is thanks to those masses of poor soldiers Regarding that point, when Soviets were "freeing" Poland after Hitler's fall, it was really common for them to raid houses of polish civilians. They didn't only steal and kill, but also rape women, children, infants alike (even impale them on sticks). I'm living on territories close to the one of extermination camps and soviets really brought us more harm than nazis durning WW2. Red army was created mostly from really uneducated villagers that lived in conditions similar to those in middle ages.

olavk 9y ago
> soviets really brought us more harm than nazis durning WW2 I presume you are not counting the three million Polish Jews who were murdered by the nazis?
- jacquesm 9y ago
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/01/27/it-could-soon-be-a-crime-to-blame-poland-for-nazi-atrocities-and-israel-is-appalled/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/01/27...
- bobthechef 9y ago
  Or the 3 million Polish gentiles that were also killed? Remember that Poland lost 6 million citizens.
- _m4r 9y ago
  This is very wide topic and I would like to not discuss it over Internet because I've had plenty of similar discussions with people I've met, and it would really require us to write essays :| Soviets killed about six million of polish people (until 1956). Not to mention harm that was done to the polish culture, dignity, economy, science for the 45 years.
  - _m4r 9y ago
    > So you would like to make your statements, but not to have them challenged? Oh dear, I didn't even point single statement yet.

batushka2 9y ago

Red Army was no savior - it STARTED WW2 together with Nazies by atacking Poland! Before, 'saviours' attacked Finland. Red army is worst or at least equal to Nazies. World should be grateful to US and Lend-Lease Act, without it Red Army would have ceased to exist.

bobthechef 9y ago

You have to take into account Soviet intent. Stalin was not interested in liberating Poland or the other countries occupied by the Nazis per se. Stalin was interested in Soviet domination. He had already tried to conquer Poland in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920 (in which Pilecki fought, as the article mentions). They lost to the Poles. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was essentially a temporary agreement (that really, neither the Nazis nor the Soviets intended to stick to ultimately) that explicitly had as its aim the division and dismemberment of Poland between Germany and Russia. "Soviet liberation" may mean that the Soviet occupation of Poland and the countries of the Eastern bloc had the result of removing the Nazis, but the ultimate goal was not liberation but also occupation. That many Russians died to secure Soviet control over Central/Eastern Europe is not proof that the Soviets were self-sacrificial liberators, but rather that in Soviet, and ultimately Russian, culture, human life is much more dispensable to those in power than it is in the West. The Tsars, and their Soviet successors, were tyrants who could decide the fate of any subject. To this day, the Russian leadership has no problem in carrying out assassinations of politically problematic people, even abroad. The Soviet-installed government in Poland following WWII operated according to similar principles and under Soviet directives, though not to the same extremes as the Soviet leadership. Pilecki is one of many who were brutally tortured and executed by the communists, many of them members of the Home Army. Both Nazis and Soviets took part in exterminating swathes of Polish society they saw as a threat or an inconvenience to their rule (e.g. Katyn massacre), during and also, in the case of the Soviets, following the War.

michaelmrose 9y ago
"ut rather that in Soviet, and ultimately Russian, culture, human life is much more dispensable to those in power than it is in the West." It is easy to lay blame at the feet of a handful of leaders and forget that in centuries the Russian people put their arms, their strength, their blood behind such. It is easy to focus on a single tiny person within the scope of history and say of course this person had no power and no complicity in evil and forget that the totality of the Russian people are complicit in the actions of their leaders.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago