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The Soviets never liberated anyone. Go ask the people of Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 how liberated they felt. Or you could ask all the people murd
by philwelch 1y ago
The Soviets never liberated anyone. Go ask the people of Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 how liberated they felt. Or you could ask all the people murdered by border guards at the Berlin Wall.
- TheAlchemist 1y agoYou are both kind of right. The Soviets helped in a major way to defeat the Germans - on par with the US. But it's also true that they did not liberate anyone in Europe, just replaced the German occupation.
- arethuza 1y agoIf you leave aside their ghastly leadership there is no doubt to me that the people of the Soviet Union paid the highest price in defeating the Nazis.
- tremon 1y agoI think the argument is that that cost has been repaid after the war by the people of occupied eastern Europe, that's why they don't "owe" Russia anything. In contrast, western Europe paid a much lower price for its liberation.
- TheAlchemist 1y agoYou would also need to leave aside the fact that they were as responsible as the Nazi in the beginning of the war. They invaded Poland in a coordinated attack with Germany.
- philwelch 1y agoThey paid the highest price precisely because their ghastly leadership was all too willing to sacrifice their lives for conquest.
- saubeidl 1y agoFactually not true. The Soviets liberated Austria.
- Jensson 1y agoAnd the Nazis did help liberate parts of Finland from Soviet, both are correct but doesn't really represent what these countries did very well.
- flohofwoe 1y agoAustria could have ended up divided by the Iron Curtain like East- and West-Germany, I wonder if you would view the Soviets the same way today if that had happened and your ancestors were on the wrong side of the wall.
- saubeidl 1y agoBut it didn't, that's the entire point of this counterexample.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> it didn't, that's the entire point of this counterexample This is sort of like arguing Belgian colonialism was fine because there was one village they forgot to enslave. Also, we were jointly occupied [1]. (Austrian-Indian American.) The reason we weren’t Polanded is the Allies, who controlled part of us at the end of the war, argued we were victims of Anschluss. If the Soviets controlled Austria, it wouldn’t have been spared. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Austria https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Austria
- saubeidl 1y agoThe statement above was the universal statement > The Soviets never liberated anyone A universal statement can be disproven by a single counterexample.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoThe Soviet "liberation" story you hear only from western Europeans who never had to live under the soviets so in their history books they're the good guys for defeating Germany.
- saubeidl 1y agoAs a Central European, the Soviets liberated my ancestors.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoDid they also live under Soviet rule after?
- saubeidl 1y agoThey did for a decade - after that they were given their freedom. Isn't that what liberation means?