Yes. I mean I have nuanced critiques of Stalin from a “let’s understand mistakes of the past so we don’t repeat them” perspective, but this is truth that I keep coming back to.
:chad-stalin:
Churchill and Roosevelt balked for years as Stalin begged them to open a western front to vent some pressure from the ostfront. I know Churchill considered it a win-win if the Nazi and Soviet menaces ground themselves down to nothing. Eventually, the weaker 2/3rds of the Allies tickled the Axis in Africa and Italy long before they landed at Normandy. It wasn’t until a year and a half after the Soviets won at Stalingrad and had already made it clear they were headed to Berlin that the Allies decided to get serious about liberating Western Europe.
The US wanted a '43 invasion of France, it was the British that stalled it so hard because they were petrified of losing their own men. I’d say you have an accurate assessment of Churchill and the British but the Americans definitely wanted to be more active on the Western Front, you have to remember until Truman the climate around Roosevelt and his cabinet was that of a post-war partnership and collaboration with the USSR.
(In case it comes off that way, this isn’t apologia for US imperialism or anything)
Exactly. The US understood the utility and need for a second front from day one. Eisenhower grew progressively pissed at the British for delaying
No, my dad said the :amerikkka: Lend-Lease program is the reason the soviets beat the germans, and that’s why Ukraine is going to win.
I just don’t see the alternative path to Stalinism. If someone offered me something better, I wouldn’t support the Soviet course in the 1930s-40s. Instead they offer Trotsky or worse. Stalin got results and he persecuted most of the people who deserved it.
I mean there are more than a few very awful mistakes or acts from that period. Lot of the purges are unjust and cannot be excused by them eventually defeating the fascists. Stuff like arresting educators for people with disability, as well as a lot of the foreign revolutionaries living in the USSR as expats. That often just hurt those movements and possibly harmed the war effort later, like the Finnish Reds. The mass deportations also often ended up being cruel, unnecessary, and a loss of manpower and waste of military resources.
I love Stalin and I try my damndest to uphold him and I do think he was at least 80% correct 20% incorrect, but that 20% is really fucking depressing and not because libs use it as a bludgeon for their BS. It sucks reading about a figure and seeing their death date as '37-39 and your heart sinking. They dont make up even the majority of those purged, most didn’t die, most purged didn’t even face jailtime, but that overblown number still in actuality is disheartening.
Which makes Trotsky as the sainted martyr so fucking funny. They pick the one guy who really was being traitorous and revisionist and posed a threat.
