A Stalin Chamberlain pact?

Was there a chance of Britain and France making an agreement with Stalin which would have either made the USSR an ally from the start or have deterred further Nazi agreement?

If so what would be the terms and the consequences
 
Was there a chance of Britain and France making an agreement with Stalin which would have either made the USSR an ally from the start or have deterred further Nazi agreement?

If so what would be the terms and the consequences
You might want to read WP's article on Molotov-Ribbentrop. Surprisingly, it gives a good factual outline of Soviet-British-French talks in Summer 1939 and terms of the proposed pact. However, you would have to ignore everything but bare facts (terms were so and so), as the article is mostly written by Polish and Baltic clique of "ethnically enlightened" wikipedians (this is the bunch which claims, among other pearls of wisdom, that destruction of Baltic SS divisions in that Courland Pocket was more important for Stalin in 1944 than dealing with Germany itself).
 
Strange that the Courland pocket held out until the end of the war then...;)
For them it is not. For them it is the proof of Balts' ultimate superiority over Russian untermenschen.

Another recent pearl of wisdom from the same bunch is that it was Estonian mobilization of 1944 (netting something like 50-70K of untrained conscripts) which stopped Soviet Leningrad Front dead from January to September 1944.

Again, I kid you not, this is the way those guys were schooled to think, and a lot of WP Eastern European articles are soaked in this poisonous ideological brew. As a Russian saying goes, "it would be funny if only it wouldn't have been so sad".
 
CanadianGoose, I'm sure you aren't joking and would hate to break the news to those guys that the Courland pocket lasted because it simply wasn't in the same league of importance to Stalin as Berlin was.

Or their reaction might be worth seeing...;)
 
For them it is not. For them it is the proof of Balts' ultimate superiority over Russian untermenschen.

Another recent pearl of wisdom from the same bunch is that it was Estonian mobilization of 1944 (netting something like 50-70K of untrained conscripts) which stopped Soviet Leningrad Front dead from January to September 1944.

Again, I kid you not, this is the way those guys were schooled to think, and a lot of WP Eastern European articles are soaked in this poisonous ideological brew. As a Russian saying goes, "it would be funny if only it wouldn't have been so sad".

I've got to admit, I thought you were exagerrating Wiki's Russophobia until something inspired me to do some superficial research into the Belarusian partisan movement. Said movement, I learned, consisted of bands of Soviet soldiers inserted behind German lines in Belarus with the mission of burning helpless Belarusian villages and carrying off the cattle.
 
well, as I've been able to understand it

the political Right in Britain and France were often personified by Daladier and Chamberlain. And too often Hitler was something of a darling of the Right in nations outside Germany.

At the same time, he double-talked, convincing Chamberlain that he was merely trying to provide a buffer against the Bolsheviki. Wasn't that really why Britain and France didn't bomb Germany during the invasion of Poland?

The Poles waited in vain for their Allies in the west to back them up.

Chamberlain seems to have been afraid to make it too hard for the Wehrmacht to start moving in the direction of USSR.

Hard to believe that a Chamberlain would ally with the Bolsheviks. Wasn't he even worried about Norway, partly, due to the USSR war with Finland?

Another angle on Norway, though, does have it that Chamberlain was trying to "Work it" and play Germany against USSR in Scandinavia. Maybe he was shrewder than that, and more cynical about Hitler and Stalin..
 
the political Right in Britain and France were often personified by Daladier and Chamberlain. And too often Hitler was something of a darling of the Right in nations outside Germany.

At the same time, he double-talked, convincing Chamberlain that he was merely trying to provide a buffer against the Bolsheviki. Wasn't that really why Britain and France didn't bomb Germany during the invasion of Poland?

The Poles waited in vain for their Allies in the west to back them up.

If we were really willing to let Germany be a buffer against Russia, even at the expense of their European hegemony, why did we follow through with war? Why didn't we make peace before or after Barbarossa?

The reason for the phony war was simply military unpreparedness. There was no immediate succour that we could give to Poland, and adequate preparations for an offensive did not exist. The French did actually make a desultory attack in the Saar in September, but we dramatically overestimated the strength of Germany's western defenses, leading us to continue amassing forces until Poland was already occupied. And after that, defence seemed the more logical option for victory.
 
I've got to admit, I thought you were exagerrating Wiki's Russophobia until something inspired me to do some superficial research into the Belarusian partisan movement. Said movement, I learned, consisted of bands of Soviet soldiers inserted behind German lines in Belarus with the mission of burning helpless Belarusian villages and carrying off the cattle.

While I know next to nothing on partisan activities in Belarus, in Finland Soviet partisans did exactly that, attacking small and helpless civilian targets and rarely, if ever, military units. They performed raids into Finnish territory in Lapland, behind the lines, and brutally attacked unevacuated villages. This is well documented, too. It can be called Russophobic if one claims that the partisans were just murderers of civilians, but there truly was that side to Soviet partisan activities.

CanadianGoose said:
Again, I kid you not, this is the way those guys were schooled to think, and a lot of WP Eastern European articles are soaked in this poisonous ideological brew. As a Russian saying goes, "it would be funny if only it wouldn't have been so sad".

What filters through the Finnish media on the historical view of Baltic nationalists and Russians, respectively, is mindboggling. There just seems to be no common ground. Both sides have their fixed views on WWI, WWII, Facism, Stalinism, etc. and I guess civilized discussion on history between the groups is very rare, at least on a popular level.

What with Finlandization and all that jazz, Finnish historians and teachers were coaxed for long to pander towards the Soviet(-cum-Russian) view of history, by our own "politically correct" leaders none the less. After mid-nineties we too have seen a backlash of a sorts of neo-nationalist popular historiography. That, happily, has not been able to drown out the high-class tradition of neutral scholarship we have (and had through the Cold War, even if somewhat underground).

I believe that in the Baltics it is the same backlash we see here, but on a much larger scale because of the force-feeding of Soviet views for half a century and the lack of a strong, homegrown academic tradition. Because of the moderating and gatekeeping effect of the established academia is mostly missing, kooks and extremists have the luxury to address a national audience in a way few Western nations have seen for a long time. These views, then, rebound from a wall of Russian officially sanctioned historiography, which, while more professional and factually grounded, is still holding on to some quite rigid and uncompromising central tenets on how the world is and how it should be seen. And thus, the battles rage on.

I guess it is the whole debacle of the "history wars" between the Baltic and the (Soviet-cum-)Russian reading of history that really "would be funny if it wasn't so sad".
 
While I know next to nothing on partisan activities in Belarus, in Finland Soviet partisans did exactly that, attacking small and helpless civilian targets and rarely, if ever, military units. They performed raids into Finnish territory in Lapland, behind the lines, and brutally attacked unevacuated villages. This is well documented, too. It can be called Russophobic if one claims that the partisans were just murderers of civilians, but there truly was that side to Soviet partisan activities.

I'd hesitate to call soviet diversion groups on Finland partisans, though it may be a correct term. While in Belarus such groups may had been sent too and did similar things, there was a large local resistance movement, which is what usually called "partisans" in Russia. They genuinely fought Nazis. They might do other things too, especially to collaborationists but that is naturally too.
And those partisans are conviniently forgotten by the folks of whom CandianGoose and others speak so lovingly.

Other you points are sadly right. Nobody wants to dint at all.
 
While I know next to nothing on partisan activities in Belarus, in Finland Soviet partisans did exactly that, attacking small and helpless civilian targets and rarely, if ever, military units. They performed raids into Finnish territory in Lapland, behind the lines, and brutally attacked unevacuated villages. This is well documented, too. It can be called Russophobic if one claims that the partisans were just murderers of civilians, but there truly was that side to Soviet partisan activities.

Irregular warfare is always brutal, certainly, and there were, I imagine, plenty of bandits who called themselves partisans, and plenty of atrocities against supposed collaborators and so on, but by "partisan" I don't mean Soviet irregular combat units deployed in Belarus, but rather the Belarussian homegrown movement. Of course the kernels of the partisan bands were deployed by the Soviets so you can't extricate the two, but I do think there's a big difference between irregular activity against the enemy in his country and your country, and the wiki article is trying to portray the Belarussian partisan movement is an invading Russian force which, to cap it all, had no military effectiveness and did indeed just burn villages.
 
I've got to admit, I thought you were exagerrating Wiki's Russophobia
I would NOT throw a fit and claim I never ever exagerrate (I don't think anyone can reasonably claim that), but sad truth of the matter is that it is not necessary to exaggerate when you're talking about depth of Russophobic bias Baltic and Polish WP editors are possessed with. As you've seen, there's just no boundaries to absurd claims they would make. So exagerration just isn't necessary.

While I know next to nothing on partisan activities in Belarus, in Finland Soviet partisans did exactly that, attacking small and helpless civilian targets and rarely, if ever, military units. They performed raids into Finnish territory in Lapland, behind the lines, and brutally attacked unevacuated villages. This is well documented, too. It can be called Russophobic if one claims that the partisans were just murderers of civilians, but there truly was that side to Soviet partisan activities.
DrakonFin, there are several aspects to that:
1) I'm not sure it is OK to single out Red Army (those groops you're talking about were not "partisans" i.e. local paramilitaries springing up as result of the hostile occupation, they were raiding Red Army units) for this type of behaviour (attacks on majority civilian targets disguised as "military necessity"). Just spell "Dresden" and "Hamburg".
2) Often difference between "civilian" and "combatant" is pretty tough to assess. Were members of "self-defence units" (most of modern Baltic prosecution of Soviet vets related to raids on villages documentally identified as hotbeds of "self-defence") civvies?
3) Yes, war is bitch. I guess no one in Finland tried to compare number of Soviet civvies perished in Finnish camps with number of Finnish civvies killed by Red raiders.

What filters through the Finnish media on the historical view of Baltic nationalists and Russians, respectively, is mindboggling. There just seems to be no common ground. Both sides have their fixed views on WWI, WWII, Facism, Stalinism, etc. and I guess civilized discussion on history between the groups is very rare, at least on a popular level.
1) You aren't forgetting about (quite natural) pro-Baltic bias of Finnish media, are you? Not that there's something wrong with that, but you can be sure that you hear softened versions of Baltic claims and very exaggerated version of Russian ones.
2) Baltic countries are actively discouraging any discussion of official version of history they promote. Regime similar to what (according to very opinionated Western claims) Russain "anti-falsification comission" is aiming at (official pressure on researchers those findings are not in line with official version) in some uncertain and very totalitarian future is the reality of Estonia and Latvia since at least 2000. I mean, how often you see about people being deported for intention to participate in scientific conference, or State Security apparatus branidng all minority groups as "agents of hostile influence"?
3) Balts didn't go through "de-totalitarisation of thinking" Germans and (to a lesser extent) Japanese went through in 1945-1965 and Russians are going through since 1985. Unlike latter, who were forced to re-assess their history and actions, Balts went through sequence of ethnic romanticism of 1930s (remember that all three were dictatorships for the most part of their pre-war existence), Soviet totalitarism (which they saw as something externally imposed, although it grew deep roots in local societies too) of 1945-1985 back to ethnic totalitarism since 1985. In plainspeak, psychologically unreformed Soviet propagandists (with notion of "difference of opions is natural" being deeply foreign to them) just dropped red banner of internationalism and picked up multi-colored banner of nation-state.

Irregular warfare is always brutal, certainly, and there were, I imagine, plenty of bandits who called themselves partisans, and plenty of atrocities against supposed collaborators and so on, but by "partisan" I don't mean Soviet irregular combat units deployed in Belarus, but rather the Belarussian homegrown movement.
Belarus had all kinds of regular, irregular, semi-regular and just criminal groups operating in forests and often entering an alliance of convenience with one another. Parachuted NKVD commando groups, remnants of Red Army caultrons of 1941, local anti-Nazi groups of different hue (AK, Red partisans, some Lithuanian and Belarussian nationalists), armed deserters, hiding armed and unarmed Jews, criminal gangs operating outside of formal allegiance but sometimes assuming identity of one of main forces, German-organized local self-defence units quietly working with underground, underground posing as pro-German self-defence... Nightmare, sheer nightmare. And none of them were saints...
 
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