No deal with the Soviet Union over carving up Europe

OK I'm sorry I really overreacted and started misinterpreting posts... :(

I'm just regularly pissed off to see clames of likes of Churchill and McCarthy about "Russian Barbarism". ComParty officials didnt gave a care about their nationality nor about nationality of their victims. Whether they truly believed their insane interpretations of ideologies or were a hypocritical power hungry bunch of thugs, you cant call entire Russian nation guilty and barbaric. It stinks even more when no one calls collective guild for Germans for WWII and Holocaust. Germans elected Hitler and Nazi party yet in that case there is no collective guilt, while all Russians are barbarians based on actions of rulers that gained power in a violent revolution?
 
I'd call for far more collective guilt with regard to German actions during WW2 but you get tired of posters (often German) constantly pointing out there was some opposition to Hitler. Yes there were some dissidents, but their impotency is a good measure of their number.

Unfortunately it seems de-nazification has built the myth that it was just Hitler and Himmler meanwhile the vast organisations numbering millions who willingly commited these acts will be forgotten.

This doesn't mean I believe all the Germans should have been arbitarilly punished or that I get some bizzare pleasure from constructing timelines in which people I consider to be evil suffer. (And in this timeline I have Stalin and Hitler suffer from a terrible wasting disease or leprosy, isn't that brilliant! Not really no.) I have nothing against 'Germans' or 'Russians' whether from the 1940's or the present day. I have problem with the actions some undertook just as I have a problem with actions certain Chinese continue to undertake and various other examples.

I do believe, and know, that a great number of German and Russian people commited acts which can probably be classified as crimes against humanity before, during and after WW2 for negligiable reason except to satisfy their own sadism.

Churchill would probably view it quite differently, he was a racial supremacist after all but I think he was reasonably in favour of Russian culture under the Tsars, atleast compared to Russia under the USSR. By 1940 atleast, possibly as early as the 1920's, Russia and the USSR were more or less interchangeable, in the manner of which Europeans often exchange Britain for England.

Saying that Europe would be under 'Russian' barbarism probably refers to the terrors of rule by the USSR. The USSR was certainly productive in some manners of culture but it brought alot of evils too. Russian activities towards the Poles and Baltic nations can hardly be considered enlightened, comparisons with Britain in Ireland and India might wash, but on the whole finding similar examples requires going one hundred years back in time, hardly an excellent comparrison.
 
Please be honest. It was Stalin and Beria. Everyone else was interchangeable and expendible. Yezhov was Lithuanian. And out of people you linked only two are Russians.

Vladimir Lenin, who started the Soviet terror, was Georgian too, I presume?

Ascribing atrocities to racial qualities or blaming an entire people for them collectively is about as goddamn stupid as it gets. But when you say no Russians at all even took part in the Soviet holocausts, that's kind of on the same level.
 
Yup, got it from there. Kind of geeky, I guess, but I don't like swearing, so ended up using fictional profanity instead...

I see... interesting.

Like 'kipple' in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I suppose.

Fair enough -it's an obscure enough reference that people probably won't realise they're being insulted unless you point it out.
 
I see... interesting.

Like 'kipple' in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I suppose.

Fair enough -it's an obscure enough reference that people probably won't realise they're being insulted unless you point it out.

Verbs ending with "-ed up" rarely have positive connotations. But I guess you're right. It's just a little eccentricity of mine.
 
Yalta was not some sleazy deal done in smoke filled back rooms it was a negotiated agreement between allies.

It mainly dealt with the actual situation on the ground as has been pointed out by others here. It also dealt with the further development of the war and how to prosecute it to achieve total victory with the least cost to the Allies, most importantly the terms and conditions of the entry of the USSR into the Pacific war. It lastly dealt with the shape of the post war world and what Churchill called spheres of influence.

How anyone could consider the negotiations a ‘sell-out’ is puzzling since in Europe the USSR was excluded from any settlement concerning post war Italy while the western Allies were included in the post war settlement process in eastern Europe. The west knew the concerns of Stalin and the Soviet leadership were principally focused on the security of the USSR’s western borders. FDR and Churchill, because of their own experience and the political-social milieu they inhabited, were convinced the best insurance the Soviets could get would be to have liberal democratic states established in the east. Stalin, because of his experience and the political-social milieu he inhabited, was convinced the best insurance the USSR could get would be to have sympathetic, Soviet-style states on the western border. Nazism was, to Stalin, a natural outcome of the western, liberal democratic process.

If no agreement was reached at Yalta then there would not be a Soviet declaration of war against Japan and this at a time when the effectiveness of the atomic bomb was unproven. What responsible President would put the lives of thousands upon thousands of American and Allied lives at risk for no tangible return?

The return of prisoners of war to their country of origin was controversial at the time but the western allies could think of no plausible reason to deny the Soviet demand. These people had donned the uniform of the common enemy and had participated in the attack on an ally. Traitors were routinely executed during and after the war including ‘Lord Haw Haw’.
 

Olmeka

Banned
erStalin, because of his experience and the political-social milieu he inhabited, was convinced the best insurance the USSR could get would be to have sympathetic, Soviet-style states on the western border
This theory seems far fatched, if he would want sympathetic states, then the mass murders, terror, robberies and organised plunder, as well as tolerance of rapes towards population of those countries would not take place.
Instead of friendly relations, the Soviet were interested in direct rule enforced by the threat of armed intervention and fear of terror.
 
Depends on the border incident.

Posit: the Soviets accidentally send a company into Patton's zone. He smashes them and invades them in return on his own initiative. The Soviets are probably paranoid enough to think it a total war from the start no matter what Truman might say.

Heh the Red Amry would smash any US attack since they were much more battle-hardened than the US troops.

The Western Allies struggled to make headway against a mere 25% of the shattered Wehrmact which had little to no air-cover. Fighting against the 10-million strong Red Army flush from victory would be much harder, and such a base betraya of an allyl would ruin the morale US troops & that of the people at home. possibly bringing down the government.

Thank you for the input, Alt, I prefer Dzhugashvili as it was his real name, Stalin was just a "political name" like "Koba". Even ol' Adolf wasn't really "Hitler" by some accounts it was Schickelgruber, but i digress...
Yes but who'd shout heil Schickelgruber? Hitler is much more snappy.:D

don't have the sources to hand from which I drew those conclusions but they were the numbers I had in mind. I fail to see how your line of arguement makes the USSR any more civilized or justifies the claim that the acts mentioned are to be blamed upon Stalin and Beria and not systematic of the USSR.
The fact that such large scale repression stopped when Stalin died indicates that quite nicely.:p

Post-Stalin the USSR was still repressive, but it was much milder. No more mass-terror, purges or famines occurred after Stalin died. Indeed the Communist party was terrified of any such re-occurrences since party members were no more immune from the GULAG than anyone else during Stalin’s rule.
 
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Well, since the Soviets were conscripting young boys and old men, had far less than ten million men and admitted among themselves that they could no longer maintain their existing force levels past 1945...I suppose the only argument against such a war would be how to convince the American people who couldn't wait to demobilize, to the point of sending home hundreds of thousands of troops from Europe while war still raged in the Pacific, to fight a brand new world war instead.


Comparison between British India and Stalin's USSR can be summed up in one word: Gandhi. In British India he survived long enough to see the British out, in the USSR both Gandhi, his family and all of his more prominent supporters would have died horribly. As for Soviet/Tsar comparisons, Lenin managed to execute more political prisoners in any one year in power than the combined Tsars did in the last three generations.


And the improvement after Stalin's death required a fight among the top Soviets in the Kremlin with the head of the (now) KGB being dragged out and shot. It was not a sure thing.
 
Well, since the Soviets were conscripting young boys and old men, had far less than ten million men and admitted among themselves that they could no longer maintain their existing force levels past 1945...I suppose the only argument against such a war would be how to convince the American people who couldn't wait to demobilize, to the point of sending home hundreds of thousands of troops from Europe while war still raged in the Pacific, to fight a brand new world war instead.

You have, of course, also the fact that American media had been painting the USSR as the "good guys" over the last half-decade or so. An unprovoked American attack would be seen as a betrayal and not be popular with the public.
 
Heh the Red Amry would smash any US attack since they were much more battle-hardened than the US troops.

The Western Allies struggled to make headway against a mere 25% of the shattered Wehrmact which had little to no air-cover. Fighting against the 10-million strong Red Army flush from victory would be much harder, and such a base betraya of an allyl would ruin the morale US troops & that of the people at home. possibly bringing down the government.

And the Red Army wank returns... :rolleyes:

Yes, the Soviets were hard bastards. I would even go so far as to say the Red Army, post-1942 or so, was a tougher thing than the US Army. Which is not to say the Soviets would win.

The Red Army was running on Spam and Jeep trucks. It was reaching the end of its logistical tether and for that matter it was running out of warm bodies too. The problems with getting the WAllied populations to support WW2.1 are pretty insurmountable, I agree - but in terms of actual blowing shit up on the Elbe, I don't think the west would do that badly.
 
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