I seem to remember a quote from a Red Army captain that was something to the effect of "the German cities and towns were so nice. The farms were nice. Why did they, who had so much, attack us?"
He makes a good point, tbh. But the takeaway ofc is that the Nazis were power-hungry bullies, not that they were better than the soviets bc no gommunism
also a captain in the redarmy would probably have been conservatively 25-35 so would have remembered the aftermath of the Russian civil war and have immediate family who remembered the poverty of the tsar and civil war. Russian wealth was not static in the time in between and standards of living drastically improved so the fact he thought it was a lot doesn't necessarily mean it was much better than the soviet union at the time as the standards of reference for wealth might well have caught up slower than the standards of living
I seem to remember a quote from a Red Army captain that was something to the effect of "the German cities and towns were so nice. The farms were nice. Why did they, who had so much, attack us?"
He makes a good point, tbh. But the takeaway ofc is that the Nazis were power-hungry bullies, not that they were better than the soviets bc no gommunism
also a captain in the redarmy would probably have been conservatively 25-35 so would have remembered the aftermath of the Russian civil war and have immediate family who remembered the poverty of the tsar and civil war. Russian wealth was not static in the time in between and standards of living drastically improved so the fact he thought it was a lot doesn't necessarily mean it was much better than the soviet union at the time as the standards of reference for wealth might well have caught up slower than the standards of living
It might have been from Max Hastings' "Inferno" but I'd have no way of checking that right now.