Im at work and cant really focus on reading anything heavy about it but it's been on my mind since I heard about it a few weeks ago
Im at work and cant really focus on reading anything heavy about it but it's been on my mind since I heard about it a few weeks ago
AFAIK it's not too complicated, basically the USSR lost territories on its western front after signing Brest-Litovsk (treaty that ended Russian involvement in WW1), Stalin "invaded" Poland to regain those territories and to create a buffer zone between the USSR and the Nazis. Clearly this paid off as the Nazis were repelled from Soviet territory before they were able to capture Leningrad or Moscow, despite their initial victories in the invasion.
Stalin wanting to set up an anti-Hitler pact before WW2 is pretty well documented, there's no chance the Soviets were a real "ally" of the Nazis as you're taught to believe in the west.
That being said I'm sure a Marxist youtuber could go into way more depth than I have in explaining this.
I've been re-watching the Brit 1973 production World At War series, and its a pretty fair summary of WWII, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was correctly considered a strategic maneuver to buy the USSR time to prepare for the eventual Nazi invasion.
as years go by, the West is always trying to revise the history of WWII, no doubt block buster Hollywood movies played a big role:
https://www.les-crises.fr/the-successful-70-year-campaign-to-convince-people-the-usa-and-not-the-ussr-beat-hitler/
tell that to the hundreds of thousands of soviets captured & killed in the reoccupied territory after neither the Stalin or Molotov defensive lines were functional because they moved the border. on paper it makes sense why they took territories closer to the Axis in preparation for war but it didn't actually translate into a better defensive strategy when war broke out. less prepared and farther-to-supply troops were fed to the germans who still advanced at breakneck speed & had to be stopped by millions of new mobilized personnel.
those troops should not have been lost so easily or quickly and would've made better accounts of themselves if not for a flawed strategic model & breathtaking soviet confidence/arrogance in the expected duration of the nonaggression pact
This isn't quite right because a lot happened after that that made the terms of Brest-Litovsk moot. In 1918 Poland became an independent country and immediately attacked Ukraine (and Belarus and Lithuania), which was in a civil war at the time. The U(krainian)SSR and the CCCP fought against the Polish and the western Ukrainian state. This war ended with the Treaty of Riga which gave a lot of Ukrainian and Belarusian territory to Poland. The Soviets got this territory back after Molotov-Ribbentrop and then WW2 happened.
The Poles still talk a lot about retaking "their" land from Ukraine and this has reached a fever pitch since Russia invaded Ukraine.