genuinely people who hold this opinion and wonder wistfully about it should be executed by firing squad. The 'Armchair historian' youtube channel just did a whole thing about it and genuinely i regard this man as worthy of being dumped in acid for this video alone.
the allies after going to war with the nazis, declaring war on the soviets, rebuilding the fascist army, would probably lose spectacularly.
Im not saying that that soviets would have rolled over them like paper, but the idea that the allies would gain any more than a Pyrrhic stalemate after losing in france and italy is so fucking dumb. the people who know the devastation after ww2 and are like 'i want another one just to destroy the soviets' are as anticommunist as the nazis and should be treated as such. they should also follow their fucking leader.
70% of their industrial capacity was destroyed in Barbarossa. In terms of morale I definitely agree, but you can't fight a war on morale alone. Thankfully that applies to both sides so the Western side still could not have possibly made that work without using nuclear weapons.
An invasion by the west might've made it necessary to do stuff like support the Greek communists and would've foreclosed making a deal with the capitalist imperialist west - you don't get "peaceful coexistence" as a possibility when they're coming to kill you right now. And the soviets had been fighting for like 30 years at that point, they were ready to hunker down and have some peace after a generation of struggle. But the exigency of war would've made it so that maybe they lose the immediate industrial output of the US but they gain the ability to flip this invasion into a general global classwar back when the west had way more sympathizers with the Soviets and the 2nd red scare hadn't happened (and also the complete institutional failure of capitalism as a going concern in the 30s was still quite fresh in peoples' living memories along with violent labor struggle that the people won)
Are there any soviets who fought in WWI, the Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and WWII? If you were 20 in 1916, you'd only be 49 by 1945. You still had another decade before compulsory retirement.