That many Russians died to secure Soviet control over Central/Eastern Europe is not proof that the Soviets were self-sacrificial liberators, but rather that in Soviet, and ultimately Russian, culture, human life is much more dispensable to those in power than it is in the West. The Tsars, and their Soviet successors, were tyrants who could decide the fate of any subject. To this day, the Russian leadership has no problem in carrying out assassinations of politically problematic people, even abroad. The Soviet-installed government in Poland following WWII operated according to similar principles and under Soviet directives, though not to the same extremes as the Soviet leadership. Pilecki is one of many who were brutally tortured and executed by the communists, many of them members of the Home Army. Both Nazis and Soviets took part in exterminating swathes of Polish society they saw as a threat or an inconvenience to their rule (e.g. Katyn massacre), during and also, in the case of the Soviets, following the War.
It is easy to lay blame at the feet of a handful of leaders and forget that in centuries the Russian people put their arms, their strength, their blood behind such. It is easy to focus on a single tiny person within the scope of history and say of course this person had no power and no complicity in evil and forget that the totality of the Russian people are complicit in the actions of their leaders.
Tell me, who was responsible for the hundreds of thousands killed in the battle of Verdun: individual soldiers? Scared to death, trembling, half-insane, playing dead under the dead, left without any reasonable choice, resembling more animals than humans? Or someone else, who actually sent them there?
The same was true of prior tyrants they embraced.
That is under a big assumption that Stalin's USSR was actually better than Hitler's Germany. Since there were lots of people who fled Soviet-occupied parts of Poland into German-occupied ones (hoping that life under Hitler will be less of a horror), this is not really clear whether the cure was not worse than the disease.
* Jews
* Romanies ("gypsies")
* Slavs (Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Czechs, modern Macedonians, Serbs, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Slovenians...)
The reason he didn't exterminate everyone at the same time is that he needed slaves and collaborators in the transitional period. People down the list could be used to exterminate those higher up (indirectly, but sometimes directly).
Few people realise that the Soviet Union took roughly one-third of Poland when it & Germany invaded Poland at the beginning of the Second World War — and it kept that territory after the war. Polish society in those conquered territories was replaced with Russian society.
For me the most fascinating is the case of Lithuania. Polish children are taught about the Commonwealth, common history, fighting together... So when they hear about anti-Polish sentiment there, it makes no sense to them. People are surprised and can't understand it. That's the fault of presenting a one-sided version of history and completely ignoring the POV of your neighbors.
* They claimed that all development in Russia was led by people of German (Aryan) origin,
* Yet they focused their efforts on exterminating the social elite first, to make the society of Untermensh (slave race) fall faster.
While the Soviets did harbour imperial ambitions against neighbouring states (Poland, Finland), this:
> had Hitler not attacked first, Stalin would probably just attack Germany within a short period of time
is blatantly false, and insultingly so given the millions of Soviet citizens who paid a bloody price for Stalin's total lack of readiness at the German border or mobilization against the Nazis.
No it's not. The only “Historian” to say so was the so-called Suvorov, a transfuge of the NKVD. And his theories have been thoroughly dismantled by the whole academia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaolzie
"The Zaolzie region was created in 1920, when Cieszyn Silesia was divided between Czechoslovakia and Poland. Zaolzie forms the eastern part of the Czech portion of Cieszyn Silesia. The division did not satisfy any side, and persisting conflict over the region led to its annexation by Poland in October 1938, following the Munich Agreement. After German invasion of Poland in 1939, the area became a part of Nazi Germany until 1945. After the war, the 1920 borders were restored."
To my knowledge there's no evidence that Germany and Poland colluded in the annexation of Czechoslovakia but Poland definitely did take the opportunity to annex part of it. And the Germans weren't particularly unhappy about that as it played very well for them internationally.
* Catholicism
* History of Poland
This is the direction recent act about "Polish death camps" is heading in. It will outlaw saying Poles were originators of any WW2 war crimes. This is ridiculous. Yes, several million of Poles were killed in WW2. But there are black sheep in any society, and certainly there are in an oppressed one. When you harm a group of people, some of them will invariably hit back. How often do you hear that widely admired Józef Piłsudski was a terrorist and a train robber in his early years ? That Polish resistance conducted assassinations and bombings, not just on soldiers but also on civilians they determined to be collaborators ? Kazimierz Wielki (Casimir the Great), praised for development of Poland under his rule, was a cynical womanizer.
Even a single person can be both good and bad. By whitewashing Polish history, Poland shoots itself in the foot. You shouldn't expect to get correct output if you provide incomplete input. Poland has aspirations to be a regional power and to form an alliance of countries under its leadership. It's not going to happen as long as Poles refuse to remember their wrongdoings towards other nations and groups. Poles will just continue to wonder why most neighboring nations don't like them. You need to remember your mistakes to avoid them in the future and/or to apologize for them, if only in a symbolic manner. Look at what Germany is doing. Yes, Germans supported terrible genocide under Hitler, but they're now doing a lot to prevent that from happening in the future. And Germany is doing really well as far as diplomacy goes.
The eye-opening moment for me was when I was preparing for final exams. We had extra history lessons, and our teacher would force us to think. She would tell us what happened, and asked us why did king X or pope Y do that. Or she would divide us into two groups, like Spartans and Athenians, give us source text and ask to prepare a speech arguing our city-state is better (contemporary Greeks considered Sparta to be a realized utopia).
As for the word like "szmalcownik", throw it around enough times and it will lose its power. For example, in Ukraine both sides of conflict call each other "fascist". In Poland, both sides of political conflict call each other "communists" - but very few actually back up their claims.
My favourite: "targowica", used by right-wingers to accuse political adversaries of treason. However, members of Targowica Confederation:
* had a conservative point of view,
* were hostile to western Europe,
* criticized contemporary Polish constitution,
* had a strong Church backing, including archbishops and Pope,
* called themselves devout patriots.
Regarding that point, when Soviets were "freeing" Poland after Hitler's fall, it was really common for them to raid houses of polish civilians. They didn't only steal and kill, but also rape women, children, infants alike (even impale them on sticks). I'm living on territories close to the one of extermination camps and soviets really brought us more harm than nazis durning WW2.
Red army was created mostly from really uneducated villagers that lived in conditions similar to those in middle ages.
I presume you are not counting the three million Polish Jews who were murdered by the nazis?
Soviets killed about six million of polish people (until 1956). Not to mention harm that was done to the polish culture, dignity, economy, science for the 45 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_repressions_of_Polish_c...
So you would like to make your statements, but not to have them challenged?
[citation needed]
Oh dear, I didn't even point single statement yet.
Google Translate says "...he was following the instructions of the NKVD Ministry of Defense and that without them it would be impossible to perform so much the number of executions to which the arrested were sentenced by three threes at a time"
Many who ended up in the soviet sphere of influence would beg to differ.
The British empire outproduced, manufactured, mined etc the Germans for basically the entire war. The question is more about why it took so long for the allies to get the upper hand.
The idea of ‘the plucky underdog’ is a myth, Britain was very much a superpower with a massive, resource rich empire behind it.
https://www.amazon.de/Britains-War-Machine-Weapons-Resources...
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was not signed without context. The USSR sought out, and was rejected from an alliance with Britain and France.
EDIT: removed link due to questions about author's truthfulness
[i] https://chechar.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/the-hellstorm-proje...
On the other hand, there was the Stalinist regime, ruthless rule, killing one's own people and others - for power and control. Whenever someone makes any judgement about Russians, they make a generalizing mistake. On top of that, I'd be very careful when making judgements about people's behaviors in extreme situations, it's quite easy to make that at a distance.