If Germany didn't invade then the USSR would attack first (and WW2 would be over sooner, probably with larger part of Europe under Soviet control). Both powers had attack plans, Germans executed theirs sooner. Some historians claim that Germans got ahead if Soviet attack just by few weeks.

There's also the point that Germany absolutely needed the oil fields to keep their war machine running.

I'm skeptical on the USSR executing on a plan to attack Germany only two weeks later given how disorganized they were in the face of the German attack. The Russian army isn't something you can move across the country in a couple of weeks.

The argument as I've seen it presented was that a large part of the army was already moved up close to the border and in attack positions, and not set up for defensive operations. Which is why, the argument goes, there were so many soldiers to surround and cut off.

I'm not endorsing the argument, note; I haven't looked into this enough to have anything resembling a useful opinion.

"I haven't looked into this enough"

And yet you rushed to disseminate it.

No, I commented why the counterargument given is not actually a counterargument against the thing it claims to be arguing about.

Fair enough

You have to rush to disseminate it. If you don't, the topic drops off the front page and eventually it gets locked. Hacker News has many pros, but it doesn't exactly facilitate slow, careful and thorough discussion. (Old fashioned mailing lists might've I guess, but I'm not aware of any contemporary platforms that do.)

This is absolutely funny how balanced unopinionated comment providing additional information gets downvoted. If this is not monoculture then I don’t know what is.

There's exactly zero evidence of such plans. It's a new western attempt to rewrite history again and make USSR even more "evil".

Make people repeat the same lie 10,000 times and they'll start believing it.

I don't think a version of history where the USSR attacks Nazi Germany unprovoked is one that makes the USSR look "evil".

There is plenty of evidence, and it is not new or western. This claim was made in the 1980s, by Soviet defectors.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/700262.Ice_Breaker

Ah, Suvorov. Even bigger liar than Solzhenitsyn.

Possibly, although as I mentioned he's not alone in his claims, he does have a fair bit of evidence, and he is most certainly not western nor is his claim new.

"the USSR would attack first"

[Citation needed]

Use your favorite search engine and type “evidence that USSR was going to attack Germany”.

And I'll find Suvorov's books. Not the kind of source I'm waiting for.

> It's not really that Russia was aiding the Western powers in a single fight;

Setting intentions aside, as mentioned by the OP, the Eastern front is where Germans lots the most blood and resources. If not for that, the resistance in the other theaters would be fierce.

>an entirely-optional war that likely wouldn't have begun if Germany hadn't decided to start it

There is a great deal of consensus among historians that it was absolutely inevitable and unpreventable. A reasonable minority even support Suvorov's claims that the USSR was planning to start the conflict and Germany only beat them to it by a couple of weeks.