Stalin: The Real Victor Of WW2? | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘Stalin himself waited until perhaps the last possible moment, to issue instructions on the very night of the invasion just several hours before it started with a warning and also essentially ordering everyone to combat readiness. But even those instructions were slightly equivocal in the sense that they weren't given clear instructions, it was made clear to them that they were not supposed to fire without provocation.
What is interesting about that, though, is that disastrous as this was in the initial hours and days and weeks, in a political sense, it was actually quite helpful because it was so obvious that it was the Germans who were invading without some type of genuine provocation on the frontier, that really flipped the switch in terms of perception and public opinion of the Soviet Union and Stalin almost instantly, is turned from Hitler's fellow totalitarian dictator and armed aggressor into, he was instantly turned into Uncle Joe as Roosevelt later called him, but that is, he's instantly a sympathetic figure. And the Soviets are sympathetic.
And this vast store of sympathy is now in place in Britain and the United States, which will eventually materialized in this gargantuan delivery of Lend, Lend Lease, war material, industrial inputs, etc, into the Soviet Union… the most famous instance of [diverting resources] is with the 200 odd Hawker Hurricane fighters, which were supposed to reinforce the garrison at Singapore, which were instead immediately sent sent to Stalin. And more broadly, the fact that even some of the fighters and later bombers that were being sent from the United States to Britain under Lend Lease, and its provisions were either transferred or as they sometimes, I sometimes use the phrase regifted, that is to say, just kind of processed on to Stalin. So did that to some extent actually hurt Britain's own rearmament drive, the same thing was true with tanks. Tanks are often under emphasized in the Lend Lease story, in part because of the kind of legend of the Soviet T 34. And some of the KV and later Stalin tanks that, that the Soviets actually did have obviously good tanks of their own, but in fact, there were massive numbers of tanks sent as well…
After Pearl Harbor, and after the US entered the war, it wasn't simply that the US continued to supply Stalin, but that they literally gave priority to supplying Stalin even over the needs of the US war in the Pacific. Even up to extending what were called A1 priority ratings, where Soviet purchasing agents were given requisition forms identical to those used by the US Army. In many cases, they're actually put right in the front of the queue. And this wasn't simply with regard to finished products, such as war planes and, and trucks and tanks and ammunition and anti aircraft guns. And that is finished products.
It was also extended to industrial inputs, things like aluminum, critically needed in Soviet factories. Finished steel products, ball bearings, chrome, even such things that, well foodstuffs is maybe one of the most obvious. I don't think the Red Army really could have fought at all without, without being fed, essentially by the surpluses of American capitalism. As far as it was, there an argument against it, I do think that so long as the Soviets were struggling to survive, you could make a good argument that some level of Lend Lease sorta made a kind of strategic sense.
The part of the story that I find harder to justify is that once the Soviets had finally defeated the Germans at Stalingrad, and then again, at Kursk, in the summer of 1943, there would have been an argument for either scaling down or curtailing the aid. Instead, it actually ramped up much further, so that when the Soviets actually began their kind of long march to Berlin, they did so, they essentially completed that march to Berlin in American studebakers. That is that the Allies enabled Soviet conquest. It was not simply a matter of survival, but in the end, conquest was accelerated, greased and really ultimately made possible by this vast delivery of Lend Lease...
Whole sectors of the US economy were reshaped to beat Stalin's need. This is true, for example, food production, where the famous Spam, something like 13 to 15% of us pork production was now being sent to Stalin. This was true even with things such as butter. Butter was actually rationed. And Americans were actually told to start eating margarine instead. Olio as it was then called so that the Russians could have butter... The Russians were suffering so horribly, that is that they made this argument about things such as, oddly enough, even crab along with butter and pork. That is that the Russians needed it for their morale because they were the ones who were fighting and bleeding and dying...
Stalin was just a really effective negotiator. He simply didn't give in. He didn't give way, He was well prepared, he was exceptionally well informed. He came to Tehran, for example, with a clear list of what I suppose today, we might call bullet points, the things that he wanted. You know, he wanted the allies to rule out any intervention in the Balkan area and Eastern Europe, a full frontal invasion of France, which to his, was to his interest because it was also as far away from Eastern Europe as possible, he thought it would be both decisive and peeling off German forces, but also would probably bloody the Allies pretty well. Invading across the channel against the well fortified beach defenses.
He even ruled out any subsidiary operations in the Mediterranean unless they were also in France. Questions regarding Poland and its future borders, the disposition of territory in Eastern Europe, the Baltic countries, not helping against Japan in any way, not even, not even, for example, agreeing to stop arresting US pilots who continue to land on Soviet soil after bombing Japan. He didn't even give any ground there. Roosevelt asked him dozens of times whether Stalin might offer the use of Soviet air bases in the Far East for use against Japan. Never gave an inch. So part of his negotiating strategy was quite simple. He simply stood firm, he knew what he wanted. He never accepted anything differently. He never even really had to compromise. I mean, that's really astonishing story of Soviet diplomacy during the war is that.'...
‘So for many people across Eastern Europe, and then in parts of Asia, essentially one dictatorship, one totalitarian regime was replaced by another at the end of World War Two. To you, does this represent a challenge to the concept of a good war that's often applied to the Second World War?’
‘Well, I think it does, I think it to some extent, you can actually see this in the legacy of both of the World Wars. That is to say that from the perspective of the United States, for example, which was mostly undamaged, at least in the sense of of the actual physical continental United States aside from a few raids on the shorelines and shipping lanes and of course, the Pearl Harbor attack and so on. Britain obviously suffered a lot more in the Second World War directly, that is to say than the first. But there's always been the sense, well, we did okay out of it. And so the war after all turned out all right in the end for for us and for the people I suppose that that we tend to, to know and to talk about in the history of our own countries. But of course it looks different if, if you're in Eastern Europe. Or if you're in, and perhaps northern Asia, where if you're in, for example, the Korean Peninsula where the war to some extent endures.
In the case of Eastern Europe, it obviously lasted at least another four and a half decades in the form of Soviet occupation. Frequent invasions, repression, deportations, of course political prisons. There's the comparative argument, where obviously Nazi occupation was no picnic either. And there was tremendous suffering against some of it, depending on the groups you're talking about, obviously, the case of the Jews, Nazi occupation at the death camps in the Holocaust, it would be hard to say anything was worse than that. For a lot of the other people, in fact, if you look at the numbers, for example, in certain areas of Poland, or in Eastern Europe, the Soviets actually deported more people to labor camps than the Nazis did. So it kind of depends on I suppose, which people in which regions you're talking about.
That is to say in this qualitative argument, it's not that one occupation was necessarily better or worse than the other from the perspective of the locals. They were both, in some ways, equally horrible, perhaps different in their emphases. As far as the impact of the, the economy probably the Soviet occupation was actually worse in a lot of ways because it required nationalization of property, vast confiscations. Land Reform, again that some people benefited from. Obviously a lot of other people suffered from but which which left stains and scars in the national psyche. You know, even to the extent of kind of the Polish case, this lying about history, the Soviet denial of the Katyn massacre of 1940 where for the whole Cold War, it was officially claimed that it was a Nazi German crime instead of a Soviet one.
To me, I think the most glaring injustice in the post war settlement actually has to do with Poland. And Poland never received reparations. You know, Poland was invaded by these two totalitarian neighbors in 1939. Although a few individual Poles who were either in forced labor camps or obviously died in the Holocaust, some families have received some compensation at an individual level, but the country itself has actually never received reparations. In fact, they applied for restitution, with Germany as recently as 2017. And their claim was denied on the basis that Poland had forfeited her right to reparations by treaty in 1953, when, of course, Poland was an occupied Soviet satellite state and not really fully sovereign.’"
Of course, the tankies just continue to pretend that the USSR defeated Nazi Germany all by itself and that they were the good guys
