The USSR could have defeated Germany without the assistance of the Western Allies. You should know that better than I do. Granted, purging half his command staff had put Stalin in a worse position than he should have been, but he still had them at his disposal if he needed them - most were in gulags, not killed.
And again, so could France in 1939. But they didn't know that, so it doesn't matter.
I'm aware of the intelligence failures on both sides, along with other Soviet problems, such as the aforementioned purges, fear of a Japanese invasion in the East, etc.. Stalin didn't know how weak Germany really was, hence his desperation. If he knew how precarious Hitler's position truly was he may well have gone to war in 1939, Polish permission and Western Allies be damned
Perhaps. But all that is pure speculation.
They usually involve more than just the troops and a few generals. A show that big usually has some heads-of-state.
So what the hell do you expect?
Too bad that Russia made the agreement to divide Poland with Germany before the war started, let alone before the Polish government fled.
No, the agreement was not made to divide Poland between the two, it was made to not advance beyond a certain mark. Russia had to invade after the Polish government fled, because then the Polish state no longer existed, and thus there was no one for the Germans to negotiate with, and nothing to stop them from going all the way to Belorussia. The remaining part of Poland was supposed to survive, in this agreement, to continue to serve as a buffer state, but so obviously weakened by the war that it would be no threat to anyone, and have been thoroughly punished.
That was what guaranteed that Germany wouldn't march all the way to Belorussia. As it was, the Germans were quite pissed when the Soviets bullied Romania out of territory that had not been included in its sphere in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Why would the Germans give a flying crap any more than the rest of the world did? Which they did, of course, since the USSR got kicked out of the League of Nations for seizing Bessarabia and the Baltic states. But then, those countries only ever existed in the first place because of Allied manipulation in the Civil War anyway. They were tools of leverage to weaken the socialist state.
And having no government doesn't cause on to cease being a legal national entity anyway. Somalia is still a recognised nation, it just doesn't have a recognised government.
Their government was
arrested.
And considering both Soviet and Nazi atrocities in Poland - the Katyn Massacre is the best-known Soviet example - how can you honestly believe that the Polish government wouldn't have been summarily shot?
Did the Germans execute any other governments during the war? Belgium? Denmark? Czechoslovakia?
And what impact does a Soviet atrocity have on how the Polish government felt about the Nazis?
Finally, they wouldn't be surrendering their state, because, as I have already described, the Pact in question left Poland in existence as a buffer state between Germany and USSR.
After a show trial on the German side, probably just marched into the woods on the Russian since they were pumping out propaganda about how it was to help the Poles.
Again, speculation.
It wasn't recognised as an invasion at the time solely because the West - including, famously, Winston Churchill - bought the Soviet lies about marching into Poland to protect Russian and Polish citizens from Germany.
Which is basically what I just said.
As for the Romanians not recognising the invasion and arresting the Polish government, it's no different from Finnish attempts to play off Germany and Russia while keeping both happy. When you're sandwiched between superpowers you tend to bend over backwards for them whenever necessary, so as to avoid being bent over forwards by them, to use a crude analogy.
Then why did they never honor the alliance against the USSR? That's what it was there for! And, as I said, the Soviet Union received zero international condemnation for the act, when Germany was strongly censored for it, and USSR was harshly criticized and even thrown out of the League of Nations for the Baltic States actions only a few months later?
Also, did not Russia and Germany already share a border along East Prussia? Or did Poland and Lithuania separate them at that point? I don't remember and I already have too many pages loaded to go looking at maps.
Yes.
All told, you didn't really explain why any of it was false Cheezy. I believe we had this discussion once before. The secret provisions of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact are incontrovertible fact. Russia wasn't protecting Poland, they were cutting themselves off a slice to protect themselves.
And we rescind back from facts and debate into repeating the warped worldview you walked in here with. Like a rubber band stretched too far.
Which had nothing to do with the needs of a wartime economy, which Russia was meeting for Germany. That deal was also with the Weimar Republic, not Nazi Germany (yes, I'm aware there were also deals with the Nazis prior to 1939, but they were chump-change in comparison to what was to come).
So? They were the same state.
Do you argue that the economic assistance provided to Germany by Russia increased dramatically in the period after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?
Perhaps it did. Again, does it matter? I don't think so.
What are you on about? I'm well-aware of this, probably more than you are. I did study international relations at university, after all. If you're enquiring about my final sentence, I'm merely pointing out that their mutally hostile ideologies limited them from more public examples of their alliance. There's a reason the secret provisions were secret, after all, and one major reason was because both nations had spent years vilifying the other to their own people.
Ideologically they should have hated each other, not traded together on a huge scale.
So what exactly is your point, then, except to whine about Soviet trading with Nazi Germany? Its a pretty classic Leninesque move, really. "The imperialists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." The USSR was still going to outpace Germany and beat the snot out of it, a little trading here and there or not. And that trading and the resulting illusion of friendship, even if seeing it required a significant withholding of disbelief, was worth the years of peace it gave the USSR to prepare for the Big War. And quite frankly, that's all the socialist government can be expected to have worried about. It was quite well realized that the survival of the socialist revolution was identical by then to the survival of the Soviet Union, and they were not about to undo their huge gains in the world. You think they cared how it looked to France or Britain, or the USA? Of course not. If it ensured their survival and the survival of socialism, then it was the right course of action.
I don't know if you saw the latest Star Trek movie, but there's a point where Spock's father says to him as a teenager that "nothing that is necessary is unwise." Maybe you should figure that into your calculations about what is "right" and "wrong" in this situation.
That wasn't a joint invasion, they simply both carved off a slice for themselves.
But you just accused USSR of doing that to Poland. Make up your mind, is it a joint invasion or not?
To my knowledge there was nothing even close to the sort of direct military assistance provided Germany by the USSR between Poland and Germany during the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. As for economic deals, the US didn't act as the financier and supplier for Germany's wartime industry. In fact, it did the direct opposite, by doing so for Germany's enemies; Britain, France (for a short time) and later the Soviets.
We were fine with bankrolling the Japanese war up to the summer of 1941, though, and the Nazi rearmament during the 1930s. Britain and France also traded heavily with Germany during this time, too. Just because that stopped during the outbreak of war doesn't mean it never happened. Besides, who continues to trade with an enemy with whom they are at war? Soviet aid obviously ceased in June 1941.
