Particularly about US - because they were unprepared for massive land war, for obvious reasons. If they had several years to prepare, yes, their potential would allow them to defeat Germany. Britain was never attacked by huge land forces, like USSR. Threat of invasion and invasion are different things.
Obviously we would have to assume some sort of preparation. They did not prepara because they were sheltered by an ocean; were they not they would have prepared. Fact is Germany was not some unstoppable machine; it had a bunch of limitations and was no industrial match for the US.
I know that Britain was not invaded. My point is that it was under serious threat, and did not feel the need to become a dictatorship (what you said was necessary to defeat the germans). The US didn't become a dictatorship to defeat the Empire of Japan either.
Yes, Russia was destroyed from the inside. What does it change? Was such scenario possible in 1941? If not, why?
It changes everything because it goes to show that Stalin was not a superman for stoping the germans. Russia had stopped Napoleon before, and would
not be defeated in WW1 if it was not for bolshevik treason. Russia had the means to stop Germany, Stalin just made the cost bigger and failed to prepare adequately.
How it is become possible, that during hard time, liberal progressive ruler let his country be destroyed and demolished, while cruel dictator save it and left much more powerful than it was before his rule?
Very simplistic interpretation of facts. The seeds of the chaos that was the early 90's were planted decades before.
It is an economic fact that you can achieve high rates of growth, for a limited period, if you force an extremely high savings rate (and, there is the simplified economic identity: savings = investment). That's what the USSR did for a while, including under Stalin. But the growth achieved by that is usually of poor quality, and it is not susteinable. This is a well known fact among development economists, in fact that sort of savings-induced economic growth is known as "stalinist growth". The soviet economic decline begun much before the final collapse.
Many of the things that are usually blamed on Yeltsin (ie, decline of life expectancy) were actually going on since the mid 60's (that's right - life expectancy declined in Russia for decades). The money supply was also expanded by decades, russian currency was worthless much before Gorbachev - it's just that it didn't show yet. Which is not to say Yeltsin's regime was blameless - it was corrupt. And the West failed to provide proper counseling and pushed Russia further down the cliff by being too demanding with debt payements and so on.
But to blame it all on "liberalism" and look at the old days as something better is ridiculous. Fact is many eastern european nations managed to make a succesful transition to liberal capitalism; so the problem in Russia was not liberalism itself, but rather how things were done.
Me too, as long as russians change their mindset which seems quite compromised by decades of soviet propaganda.
No. Do you know the difference between ideology and criminal codex?
Yeah, and as an
ideal, the soviets desired the elimination of many groups of people such as the kulaks.
Stalin deported Jewish nation? That's something new to me
He deported several jewish groups, yes.
Really, why he would deport Germans, Finns, Chechens, and not Russians, Belorussians? Was there problems with, for example, massive Chechen collaboration or no?
Massive? No. And while there was collaboration, it was because of the barbaric way that those nationalities were treated by the soviets. Remember that nazis were first greeted in the Ukraine as liberators, which is pretty justifiable considering how that country was treated.
Again, Stalin handled things in the "evil dictator" way. If some real incident of collaboration on some nationality was reported, he would punish that whole group - and other groups just loosely related. What he did to them was one of the great crimes of the last century.
Really people.