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In 1610, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth beat the shit out of the Muscovites, sack Moscow and occupy the Kremlin for two years. 1920, the Poles stopped the fucking Bolshevik and beat their asses back to the border. The fucking Russians will never forgive Poland. I know the Poles generally do not like us Germans, but the Russians are on an entirely different level of hatred.

Ohhh here we go again with the Motherboard-Ribbedcock revisionism and Polish nationalist propaganda! I'll answer point by point:

Poland existed for a long ass time, even when it wasn’t on the map. It had no less than 6 armed conflicts and rebellions against the Russian Empire

Exactly. The Polish people have been mostly oppressed for centuries under the rule of the Russian Empire and whatever German-dominated empires that have controlled the region. That's an unfortunate truth that I completely agree with. That's why I see the Bolsheviks ending the Tsarist Empire as a good thing, and allowing Poland to exert its right to self-determination as based.

Poland lost 6 million people in WW2, 17% of their population

That is a horrific example of why I'm a fervient antifascist and I happily defend those who actually eliminated fascism, Poland was absolutely decimated by Nazi genocide. Poles were considered "slaviv untermenschen" and Polish Jews doubly so. The Red Army liberating Poland saved millions of people from a fate like that eventually

17% of their population; by far the largest of any country

Well, that is unless you count modern Belarus which lost 25-30%. Anyway, my actual argument is that 80% of Nazi casualties were sustained in the Eastern Front against the Soviets. The battle of Stalingrad was the first allied victory that proved the world that Nazis aren't invincible.

Polish independence was gained through the collapse of the Russian Empire; Moscow was in no position to claim control over anything anyway

You may make that argument, but this is a bad reading of the Bolshevik policy in my humble opinion. If you want to know further about the Bolshevik position on Poland and on national identities and self-determination, the letters between Rosa Luxembourg and Lenin (in which Lenin argues for example for the right of Ukrainians to have their own republic, and for the first time pushing for an autonomous Ukrainian government and a recognition of Ukrainian culture, against Rosa Luxembourg's position that nationalism is generally bad) are quite enlightening about the real, moral position of Bolsheviks towards the national question. You may of course disagree, this is just a vibes-based topic.

Lenin renegged on that “self determination” just a few years later in 1919 when they marched the Red Army into Poland

Why conveniently leave out the fact that this was a response to Poland invading modern Ukraine and [Belarus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War], and then the RSFSR? The Bolshevik response against Poland in 1919 wasn't unwarranted, Poland quite literally started that war to gain some more territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to "restore historical borders" nationalist bullshit, don't you think?

Maybe they would have lost less had the Soviets not joined the Germans in slicing up their country

I have quite a few things to argue against this, hence why I left it for the end. I hope we can argue in good faith about it:

1) Most of the invaded "Polish" territories actually belong to modern Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus. In 1919, Poland started the Polish-Ukrainian war and invaded Ukraine, Belarus and part of the RSFSR as we saw. This "carving of Poland by the Soviet Union" liberated many formerly oppressed non-Polish national ethnicities such as Lithuanians in Polish-controlled Vilnius arguably being genocided, or ceding the city of Lviv to the Ukraine SSR.

2) The Soviet Union had been trying for the entire 1930s to establish a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, France and Britain against the Nazis, under the doctrine of the then-People's Commisar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov. This decade-long proposal for mutual-defence went completely ignored by France and England, which hoped to see a Nazi-Soviet conflict that would destroy both countries, and Poland didn't agree to negotiations by itself either. The Soviet government went as far as to offer to send one million troops together with artillery, tanking and aviation, to Poland and France. The response was ignoring these pleas and offerings.

Furthermore, this armistice between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany happened only one year after the Munich Betrayal. The Soviet Union and France had a Mutual Defense Agreement with Czechoslovakia, which France (together with the UK) unilaterally violated in agreement with the Nazis when ceding Czechoslovak territories to Nazi Germany. Stalin offered France, as an alternative to the Munich Betrayals, a coordinated and two-front attack to Nazi Germany, which France rejected in favour of the Munich Agreements.

3) The Soviet Union had been through WW1 up to 1917, the Russian Civil War up to 1922 (including a famine that killed millions) in which western powers like France, England or the USA invaded the Bolsheviks and helped the tsarist Whites to reestablish tsarism, which ultimately ended with a costly Bolshevik victory; the many deaths of famine during the land-collectivization of 1929-1933, and up to 1929 was a mostly feudal empire with little to no industry to speak of. Only after the 1929 and 1934 5-year plans did the USSR manage to slightly industrialize, but these 10 years of industrialization were barely anything in comparison with the 100 years of industrialization Nazi Germany enjoyed. The Soviet Union in 1939 was utterly underdeveloped to face Nazi Germany alone, as proven further by the 27 million casualties in the war that ended Nazism. The fact that the Soviet Union "carved Eastern Europe" was mostly in self-defense. The geography of the Great European Plain made it extremely difficult to have any meaningful defenses against Nazis with weaponry and technological superiority, again proven by the fact that the first meaningful victory against Nazis was not in open field but in the battle of Stalingrad, which consisted more of a siege of a city. The Soviet Union, out of self-preservation, wanted to simply add more Soviet-controlled distance between themselves and the Nazis. You don't have to take my word for all of this, you can hear it from western diplomats and officials from the period itself. I hope you won't find my choice of personalities to reflect a pro-Soviet bias:

“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)

“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.

"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact's signing)

"It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938) Mission to Moscow (1941)

I could go on with quotes but you get my point.

4) The Soviet Union invaded Poland 2 weeks after the Nazis, at a time when there was no functioning Polish government anymore. Given the total crushing of the Polish forces by the Nazis and the rejection of a mutual-defense agreement from England and France with the Soviets, there is only one alternative to Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland: Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland. Seriously, what was the alternative, letting Nazis genocide even further east, killing arguably millions more in the process over these two years between Molotov-Ribbentrop and Operation Barbarossa? France and England, which did have a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, initiated war against Germany as a consequence of the Nazi invasion, but famously did not start war against the Soviets, the main reason in my opinion being the completely different character of the Soviet invasion. Regardless of this, please tell me. After the rejection of mutual-defense agreements with the Soviet Union: what was the alternative other than Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland?