this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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The Soviets desparately needed finished goods that they either couldn't produce, or couldn't produce in necessary quantities, and the West would not trade them for them.
The US's tariffs were notoriously symbolic. Ford, Coke, Dow Chemical, and many more continued business even into World War II. USian bombers were instructed to avoid USian factories in Nazi Germany.
I'm by no means arguing for the Democratic™️ ideological purity of the Allies, but it's pretty clear what the universal political thinking was in the lead up to WWII. Everyone (from Hindenburg up to the USSR) thought they could keep the Nazis at arms length and aimed at their rivals. A few fascist atrocities can be overlooked so long as they happen to the right people.
The USSR spent a decade trying to form an anti-Nazi alliance, the west wanted the Nazis and communists to kill each other. The west had multiple non-agression pacts with Nazi Germany, and turned down many offers of alliances with the Soviets against the Nazis.
US exports fell, they were of course at war, but the US continued business and was doing a ton of business in the lead-up to the war. Further, post-war, the US protected Nazis and even put them in charge of NATO to make use of their anti-communism, like Adolf Heusinger.
It's pretty clear that the decade leading up to World War II, the Soviets begged and pleaded for an anti-Nazi alliance, but people like Churchill, Ford, etc. loved the Nazis so much that this was impossible until the Nazis did what the Soviets said they would.
Those survey data are highly misleading. Even if U.S. businesses never withheld or consciously distorted their economic reports, they still cloaked hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Third Reich assets. In many cases, U.S. businesses simply exported their wealth indirectly to the Third Reich by using other dictatorships of the bourgeoisie (e.g. the Spanish State) as intermediaries.
Thanks for the information, comrade!
The numbers OBJECTIVELY show a decrease in German trade to a pitiful amount. In the lead up to the US's entry, quite literally the lowest of any European country (let alone adjusted per-capita). German U-boats were sinking US trade vessels up until the end, strange way to treat your trade parter?
The numbers OBJECTIVELY show USSR-German trade in war materials increasing as the war starts, with no significant support to the Allies right up until they're invaded. There's not any arguing this.
Pointing to post-WWII is entirely irrelevant to this discussion. Either country could (and often does) gesture broadly at the Cold War to justify their actions.
Why is it so hard to admit that Saint Stalin and the USSR engaged in hard geopolitics? Somehow you're trying to push the narrative of the Soviets being weak victims that begged and pleaded and were forced to concede to German demands. But you'll also claim they're the sole reason that the Allies won WWII. Which is it?
There's a counterfactual history where the Soviets remain neutral and the Allies will still almost certainly win (though at a greater cost). The Axis simply didn't have the manpower or resource access to keep up, hence their need to engage the USSR for oil. They certainly sped the war to it's end, but that doesn't change the fact that they could have made many different decisions if snuffing out fascism was their top priority.
The Soviets wanted to fight the Nazis with the west the entire time, hence the numerous proposals for allied anti-fascist coalitions. The Soviets weren't on good terms with the West, but saw the Nazis as the far greater threat and acted rationally.
As comrade @AnarchoBolshevik@lemmygrad.ml pointed out (that you cannot see) in this post, the US distorted economic reports and cloaked their continued ties to Nazi Germany throughout the war.
The Soviets were able to beat the Nazis, but at massive personal cost in human lives. They barely eaked out a win, because while they were massively industrializing, they were a poor, developing country against a country with a century-long industrial headstart. They needed to buy as much time as possible, as they were catching up, but the distance was still large. Those are the basic facts.
Ah the classic .ml responses: the USSR really wanted to do something but was forced to do the opposite because of those nasty capitalist states and also we'll just reject all sources we don't agree with. It's as iconic as the inverse US claims but you never fail to see the irony.
If you don't want to believe US reports, just look at Germans attacking US ships well before their entry into the war. It's not some secret conspiracy that the Allies were benefitting more from the US's position than the Axis by orders of magnitude.
They saw the Nazis as such a great threat that they needed to give them the materials to fuel Panzers and make the ammunition that killed Allied soldiers? What? If they truly wanted the Nazis gone first and foremost they would not have done that. It doesn't hold up to any logic.
The US did more trade with the allies, never said they didn't, but that they continued to profit off the Nazis throughout the war.
Secondly, the Soviet Union was severely underdeveloped. It was rapidly industrializing, but needed finished goods that they couldn't produce and the Allies would not trade them for. The goods they got from the Nazis as a trade contributed towards the defeat of the Nazis.
I have not researched the Fascists’ aggression on U.S. merchant vessels prior to December 1941, but the Fascists did, for byspel, intercept neutral vessels such as the Kingdom of Sweden’s Gurtrud Bratt on Sept. 24, 1939 because they were heading for Allied régimes like the United Kingdom, and we know for a fact that Swedish capitalists were generally on good terms with the Fascists anyway.
Apart from .world blocking Lemmygrad content, the other reason that I am not bothering to engage directly with this anticommunist is that I know that they’ll defend Finland the nanosecond that anybody brings it up, proving that all their hype over the Molotov Cocktease Pact is based on false pretenses. (Sometimes, merely mentioning the word ‘Finland’ is enough to make generic anticommunists immediately drop their make-believe antifascism.) Try telling anticommunists that the Fascists knew from experience that Soviet demands were ‘much harder to meet than Finnish demands’, and watch how little they’ll care.
Corporate America could have been an Axis power with the sheer amount of stuff that it was marketing to the Third Reich throughout its existence. Personally, I think that that was far more consequential than the German–Soviet transactions of 1939–1941, and that anticommunists can blow that off as ‘no biggie’ is another reason that I cannot take their obsession over the German–Soviet Pact seriously.
None of the anticommunist's firmly held beliefs are logical in nature, of course. They license themselves to an opinion, and hold that line even when it's contradictory or hypocritical. If they genuinely self-examined, the whole house of cards would fall and they'd be forced to reckon with their own contradictions. It's more of an identity issue than a logical one.
As did the Soviets, what are we even talking about here?? You just respond to each criticism with "they needed to do it and what about the US", ignoring the multitude of other actions they could have taken if their priorities matched your claims.
Which they did once they had Soviet support. They almost certainly would have received the same support if they joined them in 1939.
It was official USSR foreign policy that the communist revolution should spread to workers of the world in all countries. Regardless of the detriments or merits of that, you can't ignore it when examining their foreign relations. Of course they got a different treatment...
They absolutely did not! One of the main factors that broke down the USSR-German relationship was a refusal to reciprocate military technology and materials.
The Soviets didn't have a profit-driven economy, what are you talking about? The Nazis killed 20 million Soviets and committed genocide against them. What "multitudes of actions?" The Soviets directly tried to establish an anti-Nazi coalition while the West traded heavily with the Nazis.
The goods the Soviets got from the Nazis included machinery, optical tools, etc, finished goods that the Soviets needed desparately to continue industrializing, and could not get the Allies to trade them for them. The communist-Nazi "relationship" never was on positive terms, they absolutely hated each other and were preparing for war with the other.
Profit: to derive benefit, to be of service or advantage, a valuable return. Are you ESL or do you just have a conditioned response from all the propoganda you gobble up?
Brother in Christ if you can't even admit giving Nazis oil, iron, rare earth minerals and other war necessities is bad then there's no discussion to be had here. And you keep pointing it back to the West as if I care or that's even relevant to the USSR's actions. Dozens of countries can equivocate and justify their ethically grey actions surrounding WWII, why do the Soviets deserve special treatment in your mind?
The world is a massive place, diplomacy has a million facets, there are always options and trade offs. If you can't find a single flaw in the USSR's actions then I pity you. You've lost sight of your purported support of class struggle and solidary in favor of waving around Cold War flags.
This is extremely silly. Profit in economics terms, as in production for profit. The USSR did not profit either in the economic term for it, nor in your generalized terms. Throwing ESL speakers under the bus and insulting me over a semantical argument when it was clear that I am saying the Soviet Union was socialist and thus its trades were not for profits is silly.
Secondly, it would have been great if the USSR could have traded with the west for what it needed, but the west denied them. The Soviet Union got what it needed, which contributed towards their victory over the Nazis.
Profit in English has a usage with the definition I gave. You said yourself they were doing it to their own advantage. They benefited from it, there was some profit to them in the arrangement (unless they like helping Nazi's out of the kindness of their heart). It's not throwing anyone under the bus to say I can't have a conversation if you lack a grasp on the meaning of words in their context.
Would have been great if they traded with them, but it would have also been beneficial to not sign the non-aggression pact and trade agreements, painting yourself as not aligning with their interests while also preaching a revolutionary gospel. You're stacking the deck against yourself. But again, we're talking in circles and you refuse to concede literally any ounce of fault or poor political maneuvering, not much to be said.
When I said the USSR was not a "profit-driven economy," I meant it was socialist. When I said the US was profiting, I meant directly, through the standard English usage of profit as business related profits. Your only counter is to assert that I'm either uneducated or speaking English as a second language, but neither of those if true should bar me from conversation anyways. It's quite literally ad hominem.
The Soviet Union signed the non-agression pact to buy time for them to further close the gap and increase the chances of beating the Nazis. Time was on the soviet side. Nazi Germany was increasingly in need of new colonies, the soviets needed more industrialization. I concede mistakes made by the Soviet Union, the fact that I don't concede the non-aggression pact as one doesn't mean I don't accept any. I don't think you have any evidence to support your claims, here.
What should the Soviets have done instead?
Not an ad-hominem when it's directly pertinent to the debate and an example of your implicit bias. If you take not understanding a word or filtering it through your own bias that be stupidity then that's on you.
Again, the conversation won't go anywhere because no matter what I say, you'll say it couldn't be done.
That there was literally no possibility of making concessions to the Allies or leveraging their resources in a more indirect way. No way to manage your political footing that didn't require reliance on Nazis or giving them an open flank in Eastern Europe. No German aggression that could be deflected and spun to international support. They definitely needed to make a photo-op of signing documents next to Nazis and of Soviet troops shaking hands with Germans. They needed to immediately start the annexation and sovietization of territories fresh off their liberation from inevitable German capture. No other way, definitely needed to happen like that.
Talking to you is a clinic in historical determinism.
No, you directly suggested a false binary, that if I disagreed with you, I was either speaking ESL or was uneducated, when the truth is that I'm a native english speaker and have done a great deal of studying on the history of socialism and socialist theory. I understand what profit means, you stated that the USSR was profiting off of the Nazis during the war as equivalent to me stating that the US profited off of the Nazis during wartime. My use of the word profit was direct, and oriented towards the capitalist nature of the US's involvement in the Nazi economy, I did not mean a general, vague notion of "benefit."
As for what the Soviets did, they did try, for an entire decade, to get the west to agree to an anti-Nazi pact. They offered hundreds of thousands of troops, and materiel like bombers, tanks, etc. They were rejected. The west wanted the soviets and Nazis to wipe each other out entirely, only engaging when they saw the real threat of the Nazis. The Nazis genuinely believed Britain would join them, and they were close to correct, Churchill was a genocidal monster and a vehemont racist.