this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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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.