[Transcript]

Yes. There is never any excuse for helping Nazis. There is no amount of bullshit you can spew to make that OK retrospectively. The Soviets didn’t just make an alliance with the nazis, they used that alliance as a chance to invade and snag vast amounts of land from other countries while Europe was too busy to stop them. This tankie propaganda that they had no other choice is utter bullshit, and it should be called out for the intellectual diarrhea that it is.

Stalin allied with the nazis to enrich the USSR. He, and every other tankie and useful idiot that support his actions, are nothing more than nazi apologist scum who ought to be lined up against the wall with the rest of the fascists. The deaths that the USSR faced when Hitler finally turned against them were well deserved, and I have no pity for filth wiping each other out, because nothing erases the stain of looking at race supremacists and thinking “yeah, I want some of that”.

extremely willing to forgive Nazis and collaborators afterwards

You say that, and yet, here you are, forgiving nazi collaborators.

Ok so the USSR approaches Britain and France saying “jeeze, this Hitler guy who keeps talking about genocide is a bit spooky. Wanna do something about it?” and France and Britain are non commital because they think they’ll be in a better position if they appease Hitler for a while longer.

Poland sinks it, because they’re more freaked out about the USSR than the Nazis who literally want to work them to death as farm animals which is… wild. So the USSR ends up signing a NAP with Nazi Germany, the same stance that everyone not explicitly allied to the Nazis has, agreeing to let them kill whomever they like if only they do it in “their” borders.

Using the time bought they rapidly, and one notes here pretty brutually, industrialise. Fight the everliving shit out of the Nazis once they have an industrial base and support in a war against them (the original fucking goal of the tripple alliance talks). USSR solidiers spill the majority of blood in Europe, theirs and Nazis. They’re not saints, it’s an army.

After the war, when countries like France are busy forgiving police collaborators and giving them their jobs back, the soviets are killing a lot of Nazis.

Stalin sucked in so many real ways, the USSR failed the utopian vision it was founded on in so many real ways. Calling Stalin a Nazi collaborator is just fucking wild. The Nazis were very explicit in their plans to genocide Slavs, that is what triggered the initial talks. Nobody in the USSR was under any illusions as to where they stood with the Nazis, the brutual policies of rapid industrialisation and militarisation were a result of being abandoned by the rest of Europe because the fucking aristocracy running the horror show preferred Nazis to communists.

your argument isn’t any different this time than before. idc if you think stalin was forced into it, he still worked with nazis and that fucking makes him a nazi collaborator. you don’t get to “but, but” about it. don’t give me that bullshit that he didn’t have a choice, lots of people were given the choice and chose death over working with nazis, including a french teenage girl. but go on about how poor widdle stalin couldn’t do what a teenager could.

you make me fucking sick. at least we know what fucking choice YOU’LL make when trump comes knocking on your door to inform on your neighbors.

(Source.)

I think that this information needs to be repeated here for emphasis:

But inside the [Axis]-occupied USSR there were not just one or two Lidices. There were hundreds. Mass killings of the Lidice type took place at Rasseta (372 dead), Vesniny (about 200 dead, mainly women and children), and Dolina (469 dead, again mainly women and children), to name only three. In the Osveya district in northern Belorussia alone, in the single month of March 1943, [Axis soldiers] and collaborationist troops devastated some 158 villages, according to Times of London correspondent Alexander Werth. “All able bodied men [were] deported as slaves and all the women, children and old people murdered,” Werth reports. This pattern of massacre and scorched earth warfare was repeated again and again throughout the war on the eastern front.

[Axis] warfare against partisans was consistently brutal throughout Europe, and the [Axis powers] and their collaborators committed numerous violations of the “laws and customs of war,” such as torture, mass killings of innocent persons in retaliation for guerrilla attacks, and murder of hostages across the Continent. It was in the East, however, that such killings reached a truly frenzied level. At Odessa, for example, the [Germanic Fascists] and their Romanian collaborators destroyed 19,000 Jews and other so-called subversive elements in a single night in retaliation for a partisan bombing that had killed about a dozen Romanian soldiers. Axis troops rounded up another 40,000 Jews and executed them during the following week. The SS used gas wagons disguised as Red Cross vans to kill about 7,000 women and children in the south, near Krasnodar. At least 100,000 Jews and Slavs were slain at Babi Yar, near Kiev, and so on, and on, and on.²

(Source herein.)

It is entirely possible that this anti-Bolshevik did not have civilians in mind, but the way that the Axis treated (unarmed) Soviet soldiers was hardly better:

It was into this cellar—a series of small cells and corridors—that the Auschwitz SS led the Soviet “commissars” that fateful night in early September 1941. As they were forced down the stairs, the POWs saw some 250 other prisoners sprawled across the floor, invalids from the infirmary who had been selected to die with them. Once the last Soviet prisoner had been crammed into the cellar, the SS threw Zyklon B crystals inside and locked the doors.

On contact with the warm air and the captives’ bodies, highly toxic prussic acid was released and desperate screaming started, carrying all the way to the adjacent barracks. The gas quickly destroyed the victims’ mucous membranes and entered their bloodstream, asphyxiating them from within. Some dying men stuffed bits of clothing in their mouths to block the gas. But none survived.¹⁶⁵

[…]

The Auschwitz SS had stumbled across the prototype of the death factory.¹⁶⁸

Its first lethal test came in mid‐September 1941, when the SS gassed some nine hundred Soviet POWs in the Auschwitz crematorium.¹⁶⁹ As the prisoners arrived, SS men told them to undress and then forced them into the morgue, supposedly for delousing. SS men now slammed the doors shut and threw in the gas pellets. Commandant Rudolf Höß watched once more: “After the insertion, some screamed ‘gas,’ followed by mighty howling and pushing toward the two doors. But they withstood the pressure.” It took several days, he added, to burn all the bodies.¹⁷⁰

(Source herein.)

In 1942, however, Vlasov was just the man that the political warfare faction was looking for, and the creation of an army of Soviet defectors under [Axis] control using him as a figurehead became its central preoccupation for the remainder of the war.

“The Germans started a form of blackmail against the surviving Russian war prisoners,” war correspondent Alexander Werth notes. “[E]ither go into the Vlasov Army or starve.” The overwhelming majority of Soviet POWs refused the offer, and about 2 million POWs who were given the choice of collaboration or starvation between 1942 and 1945 chose death before they would aid the [Axis]. But many thousands of Russians did join the invaders as porters, cooks, concentration camp guards, and informers, and later as fighting troops under [Axis] control.⁷

(Source herein.)

At first, the Dachau SS killed outside the bunker, as it had done on previous occasions, but as the number of victims increased, it moved the executions to its shooting range in Hebertshausen, about a mile and a half away. Here, Camp SS men forced the Soviet soldiers to strip naked and line up. Everything happened at great speed. A commando of SS men pounced on those in the first row, with five SS men grabbing one prisoner each, dragged them around a corner, and shackled them to posts. Then an SS squad opened fire, often shooting wildly at the helpless victims.

(Source.)

This is just a small, small selection of the abuses that more than twenty-seven million people suffered at the hands of the Axis and its collaborators. That anybody can say that these deaths were ‘well deserved’ absolutely astonishes me… as much as I loathe the Polish government and the Poles who collaborated with the Fascists, I would never say that the brutal colonisation of Poland was ‘well deserved’. Ever. It would almost be like saying that the brutal colonization of the Americas was ‘well deserved’ because certain tribes signed treaties or sometimes outright collaborated with the European invaders, as during the fall of the Aztec Empire.

It is unoften that I demand an apology from anybody. Many of the wrong things that I share them saying are so typical that I don’t expect any. But this really is such a horrifying and blatantly unacceptable sentiment that nobody (least of all an anticapitalist) should ever express it unjokingly. It is fine to be disappointed in the German–Soviet Pact, and maybe we could argue that it was unnecessary or lead to more harm than good, but this remark completely crosses the line, so I want an apology from @_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus.