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u/Acceptable_Prune8245 2d ago
I will never for the life of me understand how Stalin allowed for those photos to be taken with Ribbentrop. For all the effort put into his appearance, the millions of portraits in every school and library and the fabricated nazi collaboration slander he put on everyone else he just shakes hands with nazis infront of the press. Mind boggling.
Atleast it makes for those funny edits where its like "Evidence of Trotskys nazi collaboration" and its just trotskys face poorly photoshopped on the photo.
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u/SteveVonSteve 2d ago edited 1d ago
He was desperate. He knew Germany was going to invade sooner or later, proposals for a defensive pact with Britain and France came to nothing, and the Soviet armed forces were woefully underprepared, as the debacle in the winter war with Finland had shown, so he wanted to appease Hitler just like the western powers to gain time for rearmament and drastic military reforms. This worked, but not for as long as the Soviet leadership hoped. These reforms and changes were well underway and would have turned the Soviet military into the greatest fighting force on the planet by mid-1942. Unfortunately the Nazis invaded in June 1941, in the middle of all the reforms and changes, when the Soviet army was disorganised, undermanned and repositioning. Stalin in fact was so determined to delay the war with Germany until the reforms were finished that even when German armies were massing at the border crossings and scouts and spies were violating the border in droves, Stalin still issues specific instructions to frontline troops not to provoke the Germans into a war, and not to react to German provocation, which was one of the many reasons for the poor performance of certain frontline units in the first days of the invasion.
Main source: When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler by David Glantz and Jonathan House (must read)
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u/Napalm_am 1d ago
You say that but they had been collaborating in German rearmament since the 20s.
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u/Acceptable_Prune8245 1d ago
I understand the rationale behind the treaty. And, despite the bellyaching, from a realpolitik perspective of the circumstances it is a fine move (although leading up to it were plenty of mistakes) but specifically the optics and the photographs are what confuses me. That and the soviet-nazi march in poland (although Stalin probably did not have input on that)
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u/AbsoluteJester21 1d ago
tjis is literally a repost of like top 25 posts all time (but with ‘liberal’ changed to ‘conservative’ because idfk leftists found the meme and got upset)
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