I think you take an overly simplistic and swift look at what was a much more complex issue. Certainly you can talk about the casualties suffered by the Soviet Union in WW2 but you're leaving a lot out of the picture.Originally Posted by TrueBusiness
The USSR had a lot of casualties in WW2 because it had bad management of troops, insufficient arms supplies, incapacity to efficiently transport ammunition and supplies to its war fronts (there was, it must not be forgotten, only one, slow and archaic train line in place then), etc; in short, a chaotic situation was in place there. (And have you forgotten the Nazi-Soviet Pact? How could the Americans not view the Soviets as suspicious or two-sided? And how can you excuse the spread and subsequent domination of a great many independent nations surrounding Russia following the war as a justifiable "buffer" against further invasion? It was blatant conquest and assimilation, to make the USSR the foremost big power - be under no illusions.) The simple reason for the fact that soldiers fought barefoot, sometimes with 1 rifle for every 5, is that Communism, though representing what has been hailed as an "innovation, improvement" on the autocratic system in place there, was in fact a completely failed endeavor and served only to ruin Russia and tarnish it's past and long-lost greatness.
Let's be clear here. Many of the Russian Bolsheviks thought that because the 1917 events constituted Russia's bourgeois revolution, they would have to wait a long time before they were followed by the proletarian revolution that was their ultimate goal. It was Lenin and Trotsky who argued that unlike previous bourgeois revolutions, the Russian Revolution could be given a permanency which would enable it to lead on immediately to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Just like the Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte takeovers, the Russian variant ended in military dictatorship throughout the USSR's history. Things were in a rush thrown into their final make-up, one that substituted poor, albeit free, serfs working the land, to a generalized situation of serfs having no impetus to work whatsoever, and throwing themselves ever-increasingly to drink and debauchery.
The Cold War was not an American fetish. The Communist threat was a reality. In an age of ideologies as was the 20th century, Marx and Engels' ideals were spreading at a fast pace. People thought a denial of all of their past and the beginning in a clean slate could really work to relieve them of their problems.
The US should be thanked for acting as it did (even if, to our eyes, the McCarthy anti-Communist years do appear a tad excessive). But surely giving away secrets of the nuclear bomb to the Soviets is considered treason? Surely we are not to take that instance as "American Fascism"? I mean, come on!
We often forget we have the benefit of historical hindsight now, but before the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain fell, the West did believe the USSR was a threat (it would later be discovered the USSR was a joke, Stalin and his cronies relying solely on copying foreign technology to try to produce something of their own, what have been termed "soddy refrigerators" by one historian.)
Anyway, extrapolating these complex events to a ridiculous and comparatively insignificant quibble amongst BT users seems a tad pretentious, truth be told.
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