Vladimir Putin says there was nothing wrong with Soviet Union's pact with Adolf Hitler's Nazi German

[watrwefitinfor]

46. Shhhhhhh. You're not supposed to mention that.

Once Brittain and France folded, the Soviets knew Hitler would turn to the east. The 1938 pact was a successful effort to forstall that turn at the pact line long enough for the Soviets to prepare for what they knew was the inevitable.

Stalin also knew (correctly as it turned out) that they couldn't count on the west to come to the rescue of the Soviets - it was only 20 years (and fresh in the national memory) since US troops had been in the Soviet Union fighting with and supplying the counter-revolutionary White Russians in the Civil War.

After the pact, during the time purchased so dearly, Soviet factories were packed up and moved beyond the Urals, production of weaponry stepped up, the army modernized, and many more steps taken that helped make the ultimate Soviet defeat of Hitler's eastern army possible. The plan was to bog the Germans down in western Russia, much as Napoleon's army had been stopped. And it worked only because the Soviets had the time they bought with the pact with Hitler.

This has always been an accepted part of history, and was published in history books in the past, both Soviet and western. It has nothing to do with whether or not one "likes" Putin the Terrible. To watch the incredible efforts of the Soviet people - Russians among others - pissed upon by so many DUers is beyond my comprehension.

I was born in the early 1940s, and I remember the end of the war, and the broad sentiments regarding it, including my own father's observations which pretty much jibed with the history books I later read. I strongly remember the movie newsreels discussing this very subject of the Nazi/Soviet Pact. (I also have very clear memories of watching many newsreels about the battle of Stalingrad, the Seige of Leningrad/St. Petersburg, the Nazi death camps, and the Nuremburg trials.)

It is painful to watch important history being rewritten here. And so arrogantly and insultingly, too. If DU can't even get history right, how can we expect to affect current events?

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I know from painful personal experience how this place works, and I am disinclined to respond to typical DU insults over my honest and well-meant comments regarding history.

Wat