Explanation
The losses of Germany on the eastern front are widely believed to be the most significant factor in defeating Nazi Germany and the USSR won the battle of Berlin, the final battle before the German capitulation. Thus Europe widely believed (for a good reason) that the USSR was the main contributor in defeating Germany. With the cold war the perception of the USSR became a lot worse in western countries like France and with increasing anti-USSR sentiment the view flipped to viewing the USA as the deciding factor. The USSR (and the Russian Federation today, even if its government is very anti USSR) viewed itself as the most important force in defeating Germany, especially because the USSR had the biggest amount of deaths. It is worth noting that the USSR was at least commercially allied with Nazi Germany until June 22, 1941 and there was an agreement between the nations on which parts of Europe each could invade and which where reserved for the other.
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I’m reasonably sure that Germany did the most.
Shoutout to Germany. We couldn’t have done it without ya!
Especially the guy who shot Hitler.
That’s what happens when a state collapses, they stop getting as much credit.
“We stopped fascism in europe and they will never forgive us for that”
Zukhov is always vindicated, eruopeans never acknowledge USSR, they never will. USSR was blessing for us “3rd worlders”.
In terms of casualties the Russians did the most, no contest.
I mean they undoubtedly died the most, that’s not really the same thing though.
No, but it is a measure of sacrifice. The numbers involved are incredible and without comparison to any allied nation.
The amount of German casualties on the eastern front is not coincidentally the highest, so if killing Nazis is your metric the Russians did most of that.
Indeed, because that can mean they had bad tactics and gear just as likely
It could potentially mean that, but 80% of Nazi soldiers who died in WW2 died in the Eastern Front, so it doesn’t mean that.
“Kif, show them the medal I won”
I don’t think dying a lot necessarily means means doing much, it just means that you are incompetent and have a careless disregard for life.
80% german forces got buried on eastern front I get it why you would hate modern russia but that shouldnt diminish sacrifices made by red army in any way, we are forever indebted to them.
Here’s a copy paste of my answer above to someone with a similar argument for your perusal:
No, but it is a measure of sacrifice. The numbers involved are incredible and without comparison to any allied nation.
The amount of German casualties on the eastern front is not coincidentally the highest, so if killing Nazis is your metric the Russians did most of that.
Out of every nation to flip to, why the US?
Their impact was in the Pacific theatre not Europe.
American movies are more popular in France than Russian
Propaganda.
Well and American equipment was integral to Nazi defeat even though a large part of it was given or sold to the USSR so they could keep fighting.
But that’s not the reason why the impression flipped.
Their impact was in the Pacific theatre not Europe.
?
from the bombing of europe, to overlord - the invasion of europe - this is factually incorrect. the US got into africa later than the UK because, uh, they didn’t have colonies lol…
but half of the forces that landed on normandy were US.
the US had a larger footprint, and other allies smaller, in the pacific, but “their impact was in the pacific theater not europe” is incorrect. The US helped bomb germany into rubble, there were impacts in europe lol.
Overlord was a year after Stalingrad, which is where the war turned on the Eastern Front.
Just look at German losses on each front. Dday put a big nail in the coffin - but the Axis was already bleeding to death then.
That’s a wild take. Quibble over exact war contributions scores all you like, but to say the US didn’t have an impact in Europe is blatantly false.
Germany would have lost the eastern and western front without them. What they did was speed up the western so the Soviets owned less of Europe afterwards.
Very true, but the lend leasing that the US gave the USSR is significant (just not as significant as 8.7 million dead Soviets)
25 million Soviets died during the war. Is the 8.7 just soldiers?
Yeah. The picture in the US is the Soviets just buried the Germans with dead, but military losses weren’t that uneven. What was is civilian deaths, since the Nazis were just massacring everyone.
Not just massacring, also because the massive relocations during invasion, the immense focus in industry, huge recruitment of working force, and loss of agricultural land in the south, there were big famines in WW2 USSR. It’s the main reason behind the million deaths in prisons during WW2 USSR.
Yeah, you see an ugly pattern in lots of propaganda talking points against Russia, from WWI through now. “Russians are savage (Asiatic) orcs who don’t respect human life. So it’s good to kill them indiscriminately”
The hypocrisy there never seems to matter
tsk you aren’t counting the ones stalin purged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_under_Joseph_Stalin
I know you won’t lol, I’ve never seen someone simp harder for stalin rofls
Not significant tbh, its not as bad as libshits make it to be. And stalin gets vindicated even today after we see war mongering racist pedophiles ruling the west
Not significant tbh,
sure thing rofls. daddy stalin didn’t do nothing wrong jfc
libshits uh huh sure thing tankie boi
millions of people liquidated or just shot and left in a ditch, not significant tbh ROFLS
You also have to consider the fall of the communist party in France which fell from being a major political force (with a large infiltration by Russian goons) to a tiny party that’s almost irrelevant.
the fall of the Communist Party
The “fall” in question:
“clandestine “stay-behind” operations of armed resistance that were organized by the Western Union and subsequently by NATO and by the CIA in collaboration with several European intelligence agencies during the Cold War. […] the operation involved the use of assassination, psychological warfare, and false flag operations to delegitimize left-wing parties in Western European countries, and even went so far as to support anti-communist militias and right-wing terrorism as they tortured communists and assassinated them”
large infiltration by Russian goons
Infiltration? Goons? You mean legitimate supporters of the Soviet Union, the state that saved their own fucking countries from Nazism?
While you’re mostly right, the communist parties were mostly turned into propaganda assets by Moscow. Which only “saved” countries in order to pillage all of their assets and incorporate them into their own dictatorship. So it’s not really such a disinterested gesture.
For its many mistakes, the USSR didn’t pillage the resources of any country, the only argument you could make in this direction are postwar reparations against Nazi countries such as Hungary. After 1955 especially, the trade policy inside the COMECON was one of the USSR supplying raw goods at subsidized prices in exchange for industrially manufactured goods. This policy is detailed with numbers in Robert C. Allen’s “Farm to Factory” and Albert Szymanski’s “Human Rights in the Soviet Union”. What’s your data source for claiming the Soviet Union pillaged any country?
For its many mistakes, the USSR didn’t pillage the resources of any cou
Oh boy.
Poland was conquered by USSR against their will (well. More like betrayed by British and given to USSR)
Looting and plundering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looting_of_Poland_in_World_War_II#%3A~%3Atext=The+looting+of+Polish+cultural%2Cworld+and+returned+to+Poland.
Industrial plunder is confirmed by then internal notes and memos, that the Poland under occupation later tried to use to convince USSR to stop because they already plundered a lot, so it’s not a CIA propaganda or smthing in case you’re wondering.
Poland was conquered by USSR against their will (well. More like betrayed by British and given to USSR)
Betrayed or at least with their blessing. The Curzon Line, which was the Entente plan after WW1, was reaffirmed before and after the German invasion. The territory Poland annexed in 1921 was effectively ‘returned’ to the USSR.
Considering that one British MP resigned saying he cannot stand that shameful betrayal and the British internal propaganda surrounding that decision, the word “betrayal” fits like a glove.
In their memoirs (from a non-public meeting Churchill ordered to explain this to the MPs), some MP wrote that Churchill argued on country being tired of war, and that they have 100k (or 300k, I don’t remember) young Polish men that can repopulate the villages - why would they let them go.
God I hate that old racist.
Of course the USSR contributed the most once its uneasy agreement with the Nazis broke down.
uneasy agreement with the Nazis
This is a widely repeated misconstruction of the events in Reddit and Lemmy. I’m gonna please ask you to actually read my comment and to be open to the historical evidence I bring (using Wikipedia as a source, hopefully not suspect of being tankie-biased), because I believe there is a great mistake in the way contemporary western nations interpret history of WW2 and the interwar period. Thank you for actually making the effort, I know it’s a long comment, but please do engage with the points I’m making:
The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.” Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn’t want to. By the logic of “invading Poland” being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.
As a Spaniard leftist it’s so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren’t dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn’t agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won’t find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.
The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of nowadays when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:
“Polish” territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:
The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?
Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.
All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:
“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this
This is some tankie bullshit.
“They didn’t invade Poland, modern Poland is to the West, they invaded lands that belong to Ukraine and Belarus”
My brother in Christ - the entire country of Poland moved to the West because the Soviets annexed the east and demanded Germany cede territory to Poland when redrawing the map after WW2. This displaced millions of ethnic Germans who had lived there for centuries. The annexed land was then given to the Belarus and Ukrainian SSRs to administer, and inherited by these new countries when the USSR broke apart.
Your argument is like saying the US didn’t invade Mexico because that land is now part of Texas.
Poland had invaded these territories in the Russian Civil War and annexed them, as you see on one of the maps I provided those territories had ethnic majorities of Belarusian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian peoples at the time, what makes you think they were Polish territories?
They were Polish territories because Poland held and administered them. They were also part of the PLC before the Russian empire seized them…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland
We can argue all day about what conditions grant a right to a territory. Or we can cut the bullshit and stop pretending that the Soviets sending the Red Army across the Polish border to conquer land, while raping the inhabitants, was anything but an invasion.
while raping the inhabitants
And that’s where we stop arguing. There is no evidence of higher rates of sexual assault by Soviet troops than by any other, and the whole “rapist hordes” stems from Nazi wartime propaganda and has been picked up by racists like you. You stop being able to defend “polish ownership” over majority Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian territories by ethnicity when confronted with evidence, and resort to racist Nazi propaganda of “rapist hordes”.
ok liberal
Not to forget USSR warned france and britain multiple times about germany but they didnt listen. Non agression pact isnt allying pact.
yes they rushed millions of tanks, ships, aircraft and artillery pieces to battle. we know, we sent them lol
we sent them
The US sent a total of about 7 thousand tanks to the USSR, but the T-34 Soviet tank saw about 80k units built in total, so while lend lease was very significant, the vast majority of war material of the Soviets was of Soviet origin.
I don’t think you can only look at tanks alone since the main hardware sent was trucks/jeeps.
Also fuel and trains.
The fact that the Soviets didn’t manufacture trucks is because they got them from the USA, not backwards. A truck is significantly cheaper to manufacture than a tank.
sure thing buddy, the sovs did it all themselves lol.
https://www.jrbooksonline.com/fdr-scandal-page/lend.html
there’s dozens and dozens and dozens of line-items on that list that number in the MANY MILLIONS
now think for a moment: did it get there via UPS? FEDEX?
no it went via murmansk through throngs of fuckin’ german subs.
such a silly, stupid argument to articulate - they would have died without the US’s support. Period. Russia would not have survived. there’s no win there, leningrad falls and moscow burns.
fuck man, the ally that sends you the 3,400 LATHES so you can build the fucking tanks deserves SOME recognition lol
hey and another thing: if stalin hadn’t been a ribbentrop treaty signing idiot, he wouldn’t have put the soviets in such a bad position they needed that kind of hail mary rescue effort huh?
pfft
I did recognize that lend-lease was very significant. However, Britain got 3 times as much aid from Lend-Lease and they weren’t the ones who won the war.
Even though USSR has some blame for WW2 starting (Molotov-Ribbentrop and its follow-up), I’m sure Germany did the most for it.
As if most of the europeans didnt sign pact with hitler? lol. Blaming USSR for WW2 is beyond crazy, are you guys really this brainwashed?
Poland had seized land in Czechoslovakia with Germany, and tye USSR had been rebuffed from alliance with most western powers already (despite going as far as preventing the Spanish Republic from collectivizing land in an effort to make them happy).
If the USSR holds blame for the start, so does the UK and France.
Rember the Russians depended on lend lease to be able to mobilize Siberia and continue to fight
I would not say depended but a good help indeed.
Weird. Normally when you lose 2/3 of your cropland and your people rely on foreign imports do not starve to death that’s called a dependence.
not 2/3rd but ~60% not to mention soviets themselves expanded their cultivation siberia to reduce affect of nazi annexation. Not to mention majority of “lend lease”, including food shipments arrived after decisive battle of stalingrad. USSR wouldve prevailed it just wouldve taken longer, thats it.
Well, USSR wouldn’t have survived without US help. USSR contributed the most in terms of territorial gain and manpower spent, but they would not have been able to make it without convoys to Archangelsk and Murmansk. These convoys were packed with materiell, mostly from the US, but a lot from the UK as well. Western tanks were vital in the defense of Moscow and Leningrad.
So, an objective answer to the question can only be provided if “most of what” is specified.
Nuance matters. Surveys like these rarely allow for that.
Yeah, even Soviet leaders, including the legendary Georgy Zhukov, low key admit (I will get to that later) that if it weren’t for Lend Lease, USSR may have been defeated especially during the pivotal moments in the first couple of months of the German invasion. The material deliveries from the Allies filled the gap while the Soviet rushed their industries out of the German advances and restructuring the Soviet supply chain. Since you mentioned the Allied tanks, the British tanks made up around 40% of Soviet armoured forces in the Caucasus, since the Soviets couldn’t easily deliver their own tanks to the Caucasus after the land route was cut off by the Germans.
After the war, the Soviet leadership aimed to minimise the importance of the Allied material deliveries in order lionise their own effort and exalt the communist system. But unofficially, many Soviet leaders were thankful of Lend Lease in a hush hush and low key manner.
Wrong, Khrushchev was the first one to say they wouldve been defeated if not for lend lease, soviet leadership after stalin tried to be friendly with west and betrayed socialism. There is no concrete proof either stalin or zukhov said it. USSR wouldve sailed through even without lend lease, altho they wouldve been much weaker after war and wouldve taken more damage. Most of the lend lease arrived after battle of stalingrad
