Russia Says It Never Invaded Poland in 1939

You are basically saying that both had an equal low moral standing, but that is not really the point for me. Motivations, execution of tasks, power structure, economy and of course ideology varied considerably from each other. That both are comparable in atrocities is only possible anyway due to the clusterfuck we had in Eastern Europe at the time. Both states were in an absolute struggle for survival so it is no wonder that they started to eliminate every possible insurgent group on their territory. I am not saying those actions were morally fine, but also democracies like the US would probably have commited similar atrocities if they had been in the same situation as Germany and USSR were during WWII. For example when it became obvious that the war was going shitty in Vietnam Us army actions showed strong similarties to the anti-partisan fight of German and pro-German groups in the Soviet Union. The same is true for the Soviet Union. While Soviets/Russians get very emotional about how much Russians had to suffer from the Germans in WWII, they basically showed the same level of brutality to the Afghan civilian population during their intervention there.

All the struggles you mention above were struggles about the consolidation of power. The farmers of Ukraine refused to follow Stalins reforms and thus they got crushed by the reds. I am not defending these actions, but I think it is obvious that the NS-regime would never have conducted something like this, while at the same time the Soviets would never have used a kind of industrial method to masskill people, they more led "nature" do its work (apart from mass shootings). Still the only similarity you mention is that both killed a lot of people and I am refusing to say that this alone makes them similar. However of course the moral judgement is up to you and till today basically the consensus is still that Germany is basically to blame for the whole war while Stalin was a thugh, but a thugh who defeated Nazism and after all the world we are living now is fine. In Russia itself Stalin is considered to be a hero, because without him Russia as a the nation it is today would probably not exist at all. In former ex-Soviet states ofcourse the image is much more mixed and especially in the baltic states they consider both as equally bad (or sometimes Stalin is even worse than Hitler). In Germany the mainstream opinion is basically that the Germans started the atrocities and in the end everything the Soviets did is filed as being just a retaliation action for what Germans did to this country while at the same time indeed ingnoring that a huge chunck of the victims had absolutley nothing to do with the NS-agression.

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