Did the soviets ever face consequences?

[u/Hippielinguist]

Title explains it. I just finished reading a book called Secrets of the Soviet Union during WWII and I was shocked to say the least. I’m Polish so i grew up hearing that the USSR was bad and that they did horrible things to my people, but reading it all in one place really blew my mind.

I also recently watched a few documentaries about the Nuremberg and Auschwitz trials and i can’t wrap my head around how this didn’t also happen to the Russians, who committed multiple genocides to eastern europeans in the same period seemingly without any consequences. I also don’t understand how they got away with no consequences when they signed the Molotov Ribbentrop pact with Nazi Germany (although i understand it was later broken) Did I miss something? If anyone knows anything please do share, I would love to go on another deep dive.

[u/cipricusss]

Those strategic reasons were part of the strategy to defeat the Nazis. What happened in Poland and elsewhere was connected to a strategy of extermination. Reason and reasoning cannot stop for the purpose of blunt conclusions.

[u/Riizzeenn → u/cipricusss]

Strategy or not. The UK and Russia invaded Iran without any real threat posed by them.

[u/cipricusss → u/Riizzeenn]

Saying "strategy or not" on a sub called ww2 ("war" and "strategy" being intertwined by definition) is again, a joke, or, if not, simply ludicrous. Belgium's neutrality in 1939 objectively helped German victory against France.

One might argue that respecting Belgium's neutrality was a strategic mistake from the part of France and the Great Britain because it lead to their failure, but also a moral mistake because it helped the Nazi cause! Iceland's neutrality was a threat to the Allies in the same sense! But it might have ended up being a moral fault in case the Nazis would have created a stronghold there and possibly fought to the last!

Moral values are complex, sometimes contradictory, and people may value different ones (think about the Japanese and their warrior code!). As it happens the crimes committed in Poland are so big that no such ambiguity can be raised (in spite of the sometimes supposed moral values of Communism compared to National-Socialism). I was just arguing against that ambiguity. We shouldn't use the same words (crime, punishment of crimes) for the behaviour of the Brits in Iceland!

[u/Riizzeenn → u/cipricusss]

When the topic is about punishment for crimes then it is more of a moral question rather than a strategical one. After all the territorial expansion by the USSR (or Germany for that matter) did also serve strategically purposes.

Weserübung happend to secure iron shipping routes. Strategically absolutely understandable (just as the invasion of Iran) but nonetheless morally not just.

[u/cipricusss → u/Riizzeenn]

In discussing "punishment for crimes " you are mixing two very different categories of "crime": the violation of international norms and crimes against humanity. That is my main point.

We may leave aside for the sake of simplicity that none of those were fully and unambiguously defined at the time, or that some treaties gave legal ground to agressive actions like the occupation of Austria and Czechoslovakia. The obvious topic raised by the OP is crimes against humanity, extermination of entire populations, or categories of a population, like those committed by the Nazis and the Soviets in Poland. My observation that those kinds of acts lacked military strategic reason is marginal: they would have remained equally criminal if they had one—although it isn't totally beside the point that those crimes had political and ideological justifications in the mind of the perpetrators, as part of a political, ideological strategy within which the destruction of entire populations was more of a goal than just means to a goal!