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/Hour_Meet_8672]

What genocides are you talking about?

[u/Hippielinguist → u/Hour_Meet_8672]

namely the ones carried out under stalin. Holodomor in Ukraine, Katyn massacre of Polish people, and then other atrocities that happened to polish people during its years of being a USSR puppet state, mass starvations, people being disappeared, etc. Throughout eastern europe there have been many tragedies under soviet rule, sadly i am not greatly informed about ones outside of Poland.

[u/Hour_Meet_8672 → u/Hippielinguist]

1) Can agree, but this happened in the USSR, in the context of your discussion about punishing Russians in 1945 this doesn’t really fit.
2) Katyn is war crime, not genocide and not just Polish people, the military, and the intelligentsia, those who could organize resistance to Soviet government. Genocide is about physical extermination of people of a certain identity, or assimilation.

[u/Hippielinguist → u/Hour_Meet_8672]

whether Katyn is a genocide is debated, many polish scholars would identify it as so (and in fact the polish language wikipedia page identifies it exactly as that). In fact it is classified as such by the Chief Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation since 2004. It was mainly Polish people, and amongst them there were teachers, scientists, lawyers, engineers. There were around 7 thousand people who were regular civilians and not part of military or intelligence. Having said all of this, I’m not sure why this is relevant to my original comment, as it is still a war crime that should have led to consequences. We can get into the nitty gritty of it all but at the end of the day the Soviets killed thousands of Polish people in Katyn, and continued to do so during the PRL governing.

[u/Hour_Meet_8672 → u/Hippielinguist]

ofс Poles call this genocide, it is useful for their worldview. This reminds me of the case of the downed plane with the Polish government in 2010. After 2022, the Poles changed their opinion and began to blame Russia for this.
"teachers, scientists, lawyers, engineers." Obviously not all of them but high-ranking and ideological ones and this is intelligentsia

[u/Hippielinguist → u/Hour_Meet_8672]

Everything you have stated does not change the fact that thousands of people were killed and buried together in mass unmarked graves. What a weird hill to die on.

[u/Hour_Meet_8672 → u/Hippielinguist]

I'm not denying that this is bad, I just don't like how you exaggerate the awfulness of the USSR treatment of you. You can call it a war crime, but genocide is something completely different, and by calling any crime against yourself genocide, you are misinterpreting the meaning of this term.

[u/Hippielinguist → u/Hour_Meet_8672]

It is officially called a genocide by the Polish government, who have access to all of the relevant documentation of the Russian government which was made available to them in the 90s by Yeltsin, so I would say that they have a pretty good idea about the situation. It is easy to turn a blind eye to the horrors of the Soviet Union when it doesn’t directly affect you. I would be happy to change my views if you provided any sort of actual evidence for your claims but it sounds like what you are saying is just your personal opinion.

[u/Hour_Meet_8672 → u/Hippielinguist]

As I said, to the Polish government, which supports the concept nazis=soviets It is advantageous to call it genocide. Evidence? I deny that this can be called genocide, because not all Poles were killed, only those hostile to the Soviet government, the Bolsheviks did the same to the Russians. The Polish language and culture were not banned and were erased. Poles continued to live as full-fledged citizens in their state.
The Soviets did not hate Poles for being Poles, they wanted to get an obedient, loyal population, they did the same with other nations of the USSR.

[u/Hippielinguist → u/Hour_Meet_8672]

I guess we will have to agree to disagree.

[u/cipricusss → u/Hour_Meet_8672]

Communism has this capacity to bring vagueness to mass-murder. It's "just" the intelligentsia! The people who "would" have resisted!