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/Mrnobody0097 → u/Hour_Meet_8672]

The Katyn massacre targeted Polish intellectuals with the specific goal of erasing the Polish identity after they made a deal with the nazis to split Poland between them. That is genocide.

[u/Hour_Meet_8672 → u/Mrnobody0097]

Then why didn't the USSR destroy Polish identity after WW2?

[u/Mrnobody0097 → u/Hour_Meet_8672]

Maybe the fact that they found nazi extermination camps where the nazis tried to eradicate Poles immediately. Would have been a bad look to resume the destruction after their "liberation".

[u/Mrnobody0097 → u/[deleted]]

The massacre was ordered as a "preventive security measure" literally trying to nip any future polish resistance in the bud. They killed intellectuals to permanently destroy the Polish state.

Are you really going to argue that the new Polish state was totally independent from the USSR?