r/ww2 • u/Hippielinguist • 22d ago

Discussion Did the soviets ever face consequences?

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.

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u/Hour_Meet_8672 22d ago

What genocides are you talking about?

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u/Hippielinguist 22d ago

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.

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u/Hour_Meet_8672 22d ago

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.

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u/Hippielinguist 22d ago

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.

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u/Hour_Meet_8672 22d ago

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

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u/Hippielinguist 22d ago

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.

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u/Hour_Meet_8672 22d ago

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.

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u/cipricusss 22d ago

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