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Originally Posted by Ustwo
If Stalin had not been so parinoid, gutting the Red army before WWII, and murdred it trained officers odds are Germany wouldn't have attacked in the first place. But thats the kind of wack things communist governments lead to.
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Well, Stalin was a maniac and a horrific murderer. But I have to disagree with the second part (not withstanding your claim that Stalin was a communist, which I disagree with also) - Hitler was always going to attack Russia. The Army Command did not want him to ANYWAY, but after the triumph's in Poland and Western Europe, at that time he reigned supreme and no one could stop him... ideologically Hitler was incapable of not attacking Russia... even 1941, German intelligence was reporting Russian tank production and so on... and it was dismissed as defeatism.
Stalin was responsible for many murders of the officers of the Red Army... which is cleary a crime of horrible proportions, but that it hindered the war effort is disputable.
As for lauding someone like Stalin in defeating Nazism, it is a lesser of two evils, although Stalin clearly represented evil, he was sane in most respects at least.
As an aside, although many chose to potray the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as a masterful piece of dimplomacy to buy time by Stalin, there is a lot of evidence that Stalin was sent into a nervous breakdown by the German attack. But although he knew the least about modern warfare of the Allied leaders at the start of the war, he knew the most by the end. If Russia had fallen in the first attack - America never would have been able to enter the European war.