Allied or Soviet Victory in Europe?: A pretty good article, but I have some objections. You said:

» pseudoerasmus - A pretty good article, but I have some objections. You said:

A pretty good article, but I have some objections. You said:

It is also one of the great ironies of recent history that while the Soviet Union invested much more blood and treasure, it was the US and its allies that reaped the greatest benefits....It is a nasty brutish world and the results of WWII reflected the relative power of the western Allies and the USSR. By the time of the victory in Europe the western Allies were substantially more powerful than the Soviet Union and so they reaped the profits of World War II which many Soviets would say were paid for with Soviet blood.

How do you suppose that the Western allies reaped the greatest benefits from the defeat of Nazi Germany? I grant that Western Europe got survival out of the deal, but what did the United States get out of it? The political reality of the post-war period was America's lone superpower status, but this resulted less from Germany's defeat than from the unleashing of America's virtually unlimited economic potential. You can hardly attribute to the outcome of the war what was mostly a natural evolution of the pre-war economic disparities between the United States and Russia/USSR.

And, in traditional Realpolitik terms, the Soviet Union got a LOT out of the Second World War: the descent of its armies into the centre of Europe, something not accomplished since the Napoleonic world war; as well as the dramatic reversal of the political revolution of 1864-71 that unified Germany.

Towards the end of the war, the western Allies also took an interest in how great a victory the Soviets were to be allowed in Eastern Europe, but that too is international politics for you. Churchill, for example, wanted to take Berlin with an eye on postwar negotiations with the Soviets. Much of the postwar animosity between the former allies comes from this lack of appreciation in the west of the tremendous scale of the fighting on the Eastern Front.

So, you think Stalin said to himself: "God damn it, what we did for those Anglo-Saxons! They don't appreciate our sacrifice. I resent them. I'm hurt. I think I'll now set up puppet regimes in Warsaw, Prague and Berlin. I'll also foment a civil war in Greece and encroach on Turkish and Iranian territories while I'm at it. If only the West would thank us!" You think resentment at Western underappreciation is what made the Soviet army stand still across the Vistula as the German army eradicated the Polish uprising?

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By the way, your second paragraph is an excellent corrective to those who go overboard in stressing Russia's contribution to the war. The allied contribution to the Russian contribution was itself crucial, since without the diversions in Sicily, North Africa, the Atlantic or the Balkans, it's entirely plausible that the Germans would have overrun the Russians. But you forget the Yugoslav contribution! It was initially Tito's partisans who caused so much headache for the Germans that hundreds of thousands of troops had to be devoted to the Balkans.

-- posted by pseudoerasmus