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swampyankee ... you are conflating Poland - the nation state, with Poland - the Polish people. No one had been discussing wiping out the Polish people for 300 years. Poles were very integrated into the Czarist Empire and indeed subsequently, the Communist Party.
This is Stalin's handiman on the spot in 1939 .... personally executed 7,000 Polish officers in 28 days.
Vasily Blokhin - Wikipedia
Hi Greg, make a photo, please...Our church has a memorial plaque commemorating the victims of this massacre.
Will do.Hi Greg, make a photo, please...
".... Stalin's willingness to murder allies and imagined enemies is an interesting contrast to his disbelief in the invasion from his buddy, Adolf."
You need to think like a hard core communist who has robbed banks and fought in nasty-dirty Civil War fights and who was intended to be an Orthodox priest, to see just how consistent ... mostly... Stalin really was. He saw the world entirely through communism .. the atheistic, Marxist narrative that we see taking form in the west these days ... BUT ... Stalin saw his role as implementing "communism in a single country" ... something Marx had never described. Stalin inherited/usurped a revolution that had stalled out. What do you do when the Revolution doesn't go global?? Pragmatist Stalin knew the answer, just as Peter the Great knew the answer, you create a new state ... a powerful state ... a state that can be controlled by one man ... and when you get that venture off the ground you advance your cause by intimidation and propaganda.
And of course it goes without saying that such a lifestyle as Stalin led was/is guaranteed to create raving paranoia ...
COMINTERN agents all across Europe were confirming that Germany wasn't buying up furs and sheep-skins ... Stalin thought that was telling. (In Hitler's mind the campaign was going to be over before winter)
British, French and American diplomats warned Stalin about Barbarossa ... but their interests were suspect ... capitalistic/imperialistic, Stalin thought. (Britain, France and America hadn't done a deal with Hitler ... Stalin had. He'd gambled and lost.
Stalin is the absolute embodiment of all the weaknesses of the marxist-intellectual mind-set, IMHO. The capacity to rationalize and then justify absolute contradictions of fact and then to make decisions involving massive quantities of blood and treasure. Stalin bears responsibility for the massive Soviet body count inflicted by the Germans ... he threw his resources away ... squandered them ... because doctrine told Stalin Attack, always Attack.
Machine guns don't kill soldiers ... politicians do.