| > A central tenet of Nazism was its hatred for Bolshevism (and that was tightly connected to the Nazis' antisemitism as well). Another central tenet of both Nazism and Bolshevism is their hatred for capitalism and democracy. Their alliance allowed to suffocate Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland (attempt failed), and expand their borders until they met, as they had agreed in the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact - without triggering a direct conflict between Germany and the USSR. The obsolete narrative that portrays USSR as the victim or opportunistic bystander fails to explain why the USSR murdered Polish officers, scholars and other members of the national elite by tens of thousands, and unleashed similar terror in every other occupied country, or why the USSR tried to invade Finland and allocated a significant part of its entire military to the task while it was allegedly so worried about German attack, or why it supplied Germany with incredible amount of raw resources bypassing the British naval blockade, or why Germany initiated large technology transfer to the USSR, including drawings, performance testing data and actual samples of their latest fighter planes and bombers and a ton of other equipment. The argument that Germany and USSR were on long-term collision course in terms of ideology doesn't change the fact that the alliance was very beneficial to both of them while it lasted and allowed them to maul Europe with impunity. That's why USSR denied until its final days that the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact even existed; the protocol and events that followed completely shatter the myth of USSR as opportunistic bystander. Even in the present day, Russian goverment (including Putin personally) can't make up its mind whether Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all saw "working class uprisings" at the same time and joined the USSR "voluntarily" (one narrative), or whether USSR performed a clever trick on Germany and invaded those countries on its own initiative to win time (another narrative). The narrative keeps shifting to whatever is convenient at the moment; it has become a meme. |
Nazi Germany was a capitalist country. The reason why German conservatives brought the Nazis into government was in order to smash the German socialist and labor movement. Portraying Nazi Germany as anticapitalist is deeply ahistorical.
Your argument, that the repression carried out in Poland and the Baltics by the USSR proves it wasn't motivated by fear of Germany, does not logically follow.
> why the USSR tried to invade Finland and allocated a significant part of its entire military to the task while it was allegedly so worried about German attack
The USSR's invasion of Finland was intimately bound up with its fear of German invasion. I'm just reciting some basic history here - nothing new or groundbreaking. The USSR wanted a buffer outside of Leningrad, which was directly on the border, and the right to use naval bases in the Baltic sea. The Soviets did not believe that a small country would be able to remain neutral when push came to shove, so it did not trust Finnish promises of neutrality. Those were the considerations that led the USSR to invade Finland.