The Telegraph, 2008: Stalin ‘planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact’ | Stalin was ‘prepared to move more than a million Soviet troops to the German border to deter Hitler’s aggression just before the Second World War’

Papers which were kept secret for almost 70 years show that the Soviet Union proposed sending a powerful military force in an effort to entice Britain and France into an anti-Nazi alliance.

Such an agreement could have changed the course of 20th century history, preventing Hitler’s pact with Stalin which gave him free rein to go to war with Germany’s other neighbours.

The offer of a military force to help contain Hitler was made by a senior Soviet military delegation at a Kremlin meeting with senior British and French officers, two weeks before war broke out in 1939.

The new documents, copies of which have been seen by The Sunday Telegraph, show the vast numbers of infantry, artillery and airborne forces which Stalin’s generals said could be dispatched, if Polish objections to the Red Army crossing its territory could first be overcome.

But the British and French side - briefed by their governments to talk, but not authorised to commit to binding deals - did not respond to the Soviet offer, made on August 15, 1939. Instead, Stalin turned to Germany, signing the notorious non-aggression treaty with Hitler barely a week later.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries, came on August 23 - just a week before Nazi Germany attacked Poland, thereby sparking the outbreak of the war. But it would never have happened if Stalin’s offer of a western alliance had been accepted, according to retired Russian foreign intelligence service Major General Lev Sotskov, who sorted the 700 pages of declassified documents.

“This was the final chance to slay the wolf, even after [British Conservative prime minister Neville] Chamberlain and the French had given up Czechoslovakia to German aggression the previous year in the Munich Agreement,” said Gen Sotskov, 75.

The Soviet offer - made by war minister Marshall Klementi Voroshilov and Red Army chief of general staff Boris Shaposhnikov - would have put up to 120 infantry divisions (each with some 19,000 troops), 16 cavalry divisions, 5,000 heavy artillery pieces, 9,500 tanks and up to 5,500 fighter aircraft and bombers on Germany’s borders in the event of war in the west, declassified minutes of the meeting show.

But Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, who lead the British delegation, told his Soviet counterparts that he authorised only to talk, not to make deals.

“Had the British, French and their European ally Poland, taken this offer seriously then together we could have put some 300 or more divisions into the field on two fronts against Germany - double the number Hitler had at the time,” said Gen Sotskov, who joined the Soviet intelligence service in 1956. “This was a chance to save the world or at least stop the wolf in its tracks.”

• https://press.un.org/en/2019/sgsm19779.doc.htm
  Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding
• https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
  Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty – New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience

Good to know. The subtleties of Lemmy federation are a trip.

According to Western polling, the average person in China thinks it’s going pretty well: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: https://news.gallup.com/poll/548120/record-low-satisfied-democracy-working.aspx

You’re not calling out defenders of US authoritarianism or US imperialism, though, are you? You’re calling out defenders of states that the US coincidentally considers its enemies 🤔

You can’t help but jump straight to Western Defender of the Free World mode at the slightest nudging can you 😂 You don’t need to do the CIA’s job for them.

Because user cm0002 is site banned from lemmy.ml, lemmy.ml rejects his comments on lemmy.ml posts, which means lemmy.ml won’t federate those comments, which means those comments won’t spread beyond cm0002’s own instance, lemmy.world.

They don’t federate, I don’t think. Only the reddit.world echo chamber would see them.

Posts made for stirring up drama between Lemmy instances.

The same could be said for every other proprietary application.

But TikTok, for the most part, is not an app. Mostly it’s just another corporate social media website, like Facebook, YouTube, 𝕏itter, etc. The app versions of these are mostly just a thin wrapper around the website.

I thought we were all trying to get away from politics.

First of all, why would you think that? Second of all, everything is political so that is literally impossible. And third of all, only centrists who want things to stay exactly as they are, because they feel they are are benefiting from the status quo, ever say such things.