Soviet Union in World War II
The Soviet Union was an integral part of the causes, nature, and outcome of the Second World War.
Background
Anti-communism
The Second World War was in many ways a confrontation between fascism, liberal capitalism, and communism, and the latter had no better representative than the Soviet Union.
The 1917 Russian Revolution brought about the first successful proletarian government. Bourgeois forces, including the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Japan, failed in their attempts to suppress this government during the Russian Civil War, allowing the Russian communists to consolidate their territory into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, later known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The USSR's support for communist and socialist movements throughout Eurasia posed a threat to the capitalist-imperialist state of affairs, triggering finance capitalists in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere to support the installation of fascists and fascistic groups as the only effective opponent to the communist threat. In addition, non-fascist capitalist states implicitly tolerated or even supported the growth of fascist movements in Europe; the British royal family, for example, had good relations with the National Socialist movement,[citation needed] and Hitler and Mussolini were sometimes positively described in the American press. Winston Churchill visited Italy several times during his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s, expressing open admiration for the "Roman genius" Mussolini and calling fascism "the necessary antidote to the Russian poison". Even opponents of fascism in other factions of the capitalist and aristocratic classes of these countries typically supported a general confrontation between fascism and communism which would result in their mutual annihilation.[citation needed] This general tenor among reactionary and imperialistic sections of the ruling class was the background for the later policy of appeasement.
Imperialism
Fascism, as a reformulation of bourgeois nationalism, inherited and carried out many of the same objectives of the preceding bourgeois governments. This included the expansionist tendencies of the German Empire, which became overtly expressed in the Nazi ideology of Lebensraum, an emphasis on rearmament and war, and the racial inferiority of Slavic peoples. In fact, this restatement of old imperialism in new clothes was arguably the cause of the conflict between anti-communist bourgeois unity and inter-imperialist rivalry, which proved one of the most important contradictions in determining the progress of the war. As the Nazis consolidated power in Germany, Churchill and other British imperialists came to view fascist expansion and the threat it posed to British hegemony as a more immediate threat than Bolshevism. This anti-fascist faction of the bourgeoisie won out by 1940. It has been argued that this was thanks in part to the strategic alliance that the Soviets would pursue with the Axis powers in the wake of the appeasement of the 1930s.[citation needed]
Prelude
Appeasement
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
After the Munich Agreement, the Soviet Union pursued a rapprochement with Nazi Germany. On 23 August 1939 the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Germany which included a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence, anticipating potential "territorial and political rearrangements" of these countries.[1]