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Thank you. I stand corrected once again.

This blog’s an education.

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Since the whole of the Soviet Empire was involved in the war , it would be incorrect to describe all of those involved as Russian.

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I don’t think we have a major disagreement. I certainly agree about the convoys. I suspect that you are better informed than I on various points in ways that do not materially affect my argument with CFTs. But it may mean that I don’t even have to accept some of the premises they put forward.

My only gripe is that you refer to the Soviet people – maybe I have done myself from time to time. We don’t usually talk about the Nazi people wrt. Germany under the Nazis. In both cases I would suggest that, despite both ideologies getting gut popular, though not majority support, one in a pustch and the other in an election, to talk of either the Soviet people or the Nazi people is to confuse a group of individuals, each with their own good and bad ideas, motives, judgement etc, with the respective ideologies. One of the tragedies of history is that the unthinking response of a mass of individuals at a time of crisis can lead to a heavy penalty that many of them, as well as many more others, regret later. When CFTs talk of the heroism of the Soviet people this is standard Leninist-Stalinist propaganda. If others spoke of the heroism of the Parliamentary Democratic this would be laughed out of court by the same post-modernists CFTs. (Actually I would laugh it of court but this is because states are parliamentary democracies or (red or black) fascist dictatorships, whereas peoples are more or less free or more or less not free).

The reality of the heroism probably casts many of these soldiers is a far more sympathetic light, desperately surviving from day to day to fight with the very uncertain chance that by doing so they may have contributed something to the survival of their friends and families, possibly Mother Russia, but not for Comrade Stalin and the Party.

I think this is worth banging on about. If you look back to the string on “Commies are getting a good press” you will find some truly convoluted arguments to show that red fascism is much nicer than black fascism and qualitatively different. If Prince Harry had worn the uniform of an East Berlin wall guard or an officer in the OGPU there would still have been raised eyebrows but perhaps more chuckles than po faces amongst the media and chattering classes.

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These same people deny, by their very reticence, that without the supplies of munitions from the Western allies,delivered so heroically through the murderously difficult seaways, by allied convoys, the Soviet Union would , probably, have collapsed. It was only after the fact that the Soviet armament industry began to get into its stride, that their dependence on Western supplies waned.

It was all a long time ago, and the answers to the great question of , ” WHAT IF”, can only be guessed at, after all.

There is however,no question about the sacrifices the Soviet people made. 20 million dead. All very humbling; and for a huge number of the proletariat to end up being the unwilling poverty stricken hosts of the parasitic Mafia cannot make their lot a better one.

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Thanks for the information. I was not aware of this and I am happy to accept from you that it is (was) the case.

My logic was based on the following.

(1) Many Communist fellow travellers say that we should be grateful to the Soviet Union, whatever its faults, for putting up stiff resistance to the German army, thus entailing a higher concentration of troops on the eastern front than would otherwise have been the case. They do this by pointing out the great suffering borne by the soldiers of the Soviet army and there is a silent implication that this transmits to the Soviet Union.

(2) When the German army retreated then the amount of progress the Soviet army made was dependent on the resistance of the German army.

(3) The less progress the Soviet army made the better it would be for post-war Europe.

The conclusion I drew was that we should be grateful, in the same way, for the resistance of the German army at this point. (However I do not make the same sort of false and rather sly move from the soldiers to the Nazi state and ideology then controlling Germany as the fellow travellers do with the Russian soldiers and the Soviet state.)

You have raised a matter of fact and I have no reason to doubt you.

The point of my argument, as a rebuff to fellow travellers, still stands if I make (2) a reasonable counterfactual

(2) Had there been no agreements concerning the carve up of Europe then, when the German army retreated, the amount of progress the Soviet army made was dependent on the resistance of the German army.

This part of what I said was to make the point that just because the Soviet Union was one of the Allies in WW2 this does not alter in any way the nature of the Soviet Union or indeed the whole Communist enterprise. Nowadays fellow travellers make the same sort of argument for Cuba, usually involving the facts that it has been protected from globalisation – see the housing stocks to realise just how, Ernest Hemingway got drunk there – but he wasn’t a British football supporter so that was OK, Fidel looks like Santa Claus off duty etc. etc. – thus quietly ignoring the repression of the state there.

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The Americans were in the position to be able to advance much further East than they in fact did. They even withdrew some troops from further East, apparently because of a prior agreement between the so-called, ‘Big Three’, allied powers, thus allowing the Soviets to enter eastern parts Berlin when the Western Allies could have held more territory. The exact reason for this decision was not made quite clear. It was certainly grounds for heated discussion at the time, I remember my father complaining about the decision, whilst not understanding the reason for his complaint
The Germans were of the opinion , long after the war, that Churchill had wanted to take what was left of the surrendered Wehrmacht on side , and advance into the Eastern countries. The saying was , and I heard it many times , “Churchill hat gesagt “, ” Wir haben den falschen Schwein geschlachtet “,( “Churchill had said”, “We have slaughtered the wrong pig”); meaning that there should have been a continuation, or rather reversal, of the war, but this time, against The USSR. This belief was for many years widespread currency in the then West Germany : whether it was correct or not, perhaps we shall never know.

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I disagree with the idea that we shouldn’t visit countries with poor human rights records. In my experience, foreigners are almost always welcome in places where there have been problems. People who have suffered want to tell their stories to visitors from the outside world. Even contact with officials can be worthwhile, as a large number of them are often anti-regime themselves.

Incidentally I rather hope Boris was NOT there in some official capacity. The less we all have to do with current British government policy towards Uzbekistan the better!

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Now this may sound very utilitarian. However I think the alliance of the UK and USA with the Soviets was a good thing. While it was on, the west had to pretend that the great Soviet Union was fighting for freedom etc.. At this point fellow travellers usually try and make me feel ashaned by talking of the great sacrifice of the Russian people, which slides over to the Soviet people and then to the Communists, and sometimes as far as ‘Uncle’ Joe. The Russians fought desperately for many reasons, many for Mother Russia, some, but many fewer I think for the Soviet union, and many others because the alternative to going forward was a bullet from the Comissar. Incidentally once the tide of war had changed should we have not been as grateful to those German soldiers who slowed up the advance of the Russians to the West?

The other options were it seems

1 an alliance with Germany against the Soviet Union
2 no alliance with either power but keep on fighting
3 surrender.

The problem with such utlitariaism is that it usually comes into play as the only or the main or an important way to conduct conflicts. It is erosive of the morality of open societies to use it. It puts them into moral peril. The urgent problem is then to weigh up the utilitarian argument against the degree of peril. If the UK and USA had become closed totalitarian societies then that would have been a disaster.

Even if all the people on your side are ‘good guys’ the very use of war brings utilitarianism to the fore. For example I have read that the UK government allowed ceratin operations to go ahead even though they knew the Nazis knew about them. The reason was that the UK government knowledge had been obtained through the work of Bletchley Park and to acknowledge this by cancelling specific operations would have alerted the Nazis to the fact that the code had been cracked.

Now this is not be complacent at all. The state in open societies must be held to account. At the same time the state’s primary responsibility is the defence of the realm aka the open society. I have no idea of the extent of involvement of the UK and USA in Uzbekistan
or what advantages accrue to us in the war against state and individual terrorism. However I reject the ‘smoking gun’ theory of showing that the open societies are evil – find them engaged in one dodgy deal and that proves it. The converse theory of the ‘widow’ mite’ – apologies to those who use this story in the original way – which is that when a closed and oppresive society does one good thing then that shows they are not so bad after all, is possible even less attractive.

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