Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "Our Great Leader, Comrade Stalin. Part 2 #USSR, #stalin" video.

  1. It takes a long time to tell the story about a larger than life character like Stalin. I was in high school so it must have been 1962 or 1963 when Radio Mosco's English service broadcast a ten part series on the "Great Patriotic War". I have always had an interest in history so I listened faithfully through the static to see what the Soviets said about WWII. You'd think the Russians pretty much did it single handedly listening to that program. You'd think the allies just parachuted into Germany after Russia had mopped up almost all the German troops. There was no mention of the war with Finland, the three Baltic republics asked the USSR to join with them, no mention of the Soviet-German non aggression pact, and, of course, no mention at all of the millions of Russian POWs who returned to the USSR but never made it back to their homes. US lend lease aid got mentioned only in passing, and I think only because of all the pictures of the hundreds of P-39 fighters with the Red Star and the tens of thousands of Studebaker trucks hauling around all the Soviet troops. The reason why Japan surrendered was because of the USSR declaration war against Japan, a whole six days before Japan surrendered. The two atomic bombs were just imperialists testing their weapons of death on the helpless Japanese. Our own history can be somewhat distorted for political gain, but listening to that series was like being Alice going down the rabbit hole.
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  2. Name me one mainstream Western documentary the either doesn't mention Russia or downplays its role in the war. The destruction of German Army Group Center and South, the pivotal point of the Eastern war, didn't even begin until after D-Day. German destiny was not already sealed unless those two operations were successful. The Allies had a hard fought struggle to get through France, the Low Countries, and the western half of Germany. It wasn't a race to Berlin considering it took eleven months. The three Baltic republics had the "help" of the Soviets like a man taking your wallet at gunpoint is "helping" you. When it comes to Russian POWs and how they were repatriated, I suggest you look up Order 270 and how that was carried out by the NKVD. By 1946, only 20% of repatriated POWs were freed. The rest were executed as traitors, went to the gulags, or were redrafted to labor battalions or reserve formations. The majority of those still alive were not freed until the general amnesty of 1955. This is well documented in declassified Soviet documents that are available on the net. The history you were taught in Serbian schools and is written in Serbian histories about the war are not accurate. You obviously have access to the web, and the real information is out there. Up to you if you want to remain in ignorance.
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  3. The Soviet Union was invoiced for Lend Lease aid at $1.3 billion, about ten cents on the dollar of actual cost. The Soviets offered to pay $170 million. The settlement talks went back and forth until the Soviets agreed to pay $722 million in 1972. The last payment was made in 2006 as Putin cleared the books of foreign debts. The cost of materials sent by the Soviets was fully considered in the total. Your statement the US didn't lose a penny is absolutely false. The Soviets did indeed lose millions of men, something every American schoolboy learns in history class. However, those losses were incurred while defending the Soviet Union, not the US. If the Germans had been able to invade the US, our losses would have been equally great. Russia is in an unfortunate place when it comes to geography. You can argue with the ghost of Marshal Zhukov about how important lend lease was to the Soviet Union. The second front was not deliberately delayed. It needed large numbers of US troops, aircraft, merchant ships, and naval vessels. Those don't appear by magic. It wasn't until near the end of 1942 we started building more merchant ships than the U-boats were sinking. There was zero chance of an invasion succeeding any earlier, and some Allied military leaders thought June of 1944 was too early. Indeed, if Churchill and Roosevelt had only their interests at heart, they would have sat back and let the Soviet Union be destroyed by the Nazis and then invaded France. The fact they didn't showed the recognition of the importance of supporting Stalin, even though the communists weren't particularly loved by either leader. The British even foolishly allowed 55 Rolls Royce Nene jet engines to be sold to the Soviets in 1947 on a commercial contract. The Soviets were then supposed to pay for a license to manuface the Nene. They reneged on the deal and reverse engineered the engine instead, making tens of thousand of them over time, and never paid a dime for the rights. They even charged China for a license to produce their own copies. The MiG-15 would not have been ready to fly in 1950 if not for this theft of the Nene engine. Everything I've written is easily confirmed on the web. You say I'm indoctrinated, but I read Soviet and Western version of everything. You read only Sovet and Serb versions of history. I'm done with this conversation, since it's clear you will just keep moving the goalposts and never answer the points I bring up.
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  4. Oh, I forgot Lend Lease. The total was $130 billion WWII dollars and thousands of allied lives lost on merchantmen and warships trying to get the convoys through to the Soviets. However, I'll let the words of the noted Russian general Georgi Zhukov make my point for me, as he wrote in 1946 - "Now they say that the allies never helped us, but it can't be denied that the Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war," Soviet General Georgi Zhukov said after the end of WWII. "We didn’t have explosives, gunpowder. We didn’t have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives. And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? But now they make it seem as if we had an abundance of all that. Without American trucks we wouldn’t have had anything to pull our artillery with."
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  5. One last thing. My late wife was Slovenian. I have traveled the length and breadth of the former Yugoslavia and then again after the break up. I spent a fair amount of time in Serbia. I don't claim to be Serbian or even understand all of Serbian history, but I'm also not completely naive on the subject. I didn't approve of the NATO bombing of Serbia and have loudy protested it ever since. It's terrible that it happened, and it's something Bill Clinton will carry the responsibility for it happening to his grave. Nevertheless, it's now history, and Serbia will have to decide which direction the go in. Sadly, Serbian history books now are more anti-Western than when Tito was alive
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