Unstoppable Empire of Doom wrote:Kilobugya wrote:
In the late 1930s ? Sure. And Nazi Germany was planing to invade USSR too.
That's a much more dubious claim, and you even admit you've no evidence to show for it. The Russian civil war only ended in 1923, they had other priorities than invading Germany.
No it isn't dubious. It is fact. One of their stated goals during the polish-soviet war was to attain a land border with Germany and invade spreading the revolution to the industrialized west. If you disagree you can go take it up with Lenin.
It does seem odd for Kilobugya to argue that since the Russian civil war only ended in 1923, the Soviets weren't interested in exporting revolution; especially since the 1920 Battle of Warsaw - when the embattled Poles turned back the Soviet invasion of Poland against all the odds - is seen in traditional historiography as perhaps the key moment in stopping immediate post-revolutionary attempts to export the Russian Revolution to the rest of Europe, when Bolshevik ideology was explicitly based on exporting the revolution, and when Lenin was openly arguing that the new Bolshevik state couldn't survive without a revolutionary Germany.
To quote historian Anna Cienciala:
In December 1919, the Red Army was clearly winning the Civil War and the Soviet government sent peace proposals to the Polish government. Pilsudski rejected negotiations, suspecting the Soviets only wanted a breather before attacking Poland. At this time, the French and British were pulling their troops out of Russia and wanted to avert a Polish-Soviet war.
On 8 December 1919, the Allied Supreme Council in Paris proposed a demarcation line between the Polish and Russian "administrations." This line, which was specifically stated not to be the frontier, was roughly equivalent to the eastern border of Russian Poland, which was ethnically Polish, but it had two possible variations in East Galicia (formerly part of Austrian Poland): one of which left Lwow [Ukr L’viv, Rus. Lvov] then predominantly Polish, and the neighboring oil fields, on the Russian side (Line A), while the other left them on the Polish side (Line B). Pilsudski ignored this proposal. His goal was a federation between Poland, Lithuania and Belorussia, and alliance with an independent Ukraine.
Lenin’s aim was to infiltrate the borderlands, set up communist governments there, as well as in Poland, and reach Germany where he expected a socialist (communist) revolution to break out. He also expected revolutions elsewhere, including Italy, but the German revolution was most important to him for he believed that Soviet Russia could not survive without a socialist Germany and the help of its industrial know-how to modernize Russia.
https://acienciala.ku.edu/hist557/lect11.htm
Or perhaps this is as a misunderstanding and/or a matter of nuance.
It is true that the Bolshevik state didn't plan on invading Germany in the period 1918-1920; but that rather ignores the broader context. If they weren't planning on invading Germany, it was only because they expected a revolution (which they would then support) to break out spontaneously, in keeping with Lenin and Trotsky's understanding of the inevitability of revolution in mature capitalist societies and the attempts to set up small-s soviet republics in Bremen and Bavaria. And if they weren't necessarily planning on a military invasion of Germany, then they very much invaded Poland in order to facilitate direct mutual support with the revolutionary German state that wasn't to be. Neither Poland nor the Soviet Union achieved all of their military goals in that war, but the successful Polish defence of Warsaw was one of the turning points in limiting the geographic reach of the Bolshevik revolutions (plural) in the immediate post-war period.
