Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home, just please pick up after yourselves. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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Weird outburst aside, it’s actually kinda funny that the “shouldn’t have stopped at Berlin” line sorta touches on the OG key theoretical divergence of Trotsky vs Stalin over permanent revolution. Trotsky was firmly a “shouldn’t have stopped at Brest-Litovsk” guy in WW1 and if he were still alive by 1945 he would probably repeatedly point at “not stopping at Berlin” as proof of the USSR being a “degenerated worker state” and allying itself with capitalists.
I understand that the argument presented here was more moralistic and personalistic, but I like that it shines a light into the fact that, yeah, Trotsky wouldn’t have stopped at Berlin. He would’ve also probably gotten the USSR invaded and completely destroyed in the early twenties.
Its about hindsight. Its not about exporting revolution to europe but wishing Stalin had struck a crippling blow to fascist that they couldn’t recover from.
USSR thought incorrectly that the end of the 3rd reich would be the end of fascist aggression, at least for long enough that they could take care of domestic concerns without distraction.
Taking Berlin was only the first leg of defeating the threat of fascism. If Stalin knew what “peace” would look like maybe he would have just kept going instead of letting the fascists regroup and change tactics.
Fascism was on the ropes in 1945. Peace allowed them to turn USSR’s allies into enemies and change tactics to asymmetrical warfare, economic war and dirty war.