On the topic of Cowbee’s summary, one of the articles linked there is by this person. The article concerns the question of whether Poland was invaded by the soviets in 1939 link. I was curious about the author’s argument, so I read it.

As it turns out, the crux of the author’s argument was that the Polish government exiled itself to Romania on September 17th, and so the soviets could occupy eastern Poland because Poland technically had no government at the time. After all, it couldn’t do anything from Romania, as it was a neutral country. EXCEPT the Polish government went to Romania AFTER the soviets invaded, and it was IN REACTION to the soviet invasion. So, because the author got the chronological order of events wrong, his argument kinda falls apart.

I don’t want to suggest that the author doesn’t know history, but I strongly suspect that he argues in bad faith by intentionally manipulating facts and omitting important information. I don’t think you should treat this author as an authority on the topic, especially since this isn’t his only outstanding claim that has been questioned by people versed in the field of Eastern European history. Among other things, he’s also a Holodomor denier.

tankie punks fuck off

That summary is terrible, though. It claims shit like the soviets “hated” germany / the nazis, ignoring shit like the Treaty of Rapallo wherein the violent suppression of communists by the German government (not yet the nazis, yes) was freely forgiven by the soviet union, and which played a huge role in the interaction between the Soviet government and the Weimar / Nazi governments. It also relies heavily on the writings of Grover Furr, a flag even redder than the Soviet’s in any political discussion about the time period.

Grover Furr’s credibility is best explained by this blurb from his wikipedia page:

Furr has written books, papers, and articles about Soviet history, especially the Stalin era, in which he has stated that the Holodomor, the 1932–33 famine in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, was not deliberate, describing it as a fiction created by pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists, that the Katyn massacre was committed by the Nazi Schutzstaffel and not the Soviet NKVD, that all defendants in the Moscow Trials were guilty as charged, that claims in Nikita Khrushchev’s speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences are almost entirely false, that the purpose of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was to preserve the Second Polish Republic rather than partition it, and that the Soviet Union did not invade Poland in September 1939, on the grounds that the Polish state no longer existed.

Seriously, just go read Furr’s site (it’s incredibly difficult to parse due to how it’s presented. He loves having multiple interlinked web pages with little context provided as to how the specifics relate, so fair warning that it’s a slog.) The most blatant thing to point out is how he provides baseless in-text explanations of things like the meanings of specific language used in the M-R Pact which are completely unaddressed elsewhere in his explanation. It’s maddening to see him treated as a scholar in this field, as though statements provided in inline parenthetical / editorial asides are somehow exempt from the need for citations or that anything he does is acceptable academic behavior.

Back to Cowbee though: they completely misrepresent the “4/5 of dead Nazis” statistic, ignoring things like:

• Troop allocations between the western and eastern fronts were wildly disproportionate
• The seven other countries that contributed troops to the war on the eastern front (and then assign credit for all those nazi deaths to the USSR, of course)
• That, thanks to the willingness of Nazis to surrender to the western forces, the western front captured more than 10x the number of Nazi soldiers they killed (~3,500,000 captured to 375,000 killed) which is a million more than the soviets killed (this does not include the additional 3.5million ‘disarmed forces’ since those are only somewhat admissible here and is a hugely complex topic on it’s own)

There is a very real discussion to be had on how related, truly, were the two countries prior to the war, for example: They were close enough that the USSR even allowed the Nazis to run a tank training school, fighter pilot school and chemical weapons proving ground in their territory, which was closed soon after the reichstag fire as the political differences between the two countries became more solidifed as hitler rose to power). How much of that earlier cooperation survived? Important to discuss, and misrepresented by all sides in nearly all directions for an endless procession of political reasons. That solidification of differences is a truly fascinating topic and one fraught with complexity and intrigue and is a great subject to debate (in good faith), but the debate Cowbee is presenting is full of misinformation and absolute rampant bullshit from a king of misrepresenting history.

^{edit: misformatted link}

^{edit 2: words are hard}