Were the Soviets the good guys in WWII or just useful allies?

The Soviet Union played a pivotal role in the defeat of Nazi Germany of that there is no doubt however they were more an ally of convenience than anything else.

Winston Churchill said it well here: ‘If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons’.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Don’t forget that until Operation Barbarossa (June 22nd, 1941) the Soviets had a Non-Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany that was signed on the 23rd August 1939, one week prior to the Invasion of Poland by Germany.

This Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact allowed the Germans and Soviets to partition Poland between the two countries and by extension essentially divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence (the Soviets would use this to extend their control into the Baltic States and Bessarabia).

This was not a formal alliance but the sordid details were revealed during the Nuremberg trials.

Stalin for one, went out of his way to avoid war with Germany and for the period from the 1st September 1939 until Barbarossa actually supplied the Germans with raw material that they would use in their war effort.

In fact even as reports from various sources (especially Richard Sorge in Tokyo) warned of an impending invasion Stalin refused to believe this line of thought. He felt that he had done enough to placate the Nazis.

The massacre at of the Polish army officers at Katyn (April/May 1940) and the harsh treatment of the Poles following the Soviet Invasion of Poland on the 17th of September 1939 do much to dispel the Soviet good guy image.

Having said that the Soviet achievements in rolling back the Germans in Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Bagration should not be understated. They broke the power of the Wehrmacht (albeit with considerable resource support from the Western Allies via the convoy system). It was also the Soviets who liberated such death camps as Auschwitz-Birkenau.

So what we have is a lot of grey. Good guys on one side. Tainted on the other. The Iron Curtain that descended over areas of Soviet controlled Eastern Europe following the World War Two reinforced the darker side of what once a marriage of convenience.

There was a greater devil to defeat until 1945.