It most certainly includes direct casualty numbers as well

Good, then we both agree the source doesn’t support the “hundreds of thousands murdered in Poland” claim.

For the last time: I have asked at this point in 4 different occasions what was the desirable alternative to a Soviet military occupation of eastern Poland after the Polish, English and French rejection of a mutual defense agreement with the USSR.

The fact that you fail to provide an answer after being clearly prompted 4 different times to give one, is enough evidence to me that you simply don’t have one. I will then state the obvious: the Soviet military occupation of Eastern Poland likely prevented hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Roma and other ethnicities from being genocided by the OTHERWISE INEVITABLE Nazi invasion.

You really, really cannot imagine not having to do

No, I really cannot pretend knowing more about defeating fascism in Europe that the nation which ultimately defeated fascism, at the IMMENSE cost of 25 million lives in the struggle against Nazism. It’s easy to go with our hindsight and categorise the oppression of bourgeois and nationalist elements of Poland as unnecessary and “barbaric”. But you known what, I’m not Polish, I’m Spanish. I’m from the country where the communists did not go far enough, and the result was losing a preventable civil war against fascists which murdered hundreds of thousands of innocents, and the 4 decades of fascism that followed. So, no, my claim is NOT that I know more about fighting fascism than those who actually defeated it.

it’s clear they wanted to keep him [Hitler] on a leash and have him serve as a first line of defense

This is basically the thing I’m arguing. The Soviet Union was never an expansionist project in the military sense (they wanted to spread the revolution abroad, such as by assisting the Republicans in Spain and giving weapons to the Vietnamese in their anti-imperialist struggle), never projecting their military force outwards except as a response to serious provoking by third party foreign actors (such as in the case of the funding and arming in Afghanistan of radical theocratic militias by the US).

The fact that all of these western leaders talk of the USSR using the Molotov-Ribbentrop as an “odious but necessary defensive measure”, proves to me that they understood that the USSR wasn’t something they needed to be militarily defended of by a weaponized Germany acting as a buffer, hence that can’t be understood as Germany’s role in the situation in my opinion.

I’d dispute that based on the fact that they declared war on Germany immediately when Hitler invaded Poland

They already had a mutual defense agreement with Poland, that’s why they intervened at that point. Additionally, they didn’t want Nazis to get too big because they were competing for resources and markets, as are all capitalist nations.

I find it very easy to believe that the very nations that invaded the Bolsheviks during the Russian civil war and supported the tsarists with no other reason than to attempt to destroy communism, would be happy to see Germany destroy the Soviet Union which, as a nation which had only began to industrialise in the late 1920s (compared to the extra century that Germany and England had had to industrialise), was very weak in military industrial capabilities.

In any case I understand that that’s just my opinion based on historical precedents, and there may be more nuance. However, I seem to share the same point of view of many western allies from the period:

“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be ” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)

“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door ” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.

“One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course ” Neville Chamberlain, House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)

“We could not doubt that the Soviet Government, disillusioned by the hesitant negotiations with Britain and France, feared a lone struggle against Hitler’s mighty war machine. It seemed they had concluded, in the interests of survival, that an accord with Germany would at least postpone their day of reckoning ” Cordell Hull (U.S. Secretary of State), The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (Published 1948)

“It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door ” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938), Mission to Moscow (1941)

There were several alternatives, actually

Great, please name one of them that doesn’t imply complete occupation of Poland by Nazis, I’ve asked you already several times to do so and you keep avoiding it. To me, a great alternative would have been the mutual defense agreement that the Soviet Union spent the entire 30s pursuing with England, France and Poland, which the latter countries repeatedly rejected. What’s your alternative?

Yeah sure, here’s one that estimates between 250k and 1.5m

That’s a book on migrations and deportations, not a book on casualties, it doesn’t seem to support a claim of “hundreds of thousands murdered” which you made in your previous comment, could you please elaborate?

already convinced themselves that all these murdered Poles

Again, you’re conflating murdered with deported.

“must have deserved it”

I explicitly mentioned in my previous comment that there were innocents caught in this process of class war and collectivisation of the economy in times of war, which I deeply lament. I just can’t envision an alternative reality where, after a decade of denying mutual defense agreements with the Soviets, there was a better alternative to Soviet occupation as opposed to Nazi occupation.

Stalin could have not promised the nazis to attack the Poles from the rear not attacked the Poles from the rear

Again, please tell me what was the alternative to Soviet occupation in Eastern Poland, once Poland rejected a mutual defense agreement against Nazis with the Soviets.

murdered hundreds of thousands of Poles

I don’t think those numbers are honest, can you provide a source for that? I know about the Katyn massacre and about other events in which Nazi collaborators/Bourgeois Polish nationalists were killed (as well as some innocent civilians), but AFAIK the numbers don’t go that high

I think all of these alternatives would have been more desirable

Again, how is tens of thousands of deaths in occupied Poland (many of which were Nazi collaborators and bourgeois Polish nationalists) preferable to Nazi occupation? Or can you think of an alternative to either of these two options?

In my humble opinion, this is nothing like the Molotov-Ribbentrop. Molotov-Ribbentrop gets a lot of bad advertising due to cold war propaganda, but even western leaders in the west at the time like Churchill admitted that the Soviets had no other option (if you want evidence I have plenty of reference, feel free to ask :)

The Soviets spent the entire 30s warning of fascism and trying to build mutual defense agreements with France, England and Poland and they refused systematically, even when in 1939 the Soviets offered to send 1 million troops together with artillery, tanks and planes, to the Polish and French borders on exchange for a mutual defense agreement, but the French and English ambassadors received orders not to engage in actual negotiations and just to postpone the agreement, since they wanted the Nazis to invade the Soviet Union.

Either way even if you fundamentally disagree with what I’m saying, what was the alternative? Poland was going to get steamrolled by the Nazis with or without the soviets controlling the eastern part of it (as proven by the fact that soviets started invading some weeks after the Nazis). What’s more desirable, half of Poland having concentration camps, or the entirety of Poland having concentration camps?

All of this could have been prevented in my opinion if western countries agreed to engage the Nazis together with the Soviet union, as the soviets suggested as an alternative to the Munich agreements. So the lesson in my view is: to fight fascism, listen to socialists (who are the ones who actually defeated most Nazis in the eastern front)

That would be a compelling argument (unpredictable policy shift) if it hadn’t been predicted by socialists all over the world when the war started