Stalin’s Danish Mystery
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
Thus in principle the Russians could have claimed all of Norway.
They did not which I think is one of the reasons we in Norway retained a pretty good relationship with the Soviet Union through the Cold War sometimes to anger and bitter resentment by our American NATO allies which seemed to prefer to refer to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire”.
For instance, citizens of both countries living in a defined zone either side of the border can visit under a visa waiver-esque program.
IIRC the debate following the TV series was more about how some figured the plot - that the EU wanted access to our natural resources and were willing to use force (by proxy) to get it - seemed plausible if international relations deteriorated sufficiently.
Our own little Suez crisis, that.
http://www.hscentre.org/uncategorized/fire-and-ice-the-defen...
Arguably incorrect, since the Soviets maintained a naval base in Porkkala, Finland, just west of Helsinki, until 1956. (Arguably because Finland is culturally but not strictly geographically Scandinavian.)
Also, the Red Army liberated the northernmost part of Norway (Which, incidentally, also is the easternmost - the town of Kirkenes lies to the east of Istanbul) in the autumn of 1944; they quietly left in the autumn of 1945.
From what I've been told by my grandmother, who along with a lot of other locals had dodged the forced evacuation ordered by the retreating Germans and hid for weeks in mines outside the town, cooperation with the Red Army was excellent, with very little friction - to the extent that when rebuilding of Finnmark started (the retreating Germans having blown up everything they couldn't burn!), some construction materials were shipped in from the Soviet Union, which presumably had enough rebuilding to do on their own turf...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavia#Use_of_Nordic_coun...
‣ https://satwcomic.com/new-nordic
‣ https://satwcomic.com/greatest-authority
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Estonian_alternative_flag... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Estonia#Nordic_flag_pr...
Furthermore, in an article about military history, Scandinavia is understood - in a military geopolitical context - to only include Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
Of course, I enjoy being contrarian more than I probably should.
I'm Swedish, if that matters.
Not sure if any Scots agree, but it seems right to me at least.
Though some do insist on that distinction. They're kinda right, but don't get invited to parties.
Really? I think the Soviet campaign in the Far East began 3 months after VE day, after the US had dropped 2 atomic bombs on Japan, and lasted less than 4 weeks. Its real strategic importance was that it forced the Japanese to realize the Soviet Union would not broker a negotiated peace with the other Allies. The Soviets had no beef with Japan, to them it was a land grab,
Japan's forces on the mainland were swept away by experienced, battle-tested, and overwhelmingly large armies redeployed from the Eastern front.
Japan's plan for the defense of the home islands consisted of pulling everyone they could out of Manchuria, but relying on its resources and industry to support the war effort. This obviously required the Soviet Union to uphold it's end of their non-aggression pact. Which it didn't.
With Manchuria under Soviet occupation, and the Japanese armies routed, this plan completely fell apart. The invasion convinced Japan that capitulation was the only solution more than the bombs did.
No. (And also no to JackFr.) The Soviet campaign in Manchuria started on August 8, after Hiroshima but before Nagasaki.
The Japanese plan to use Manchuria for defense of the home islands would never have worked. The US could have put enough naval forces there to make transport of troops and material impossible.
My mistake. I must have gotten confused because of its inter-bombing timing. The argument that it played a bigger role in their capitulation than the second bomb is still a reasonable one, though.
> The US could have put enough naval forces there to make transport of troops and material impossible.
Japanese war planning was quite optimistic. But once Manchuria fell, it was clear to everyone that there was no hope.
didn't this:
a) radically shift power balance in the region b) revert losses from imperial war with japan in early 1900s
I think this is consistent with the withdrawal of Red Army troops from places like Austria.
As for Bornholm, I really don't see why people think it would have some great significance. The Soviets already had many bases in the Baltic which were contiguous with their territory. What would an island add? The Soviets did not have a good record of supplying their forces by sea. During WW2, i.e. immediately before the time in question, they suffered a number of disasters when their forces were cut off from supplies by land and had to be supplied, and then evacuated, by ships. There was the disastrous evacuation of Tallinn at the beginning of the war, the battle (and evacuation) of Odessa, the loss of Crimea, and the Leningrad front with immense civilian and military losses. Bornholm would have looked like a death trap to the Soviet commanders of the time, rather than some great asset. No wonder they agreed to return Porkkala to Finland 40 years early, and never placed naval assets of any significance there.
The Soviets did not withdraw from Austria until 1955, two years after Stalin's death. The neutrality of Austria was a condition.
Here's a painting of Danish roads around that period. Looks like a buggy track thru the countryside: https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=gUPDkI...
Here's an article (in Swedish) about the roads in Skåne.
Covers a long period.
https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2017-03-25/alla-landsvagar-bar-ti...
Malmö was even then Sweden's third largest city. Copenhagen was a global city and Denmark the center of European pork production. Prussia's huge estates were the foundation for the aristocracies' wealth.
To get goods to market, or to a rail hub, good roads helped a lot.
It seems around 1940 or so Stalin did stop a Hamlet production (based on a Pasternak translation) at the Moscow Art Theatre. Recollections vary somewhat but the most plausible explanation is that Stalin felt Hamlet (the character) was weak. Completing the circle, the Russian wikipedia page on Ivan The Terrible has a quote from a Central Committee critique of a different movie in which, as an aside, part two of Eisenstein's film is criticized as ahistorical and as portraying Ivan as too weak "like Hamlet". The second part was not screened until some years after Stalin and Eisenstein's deaths. Hamlet itself was not staged in the last 12 years of Stalin's life.
Hmm. "On 8 April 1941, the United States occupied Greenland to defend it against a possible invasion by Germany."[1] So, first, there never were any German occupiers to liberate Greenland from, and second, the US occupation of Greenland started 4 years before 1945.
> Furthermore, there were emplacements for massive guns with 42 kilometre range, which could close the strait south of the island to the coast of what is now Poland (then Germany).
First, the strait is 90 kilometres wide.[2] Second, the last German stronghold on the southern coast of the strait, the port of Kolberg (Kołobrzeg) fell to the Polish People's Army on March 18.[3] Calling the coast "then Germany" in May is pretty weird.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland#Treaty_of_Kiel_to_Wo...
Founded in 1255 by Germans, Kolberg was part of Prussian Pomerania from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia until the August 1945 Potsdam Agreements which implicitly recognised the Soviet capture of eastern Poland and gave Poland eastern Germany in return; this was not finalised until the 1990 Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany. It's perfectly reasonable to refer to Prussian territory in early 1945 as Germany.
(I am not complaining about the transfer to Poland — after the inhumanity of the German occupation of Poland itself it was only just. It does seem a bit unjust that eastern Poland is still part of Russia though!)
It wasn't an entirely inappropriate term, given the Holodomor, the Katyn massacre, the massacre of the Cossacks, the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Berlin Wall, the gulag system, the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan &c. The U.S. was imperfect too, of course, but most of the badness was non-policy like the My Lai massacre, or evil or wrong policies (e.g. segregation) which pale in comparison, and anyway whatboutism isn't really wise: one should call out misbehaviour anywhere it rears its head.
It's fair to say that even in its kinder, gentler post-Lenin and post-Stalin form the Soviet Union was a malign force in the world. 'Evil empire' was a fair shorthand.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22534609.
I disagree. The biggest badness was support for murderous dictators and paramilitary groups in Iran (1953-1979), Chile (1973-1981), Iraq (at least from 1980-1988 or so), Nicaragua (during the 80s), and numerous other places. This was completely intentional, calculated policy that led to the death of thousands of people.
(The Soviets had a great, ah, excuse for doing it - they were 'just' trying to combat religious extremism and terrorism... And were 'definitely' not playing balance-of-power games in the Middle East.)
Imagine a drama of Three Mile Island, made entirely by Russians, with a wholely Russian cast and crew, how preposterous it would be.).
There was much incompetence surely, but pure malice, I think is yet debatable.
https://wap.business-standard.com/article/opinion/if-chernob...
And this too:
https://www.rt.com/news/460878-chernobyl-hbo-fake-soviet/
May be RT is not the most reputed organ, but that particular article seemed written with an authentic motive:
"These elements of Soviet life may seem like the background to the central human stories, but in fact they dictated how each scene shown in Chernobyl unfolded in real life. And although occasionally the show hits upon the right note, perhaps when it sticks closest to a verbatim recreation, it does not seem to realize it. Most of the time, those involved act wrong on the wrong motivations, talk about the wrong things, and say them in the wrong order with an alien cadence that is more than just a different language."
"The most jarring scene is a Soviet minister bargaining with coal miners at gunpoint to persuade them to dig a tunnel under Chernobyl. Moscow mandarins did not negotiate with those 10 rungs below them – they sent down orders and didn’t need bullets to enforce them."
"Mazin’s party officials are more like sullen gangsters protecting their own patch – they bully, shout, laugh ostentatiously, and bang their fists on the table. Stellan Skarsgard’s senior cabinet minister threatens to throw Jared Harris’s renowned academic off a helicopter, then to shoot him, but the conversation is as implausible as it would be if it were shown between Vice President George H.W. Bush and physicist Richard Feynman, to pick two contemporaries."
Most cases of "I know Russians and they say X" or "I know Cubans and they say Y" are claims in the West that are informed by the fleeing bourgeoisie that would of course be critical of the regime change.
I don't think they were that old.