> which allowed them to pilfer surviving equipment from German factories
Remember kids, the Soviets only pilfer and plunder, while The Great West gives jobs and opportunities (especially in the rocket industry)!
It is especially jarring in the article what essentially praises the same Soviets.
Webster:
pilfer
intransitive verb
: steal
especially : to steal stealthily in small amounts and often again and again
transitive verb
: steal
especially : to steal in small quantities
OED:
pilfer, v.
transitive. To steal (property), esp. in small quantities; to filch. Also figurative.
Do I need to provide the definition of the word 'steal'?
And the most amusing thing is what in the first comment I explicitly marked the difference on how it's described depending on the side.
Well it pretty much was compared to West Germany in 1990. And the little economic successes the GDR had were definitely not because, but despite our "beloved" Soviet Big Brother who didn't miss a chance to milk East Germany dry (lookup the uranium mining in East Germany from 1945 into the late 70s for instance - if the Soviet Union would actually have paid anything close to fair prices for the uranium, East Germany would have been much better off).
East Germany looks how it does today because West Germany also pumped massive amounts of money into rebuilding the economy and infrastructure after the reunification, just as the US did in West Germany after WW2.
I'm not ignoring the atrocities that Nazi Germany did in the Soviet Union during WW2 (and all of Eastern Europe btw, not just Russia, Belarus and Ukraine).
The 'semantics' was about your nitpicking of whether taking "spoils of war" is the same as "pilfering". I called it "moving" btw, which as far as I'm aware doesn't have any negative connotations (maybe in Russia, dunno).
The "whataboutism" remark is because you brought the "Great West" into the discussion out of nowhere. A true cornerstone of the Soviet and Russian propaganda playbook to deflect any criticism of the Soviet Union and today's Russia under Putin. The "Great West" had absolutely nothing to do with the complicated relationship between the Eastern half of Germany and our Soviet overlord.
People greeted soviet liberators pompously, then came sobering up.
They were greedy at times of peace and out of control during war.
Top personnel often fled the Russians, expecting better treatment and economic conditions in the West - and they were right about that. Besides its own nature, the SU had also suffered many large-scale German war crimes to make it harsh on the defeated Germans.
No what about X that also genocide the natives or Y that did Z, that does not excuse what USSR/Russia did or is a good reason for Russians to modify their history books and attempt to push alternate history in media and push excuses why their crimes are justified compared to other countries.