Warsaw came close to never being rebuilt (2015)
culture.pl
culture.pl
Green, walkable, clean, good public transport, mostly-well-connected airport, reasonable cost of living (esp. if you work remotely as a software engineer…), good and varied restaurants, and very safe.
I go to Poland nearly every year because of Lambda Days, which is in Krakow, though next time I fly over I might take the train over to Warsaw again.
There were simply too many cars around that block so they effectively locked each other up. That was ten years ago though so maybe they fixed it.
A big part of my time there was spent in a taxi.
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.2309595,21.0148913,16.75z?en...
It was probably more the roundabouts combined with traffic lights that caused the mess.
I remember thinking that someone needs to drop a bomb on this place or we'll be stuck forever.
The only place worse/as bad in the EU is Northern Italy but at least they have geography as an excuse.
It would be a nice place if the Poles stopped burning coal..
* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2023/...
It’s easy to manipulate by using a color scale where perfectly harmless pollution levels are painted red or black.
Better map (live) here: https://airly.org/map/pl/
If you follow for example air quality in Legionowo (one of Warsaw northern suburubs) since November till March the air quality drops at around 6pm until 6am to the levels compared to most industrial parts of Silesia. This pollution spreads over central areas of Warsaw depending on the winds.
However the major problem is that gas is expensive and wood is cheaper. It is enough that one house in the neighborhood is heated by burning wood and everybody can smell it.
The situation is also much worse in small villages far from Warsaw.
The one I posted was the yearly average which I think is a much better way to look at this (maybe monthly would be better though).
> < 20 p/ug
~ 20 seems quite high (IMHO)
> so almost no one uses coal or wood here
Power plants might be the much bigger issue. Coal is still > 60%, of course it has improved massively over the last few years (used to be almost 80% a few years ago). IIRC Poland produces more electricity from coal than all the other EU countries combined besides Germany (who also suck).
The actual air pollution issue stems from small heaters used in houses that haven't been upgraded yet (or people using them improperly / burning trash) - but there's plenty of EU funding going towards replacing them. Many of the remaining users are unfortunately living in poverty and can't even afford the remaining 20-30% of the price + heating afterwards can absolutely become more expensive.
Coal powerplants suck cause they produce a lot of CO2, but they don't polute much (because of mandatory filters). It's negligible compared to unfiltered coal heating in millions of homes.
I also live in London and never had that.
Good for you that you stayed if that's more like your cup of tea. Perspective of somebody who actually moved - best decision of my life. Nothing less than Switzerland, no point trying to reach less in life than the limit. Not easy to get into by any means, and you have to adapt to their culture and way of life and not vice versa (which is usually the biggest issue with immigrants) and accept few tradeoffs.
But for adventurer and mountain lover like me, who came to appreciate massively clean everything, low criminality, consistently polite and respectful people, society that just works (TM) - social, education, medical aspects, even bureaucracy. Then coming back (not Poland so not comparing with it specifically) gets less and less rosy over time, to the point of being disappointed with whole place and society. You see corruption, stupidity, self-shooting in the foot, greed, everybody thinking about themselves and screw others, mafia, and everybody knows it, knows who is bad guy, yet nothing is done.
Not a place I decided to have kids and raise them, nor get old. To each their own, as long as we are all happy with our choices down the line, life is easy in your 20s and 30s without kids practically anywhere.
Westerners who move there as tourists or with their remote jobs will never see this so for them it's only upsides, especially if they come from that country full of gun crime and homeless people, it's like some miracle place.
Having grown up in the late 60's and 70's in the States, eastern Europe was usually demonized because of the then influence of Russia. When my wife suggested Prague, I admit I had a little apprehension, but I was absolutely wrong. The people were very kind and helpful, the history was interesting and the food and drink was fantastic.
Still, what I wrote is valid for that too, no reason for me to return there from where I am now. As semi-local I could see through the surface and see issues I mention, and they are there (plus a typical Prague thing - kids starting with meth at 10-11 since its very accessible and weed even earlier, very popular with adequate consequences). They may be negligible /invisible to many others, not pushing my opinion but I stand by it, and in past 15 years nothing happened to change it, in contrary.
For someone from Gdańsk this is laughable. The city is very car-centric. There are large areas of it that are just concrete with no green in sight. This contributes to absurdly high temperatures in the summer and difficulty of finding any shade. “Patelnia” (frying pan) has that name for a reason and it’s by no means the only such place. The city also keeps building glass skyscrapers which reflect sunlight onto the ground in already heat-stroke-inducing heat. It’s laden with huge intersections with 2-phase crossings, which you need to run through in order to go through in one go. If you fail, you’ll be stranded on a concrete island breathing in fumes from car traffic. Public transport is good if you can use the metro. But there are only 2 lines, so aside from maybe going to work you’ll most likely be using a bus. The bus is most likely to be going regularly late and overcrowded (god I hate 186).
That reason was actually retconned.
Back when the term was coined there weren't that many cars in Warsaw and summers were not this hot.
Most likely it was simply the first association anyone had looking at it when emerging from the subway.
I disagree with it not being walkable somewhere though. You can easily get anywhere on foot, and safely. Never had an issue with that anywhere in the city. It could definitely be more cyclable, as there are still many places without a dedicated biking lane (and you have to use the road or sidewalk), but walkable it definitely is.
I did find the huge open spaces next to Stalin Skyscraper and Saxon Palace to be very unused looking.
I love Warsaw, too bad I find the language impenetrable.
It's weird but I managed to learn conversational Polish in about 6 weeks, thanks to a girlfriend who couldn't speak English.
I mean, that's a pretty strong motivator, unfortunately it's not a viable strategy for everyone ;-)
I agree that it's mostly safe, but green, or clean? And the public transportation is a mixed bag, my daily commute to the office used to be 1h each way (around 6 miles distance). Cost of living is ridiculously high compared to the rest of Poland, software engineers, businessmen and celebrities are probably the only ones who really can afford it.
But the main reason I'm leaving is because people here are assholes. As a capital city of Poland Warsaw attracts the worst kind of scum, politicians, wannabe celebrities, con men, corporate drones, gold diggers, etc.
If I could have one wish it would be for Putin to nuke Warsaw.
Also, the relevant NATO simulations start with the first nukes arriving from Kaliningrad (Königsberg) to North Dresden. Warsaw is a bit later in this game. In the end all is down.
This sounds pretty standard, maybe you don’t like capitals / big cities??
Good god that escalated quickly.
One of the reasons why the Germans wanted Warsaw so exceptionally destroyed was their feeling of racial superiority. The Fuhrer got extra angry when he found out those occupied Poles still dare create rebellions, and ordered a systematic levelling of the capital. I'll let you ponder whether we've actually learned a lesson from those times.
אַ דײַטש האָט אין טרעבלינקע זי פֿאַרברענט.
און איך בין אין דער ייִדישע מדינה
דער סאַמע לעצטער, װאָס האָט זי געקענט.
פֿאַר איר שרײַב איך אױף ייִדיש מײַנע לידער
אין טעג די שרעקלעכע פֿון אונדזער צײַט.
בײַ גאָט אַלײן איז זי אַ בת־יחידה ־
אין הימל זיצט זי בײַ זײַן רעכטער זײַט.
:-(
In any event, The USSR needed Poland to succeed as a buttress protecting the Russian state. Unlike Germany it was not partitioned, it was integral and complete as a country, it had voting rights in the UN, and it had a complicit puppet government. If that government wanted to reconstruct Warsaw and the Russians held out for Łódź It would create tensions which weren't needed. Realpolitk intruded.
Is there any record in post-roman history of a city subject to destruction which wasn't rebuilt?
I am told that in order to re-create Warsaw, other towns were also denuted of stone carvings. In effect, so that Warsaw could exist again, other towns lost parts of their heritage. You can of course see some of the reobar and plaster overlay on brick and blockworks of the less well restored places, or from 70 years of erosion. It's substantively a modern city with a dress on.
The continuing legal fights over land ownership speak to how strongly people feel about their patch of land. Fighting human nature is a King-canute move.
Tana (Tanais) comes immediately to mind, founded by the Venetians in the 14th century (notionally a refounding of the ancient Greek city), destroyed by the Mongols about 100 years later and essentially never fully rebuilt after that.
Machu Picchu might be another example, depending on your definitions of "post-roman" and "destruction".
Aghdam, Marinka and Soledar would be current cases, though they may be rebuilt (already planned for Aghdam).
I think your question is basically a proxy for population. In areas where populations rebound, cities are obviously rebuilt. In areas where the population continues to decline, they aren't. And the very nature of dead cities means you also probably have never heard of them, so listing random names is pointless. But you can obviously find endless examples in times ranging from the Mongols to the USSR. Well and probably beyond, I'm sure Africa has examples after 1991.
I traveled all around Eastern Europe and I put it definitely higher in my rankings than Prague and Budapest.
I can see the point of those who may disagree, it's a matter of taste, but I find Warsaw one of the most beautiful cities in Europe for a weekend (whereas the likes of Rome, Paris, London can simply not be appreciated well in such a short time span).
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/15/war-on-terro...
Far less people died in other places but far more building damage got done (e.g. Würzburg, Pforzheim, and/or large cities hit by dozens of major raids like Hamburg, Cologne or Berlin).
None of this, though, justifies razing Warsaw. Atrocities don't "balance".
Err, Dresden was infamously firebombed to hell in the final days of the war (for no good reason).
It was also relatively untouched compared to what Third Reich planned to Warsaw even before war, yet alone the revenge spree in 1945.
There are reasons why it's practically illegal to remove most bullet holes you find on some walls on western side of Warsaw - they are the rare walls that survived.
Dresden was destroyed by the western countries (US et al). While Warsaw was destroyed by Germans.
So "we" fix what the bad Germans broke. But we keep the mess left by the spoiled West as a reminder.
Nazi perpetrators and victims of the rape and pillage "revenge" are generally not the same people. So yes there's sympathy.
Nazis had plans to turn Warszawa into a provincial but yet a model Nazi town in Pabst Plan [1], by completely demolishing it and rebuilding anew. But after the Uprising, they just simply destroyed it [2].
In the 1952, Stalin offered Bolesław Bierut (president before the office was disbanded; later he become the chairman of the Council of State) a choice between building an underground network in Warszawa, building a housing estate or PKiN (the Palace of Culture and Science). The answer was: "The underground is unnecessary, we can build the housing estate ourselves" - and so, out of Bierut's choice, the Palace was built.[3] Some criticize the decision and today even the very existence of the Palace that shares style with Moskow's Seven Sisters skyscrapers [4] and is considered as a monument of Soviet and Russian influence over Poland. It's still a quite hot political potato for all sides.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pabst_Plan
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Warsaw
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Culture_and_Science
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(Moscow)
It's also somehow intriguing to think how Łódź would look like if it would permanently become the country's capital; the city itself changed much in last 12 years mainly because of new communication hub that Łódź Fabryczna railway station become. But that's still not the same as being the capital.
A little gem example: there’s a communist era train platform that’s been reimagined as a Bangkok night market. In a nearby rail yard building is a very good pinball museum with playable antiques.
Sounds like the Thai government’s decades long program of soft-diplomacy through food is working.
https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/news/article/food-diplo...
Vietnamese are not Thai. They are entirely different cultures.
It's like saying a Poles are just knockoff Russians.
Vietnamese are proud of their culture and gladly export it, just like the Thai diaspora.
The train car conversion was probably done by Poles who formerly backpacked in Thailand
Apologies if the way I phrased my comment was somewhat confusing! As a Pole who studied Persian I can see how people might expect ignorance in that matter.
(pndy’s comment is correct)
> Sounds like the Thai government’s decades long program of soft-diplomacy through food is working
> My bet is that is has more to do with the Vietnamese (largest non-European) minority in PolandAnother little architectural flourish I love are the 'latarenki adresowe' (lit. 'address lanterns') you can see in the cities. They're a little lightbox that shows a silhouette of the street name and number. The older metal and glass ones you can find around the stare miasto in Krakow are especially beautiful. Some examples are [2] [3].
Some of the old buildings in central Krakow have really awesome relief art on the facade. This page has some amazing examples: [4]
A great blog about history and architecture in Polish cities is Miasta Rytm: https://miastarytm.pl/
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warszawa_Mi%C4%99dzylesie_rail...
[2]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c0/c3/10/c0c310bbb6b6ebed0a51...
[3]: https://grochow.pl/web/files/article/cdf1ecfd640977b795cdd86...
[4]: https://miastarytm.pl/godla-krakowskich-kamienic-lat-30-xx-w...
"Ruins all around"
My sister lives there with her husband and two kids, she likes it, it’s expensive though.
I like old buildings, so prefer Cracow as it wasn't rebuilt, the old buildings there are really old, not built in past 80 years.
Also capital dwellers tend to have such self-centric attitude that makes other people upset (Warsaw is known as the "default city", because in some early days of internet when some of them asked about where to buy stuff, they didn't mention in which city, they assumed it was Warsaw).
It’s one thing to prefer another city (because it happened to have fewer bombs dropped on it?) it’s another thing to say “stay away.”
There is also a lot of fetishisation of its history by conservatives, since history in Polish schools is told in a very martyr way, and history of Warsaw, its monuments and all that play well into it. If anything, it’s a very good place for conservatives.
[1]: partitions and other shenanigans of Polish history.
One exception is the city's football team of course - but football in this country is synonymous with ultra-nationalism.
I think that's the perception of Polish history pretty much everywhere except Russia, Ukraine, maybe Lithuania? I'm genuinely curious as to what other theories of Polish history exist, especially in Poland.
Personally I’m a fan of taking responsibility. And in the context of falling into partitions we did have a role in that internally the country was a mess, conflicted and for sale. We could learn something from our western neighbours when it comes to forming some unity and valuing work/grit over aristocratic navel-gazing.
I multiple times had exchanges online where Poles absolutely refused to acknowledge any antisemitism was ever present and that everything was the Germans’ fault (to the point where if there was any it was “due to German influences” and other such weird reasoning). I don’t consider anyone at fault for something their ancestors did, I just didn’t expect such total denial of wrongdoings before encountering it.
People tend to value their own group than the other. Jews tended to keep to themselves, which had two reasons: they were forced to by laws in many countries (e.g. Ashkenazi group evolved to have good math skills mostly because they were forbidden from owning land etc. but were allowed to be merchants) and by Jews themselves tending to one another and keeping outsiders out (which is quite natural for any group, but not to that extent). Consider what happens in most cases when w given ethnicity moves out of their country - they integrate in century or two (see USA). Jews do not, at least orthodox ones (which were majority before I think).
Similar thing happens with other immigrants - if they don't integrate, they are feared. If they have different religion even more so.
Countries outside of Germany during (and before) WWII didn't have state level killings of those "alien" groups.
And I’m not at all surprised to know there are many Poles that saved Jews in WW2 - there are also a lot of Germans! I’m sure individually a lot of Poles were and are fine people.
But at least according to my late grandfather it sounded like it was pretty common to experience anti-semitism as well (my grandfather grew up in an ultra orthodox family so was easily identified on the street as Jewish - he became secular during the war).
Perhaps it's just that antisemitism didn't stand out among other -isms and frankly paled in comparison to nazi industrialized genocide.
Make no mistake - it was there - but pre-WW2 Poland was actually fairly diverse with ethnic Poles being 69% of the population and the rest consisting of (population numbers in descending order) Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians and Germans.
It was a melting pot of mutual antipathy.
Case in point: to this day in literature there are two terms for the largest of these minorities - Ukrainians and the Rus' (the generally agreed on definition notwithstanding), the difference being that the latter did not display ambitions of forming an independent state.
For a fledgling state any such notion was of course dangerous and Ukrainians were treated in accordance to that (badly).
It's just an artifact of our history: even in 18th century, before partitioning of Poland the social structures we like this: Polish nobles > Jewish bankers, merchants, clerks, lawyers, doctors > Polish peasants. This structure persisted through 19th century into the 1920s and 1930s. You could say, that Poland basically outsourced most of the middle-class jobs to Jews.
In the late 1930s Poland actually ran kind of "affirmative action" to get more Polish students accepted to Polish universities, which had pretty high percentage of Jewish students: 15-25%, compared to 8.5% of Jews in general population.
All this naturally created some outrage against Jews, with Polish people feeling like a second class citizens in their own country, sometimes (but rarely) resulting in violence.
Antisemitism has always been used by those seeking to gain power through ripping up the society to shreds and it was not and is not limited to Poland.
1. There were times and nations where "anti-semitism, period" was a complete political program that won legal democratic elections.
2. In Poland this program was always in substantial minority, geography and economics nonwithstanding.
3. People susceptible to such programs are a part of the problem, not a part of the solution. The program is about labels, but it breeds the hate towards an actual neighbor. Even if the idea is changed to "it's all because of Zambians". Or Poles.
That said, I enjoyed my time there the most. I love the fact that this city that was ravaged by the Nazis w/ an Eastern Bloc past has emerged as this beacon of resilience and modernity. The part that was hit the most, the Wola district - perhaps the most by the Nazis over any other part of Europe - was the most modern. It has some really great museums and public artworks.
Also to note, the areas that were rebuilt were done so well that it's not obvious to me the difference between those and the actual medieval structures in the other cities. The old towns in all had a pretty similar flavor and of course the facades of these structures have likely been updated/fixed/repainted multiple times over the centuries.
Another interesting thing is that almost all “old” things are materially mostly new, like the Ship of Theseus. Most structures take regular refurbishment to stay standing. So in a way, while Warsaw Old Town is materially new, the form is old, so it is still in some sense old. This is in contrast to Gdańsk’s old town which are facades slapped on top of communist block buildings meant to create a Polish themed city out of the former German city, much more Disney than architectural conservation.
Do you have google maps link please?
Then I have visited Warsaw couple of years ago and I was shocked. Shocked. To me personally this city is one of the most beautiful in Europe, and I have lived pretty much everywhere.
I love Warsaw so much I actually moved here a year ago.
[1] https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/culture_socie...
And when the Warsaw Uprising started Stalin ordered Soviet troops to wait 20 miles out of Warsaw for a month so poles and Germans would kill each other.
So the USSR has had a pivotal role in Warsaw's fall.
“What was left was methodically looted and then razed to the ground by the German Vernichtungs- and Verbrenungskommando – even as late as mid-January 1945.”
Vernichtungskommando is the specific German unit that was responsible for the systematic demolition of the remaining buildings.
The other one, Verbrenungskommando, was responsible for the cover-up of the mass murder of the tens of thousands of Warsaw's civilians that had just been carried out by the German army¹.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbrennungskommando_Warschau
You can see echos of the same in the current "meat attacks" in Ukraine. Shturm, poshli, vperyod, into a hail of FPVs and cluster ammo.
--
[1] They took and accepted heavy losses, but given the alternative was total extermination, their tradeoffs were entirely different to the Western Allies'...
Also Western (considering silly movies like Enemy at the Gate). They had more than enough equipment outside of some brief periods to make something like that entirely unnecessary.
BUT the Soviets were much more tolerant about manpower losses than the allies and even the Germans. They regularly traded massive amounts of casualties (in ways that would have been entirely unacceptable in Britain/US) to sped up their advance (or due to political reasons).
As for your last point, I think the tradeoffs the Soviets were forced to make were entirely different to the Western Allies, especially say the US. If the US lost the war, their soldiers got to go back home. If the USSR lost the war, about 80% of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe would have been wiped out, as per stated Nazi plans. A terrible situation surely demanded terrible resolve to overcome.
Regardless the Soviets had almost no concerns about throwing away manpower unnecessarily due to political and other reasons.
e.g. the whole “Race to Berlin” and the ensuing battle, had Stalin and his generals had any concern about the lives of their soldiers (compared to most western generals/leaders) hundreds of thousands of Soviet lives could have been saved at a very small cost.
He furthermore explains how the casualties of ignoring infantry mines are in the end about the same. Remember minefields were not really used as area denial but for delaying operations. An offensive operation that gets successfully delayed results in much greater casualties later on, as the enemy has more time to prepare or retreat in an orderly fashion. Which is the whole point of using minefields!
But in any case, as Zhukov explained, the casualties of ignoring mines vs taking the time to disable them would have been about the same. So no real difference in lives.
The context of Zhukov's quote also matters. Unlike the case with the Western Allies, the war between the USSR and Nazi Germany was existential. Had the USSR lost, there was no surrender or retreat possible. There was no "going back home" or being "under new management": Nazi Germany had their Generalplan Ost, most of the Soviet officers would have been executed and more importantly 80% of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe would have been executed as well. When facing this kind of outcome, the tradeoffs that must be made are different.
But this is all a tangent, because what Zhukov describes is not a human wave attack. A human wave attack is infantry charging in waves, without cover or any tactics, and getting mowed down by dug in enemy infantry, without care about casualties and without any thought for tactics. This is definitely NOT what the Soviets did; in fact commanders who wasted the lives of their soldiers in this way were reprimanded, punished or removed from their posts (with some exceptions, of course, but exceptions also happened with the Western Allies).
Then you look at soviet loses vs everyone's else :)
There's no denying the Germans were tactically superior (and the Soviets pretty bad, especially initially, as evidenced by their disastrous performance during the Winter War), just as the Germans were logistically and operationally inferior, especially as the war progressed.
We know soviets just pushed people through minefields.
We know soviets had huge loses - higher than everybody else.
Your reading is that it's unrelated because the guy that did it said so :)
For me this is just excuses/trolling exhibiting the typical soviet attitude towards human life. And it's very much related to their higher loses through the wars they fought.
One, this is not a "human wave", are we agreed on this at least? Human wave describes something else. Zhukov describes attacking through minefields as if they weren't there, not running recklessly and getting mowed down in waves. They actually took cover, advanced tactically, etc; they just ignored minefields.
Two, their higher losses were mostly due to tactical incompetence in relation to the Germans, plus a much more desperate situation (not comparable with anything the Western Allies faced).
As for the Allies, did they not consider this tradeoff? Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but the tradeoff was different to them. A delay in a Western Allied operation was concerning but had different outcomes for them -- what was at stake was different. A delay in a Soviet operation had vastly more disastrous and costlier consequences (in lives).
So what is the alternative? Take a very careful and time-wasting approach to minefields, such as wasting lots of time to disable them while avoiding hostile artillery and MG fire, or avoiding that avenue of approach entirely? Acceptable to the Allies, but disastrous on the Eastern Front.
What do you mean, "trolling"? For decades the accepted thinking on the Eastern Front was what the Germans told the Allies. I call that the ultimate trolling... history as told by the losers!
I recommend some reading of Glantz and House, both renowned military historians, both retired American vets, both expert on the Eastern Front.
Yes. Because they don't value human life as much. That's the point.
> What do you mean, "trolling"?
Taking pride in shocking westerners with your recklessness.
> A delay in a Soviet operation had vastly more disastrous and costlier consequences (in lives).
Notice how when it was politically beneficial - soviets waited for over a month on Vistula river bank while on the other bank Polish resistance was securing passage and fighting Germans.
No, that's begging the question. I'm providing a different interpretation than yours, based on reading experts on the Eastern Front.
I explained the tradeoffs, and I know you read my explanations. You cannot simply ignore them.
As an aside, in my opinion you're implicitly making an entirely unsupported assertion: that most of those lopsided Soviet infantry deaths were caused by minefields (since you provided it as an example). Unless you can support this with some references, I'll be skeptical... especially since it contradicts the stated opinion of someone who actually was there to win the war: Zhukov.
> [re: "trolling"] Taking pride in shocking westerners with your recklessness.
I'm sorry, who do you think is/was "taking pride in shocking westerners"? Zhukov was reckless in order to shock westerners? I don't follow what you're saying at all.
> Notice how when it was politically beneficial - soviets waited for over a month on Vistula river bank while on the other bank Polish resistance was securing passage and fighting Germans.
It was politically and strategically beneficial from the Soviet point of view, yes. That uprising was discouraged by the Soviets and it wasn't a Soviet-led operation, so it doesn't seem to have much to do with those alleged "human wave attacks" or "not valuing human life". Can it be criticized from other points of view? Sure, but it doesn't support your main point.
I guess you have a better strategy than Zhukov has described, with more favourable tradeoffs.
Perhaps you could share it with Ukrainian command since they went with Zhukov in the summer of 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kama_tank_school
and their fighter pilots
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipetsk_fighter-pilot_school
and their chemical warfare teams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomka_gas_test_site
I guess it was the same Stalin who signed a pact with the Nazi Germany to partition Poland and invaded Poland on 17 Sep 1939.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
It must have also been the same Stalin who ordered the extermination of 22,000 of the educated part of the Polish society and then blamed the Germans for it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
I guess he wanted to outdo the Germans, who had a special plan for the extermination of Polish intellectuals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_AB-Aktion_in_Poland
I don't know about you, but I don't think anybody wanted to listen to Stalin. He wasn't exactly a reliable interlocutor.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_Commer...
Germany had no oil after invading Poland. Almost all of it was imported over the ocean (IIRC mainly US). In theory the allies could have just waited them out. And then the Soviets sent that massive amounts of war materials due to “reasons”.. I guess. Barbarossa couldn’t have happened without that either.
France/Britain were even seriously considering bombing the Soviet oil fields in Azerbaijan and intervening in Finland before France fell.
Not more than usual? Trading massive amounts of casualties to sped up their advance was a core aspect of their military doctrine. Soviet military leadership had no qualms about that before or after Warsaw.
Of course near the very end of the war the difference between them and the allies was heavily exacerbated by the fact that the many Germans troops were willing to fight till the death after encountering the Soviets while immediately surrendering if they ran into the US/UK forces.
> Stalin warned them against the uprising.
Well obviously. Almost entirely due to political reasons. The last thing the soviets wanted was a rival political with its own military after the war. Same reason non-communist resistance movements were purged on a large scale after the war.
This all while explaining how Russian lives are worthless anyway (a scroll worth of comments) so why bother about these.
I'm also not sure why Stalin will discard his political goals and help Polish resistance achieve theirs instead with his armies. What did they expect?
Then after Germans betrayed them in 1941 they recaptured Poland from them (stealing and raping their way through the country) and then kept Poland as a puppet state for 50 years, murdering innocent people, censoring press, falsifying history and enforcing the totalitarian system they put in place after faked elections with stalinist purges and communist terror.
Pardon Poles for not being thankful :)
One might say that being one of the aggressors who started the war and by playing a massive part in the successful German invasion of France (it’s hard to imagine Germany could have pulled that off without massive Soviet material support, they basically had no oil after all..) that the Soviets had a moral obligation to right some of those wrongs.
> Russian lives are worthless anyway
That was a fact (in relative terms) mainly established by the Soviets. They indeed considered the lives of their citizen to be worth very little (compared to the allies).
> What did they expect?
That he’d prioritize the defeat of Germany and the liberation of Poland over them. Of course extremely naive…
That is extremely naive indeed to think that Stalin would have any moral obligations to right any of his perceived wrongs.
All the trajectory of his political life suggested he will shoot the survivors, so to say.
How exactly? Believing that he had that obligation doesn’t mean that I also believe that he could have acted on in under any set of circumstances.
Poland did end up on the receiving side of Stalin's benevolent dictatorship. He essentially de-partitioned Poland thus effectively recreating it. An uncelebrated founding father of Polish nation state.
Many people would think Poles suffered comparatively little and got out with comparatively much out of WW2.
> [Stalin] essentially de-partitioned Poland
Are you even aware that Poland existed before WW2? There was no need to "de-" partition it if you just kept your hands to yourself. It was Hitler and Stalin who partitioned it in the first place.
And even in strictly technical terms - Poland was in one piece after 1941 because Germans took it over from soviets. There was no need to "de-partition" it after WW2 either.
On the other hand soviets did partition it AGAIN in 1945 by splitting the eastern parts and annexing them to USSR. Even including the gains in the west - Poland lost about 1/7th of its territory during WW2 because soviets just took it.
> Many people would think Poles suffered comparatively little and got out with comparatively much out of WW2.
Over 1/6th of Polish population died in WW2. About 6 million Polish citizens (half of them Polish Jews) died because Nazi Germany and Soviet Union joined forces to invade Poland in 1939 and did ethnic cleansings and political repressions there. Germans for 5 years, Russians for 50 years.
Stalin is personally responsible for ordering murder of several hundreds thousands of Poles and forced expulsion of millions of Poles from their homes in eastern Poland (which became USSR after WW2). And indirectly co-responsible for all the deaths that resulted from WW2 which he helped Hitler start.
> An uncelebrated founding father of Polish nation state.
Fuck you.
And of course Stalin warned against uprising - he wanted to get Poland, any independent forces were a threat to that plan. After WW2 he imprisoned anti-nazi guerilla fighters in Poland and murdered their leaders in a show trial in Moscow (after promising them safe passage).
There were a lot of appalling facts, but where does one fit in the Red Army sitting across the river and watching?