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Please don't start ideological flamewars on HN, even in response to an article like this one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is a good time to remind people of how naive Americans were of the reality of the Soviets. The best example being when in 1944 the sitting vice president of the United States literally visited multiple gulag camps that the NKVD dressed up as Potemkin communes and was fooled utterly:

https://www.rbth.com/history/327846-henry-wallace-magadan-ko...

Problem here, almost none of the the Lend Lease shipments arrived until after the Battle of Kursk, and they weren't enough to prop up the USSR like you claim above.

Had Hitler not gone forward with Operation Barbarossa, the entire outcome would have been differently.

Note that attack was on the Soviet Union was on 22 June 1941, long after most of the 'friendly dictatorships across Eurasia' were already established.

While US policies did cause lots of problems, the power for the US to prevent those happening is greatly overstated above.

There are several good books by Mark Harrison and others who explain while it may have shortened the war and help speed the recovery of their economy a tiny amount, it was a drop in the bucket.

As history shows, shorting the war was in the US's interests.

We forget that the US was an active participant in the Russian Civil War, and war-weariness from WWI was one of the reasons we lost that war, along with several after WWII.

The above also ignores the interwar politics like how the Irreconcilables blocked the US joining the League of Nations or the Neutrality Acts that were passed due to isolationism and non-interventionism.

While there were valid concerns that the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh and almost certainly played into Hitlers ability to rise to power, isolationism and non-interventionism of the US didn't help.

The US recognizing the USSR in 1933 was during the depression, and during a period of Japanese expansionism, and far more complicated than some form of appeasement as suggested above.

The popular cultural myths are really just propaganda, the Lend Lease wasn't as large or as meaningful as is claimed.

Yes and it was also an era in which government was willingly made very large and had broad support for doing so. First was the expansion in response to the Great Depression, then again not a decade later for WWII. The fed as a portion of GDP was at its highest levels in our history (at or near 50% I believe). So the line between American economic liberty and communism was not nearly as sharp as it is today. Also there tends to be a misunderstanding among today’s political right that the current size of government is not the historical high point. In fact it is some 20 points short of that.

Both Nazi Germany and Communist Russia had many sympathizers in the west before their giant crimes against humanity were revealed.

Where could I read more about this?

They were right about communists sympathizers spying for the USSR within the government too - eg Alger Hiss and Harry White.

> which they used to help establish friendly dictatorships across Eurasia, from East Germany, to China (simultaneously, the US put an arms embargo on the legitimate government who were fighting the communists)

How did Russia establish a friendly communist government in Hungary in 1919 when it had no troops there? Actually England armed the Romanians to overthrow the Hungarian communist government.

Of course, the US, England etc. invaded Russia and fought the Red Army during/after World War I with the Polar Bear expedition etc.

Stalin dissolved the Comintern during World War II, and the Communist Party USA dissolved as a political party as well at that time.

With Albania and Yugoslavia, Red Army troops passed quickly through a small corner of Yugoslavia and offered little help to Tito.

Insofar as China, the Soviet ambassador as far as I know was the only one who accompanied Chiang Kai Shek to Taiwan. Mao took China back from the Japanese with little help.

Greece probably would have become communist after World War II, but for the Truman doctrine and US involvement, Russia did not get involved at all.

Moscow's lack of support helped in the breaks in relations - with Yugoslavia, Albania and the Sino-Soviet split.

What you're saying is rather ahistorical.

The Russian people also paid a staggering price to defeat the Nazis in the East. The Soviet post WW2 occupation of Eastern Europe was also, in part, do to the paranoia of being invaded. Hence the response to Western activities in Ukraine in the 21st Century.

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