Quote Originally Posted by wiruwiru
That's a curious morality you're arguing under... Why not? Because Poland was a sovereign nation, as were Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland, which Stalin attacked in late 1939.

Yes, the USSR was not ready to fight a major power in 1939. (It was hardly ready in 1941..) But the fact remains that the war started 7 days after the signing of the non-aggression pact between Germany and the USSR, and within a few months the USSR had annexed Eastern Poland, the Baltics and several other territories, as well as starting a war against Finland.

They seemed to be involved pretty damned quickly..
My reading was they the Soviets, under economic attack from the Democracies since 1917, had been negotiating with Britain and France for the establishment of basically a buffer zone between its borders and Nazi Germany---and that would have been essentially the same countries that post war were the old "Warsava Pact". They were demanding that those countries---including Poland---be neutral and that the Red Army could enter those countries if foreign troops entered. In short they wanted to fight on somebody else's soil rather than their territory..
They dod not trust the Democracies will as they had seen how France and Britain and USA did nothing to support the democratically elected government in Spain--indeed they (the Democracies) criminalized support of the legal democratically elected Spanish government... They had seen the West did nothing when Germany began to re-arm, did nothing when the Alscace was grabbed back, nothing when Sudetenland was grabbed, nothing when Czechoslovakia disappeared, nothing when Austria was absorbed...

And of course they read the Nazi fantasy books about superiority of "Aryan" peoples and their "right" to subjugate, kill, exterminate Slavs....

When the West would not negotiate some sort of buffer, in early August, the negotiations were broken off and since the Nazis had been promising a "better deal' the Soviets took the only deal they could...

Virru-virrruuu there is/was no excuse for the barbarity of Stalin and his gang but this "they were all the same" is crazy talk.... The Soviets own mythology did not include phony mystical superiorty of one Nationality and the total dismaissal of the humanity of whole races..... the Nazi's did and they made national Policy based on their "rights " as superior beings...

In the end, the philosophical underpinnings of a regime do count just like in law (law descended from N Germanic/Saxon/English/American) and act may be legal or illegal all depending on what is in the mind of "the perpetrator ".