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He could have actually supported the Polish with weapons or maybe even intervened in favour of Poland.
Yes, but that would have meant going to war with Germany in September 1939, while the Western Allies did nothing (remember, France and Britain declared war and then sat around for months without firing a single shot). So, this course of action would have been suicide for the USSR.
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And if only invaded to stop the Nazis from taking over the rest of Poland than why didn't he set up a free government in Poland in the areas the Soviets occupied?
Oh, I never said Stalin was in any way interested in the welfare of Poland. I said he was interested in defeating the Nazis. Saving the Polish people from slavery was, for the most part, just a side effect of Stalin's main goal (and I do mean slavery in the literal sense, because that's what the Nazis had planned for Slavic peoples in their conquered territories - some were to be exterminated, and others were to be kept as illiterate servants).
Stalin occupied Eastern Poland not because he cared about the people there (the majority of whom were Belorussian, by the way, not Polish), but because he cared about stopping the Nazis from advancing further East.
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Emphasis on the bolded part, how is that different from American foreign policy which you call "imperialist"? Most of the time Americans don't give a damn about internal affairs but they do insist on unconditional support for American policy and enforce it with some "imperialist" actions.
Actually, most of the time, the US exploits the countries in its sphere of influence. Imperialism requires economic domination and exploitation (with or without the cooperation of local elites in the dominated country). This is precisely what the American ruling class does. You can see it most clearly with oil, but practically every American military action in the last 60 years has been intended to defend or promote the profits of American corporations - at the expense of the workers in the conquered country.
Obviously, there are some cases where United States insists on unconditional foreign policy support but does not demand anything else. American policy towards Western Europe is the best example. In those particular cases, the US is not acting in an imperialistic manner. I don't think anyone claims that, say, Belgium has been a victim of US imperialism.
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I wouldn't call killing millions of people including skilled workers, military officers, and others "efficient".
I agree. The amazing thing is that Stalin's regime
was efficient,
despite some horrible sources of inefficiency, like the ones you listed. Imagine what could have been achieved if Stalin
hadn't imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people who could have been doing skilled work.
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Plus he did crush fascism and Nazism but replaced it with Stalinism which isn't much of an improvement at least until Khruschev's reforms.
Not much of an improvement? Are you kidding? Do you have any idea what the Nazis planned to do
after the war, if they won? What we call the Holocaust was supposed to be just the beginning. The Jews were the first "non-Aryan" nation on Hitler's hit list, but they were by no means the last. The Nazis wanted
Lebensraum - "living space" - in the East, and they planned to get it by doing to the people of the Soviet Union exactly what European colonists did to the Native Americans... except on a much grander scale, since there were so many more of them.
Stalinism, in the post-war years, threw lots of people in jail for opposing the government. Yes, this is repressive, but it is rather ordinary, mundane repression, which happened in many different countries (including most Western countries in the 19th century). It is
infinitely better than a Nazi superpower dedicated to the extermination and/or enslavement of about 1/4 of Europe's population - and its replacement with German colonists.
And Stalinism was more than just political repression. That was the negative side of it, but there was also a big positive side. In Eastern Europe after WW2, women were given equal rights to men (in some countries, like my own, this was a radical progressive reform). The 1950s in the East were a better experience for women than the 1950s in the West. Women were able, for the first time, to get the same jobs as men and earn their own income (which, by the way, was equal to the income of men for the same job - something capitalism has not achieved even today).
In the late 1940s, private schools and universities were nationalized, and all education was made free for everyone. This made it possible for the children of ordinary workers, like my grandfather, to get a higher education and have successful careers as professionals, intellectuals, civil servants or politicians. For about 10 years, there was even an affirmative action program to help children from working class backgrounds get an education. The pre-war societies of Eastern Europe were highly stratified and intensely conservative. Stalinism smashed the old elites and massively improved social mobility. Under Stalinism, it was really possible for a worker to rise to the highest levels of government - and many did. Such a thing would have been unthinkable before the war.
Today, the generation of people who were 20 years old around the year 1950 is still extremely supportive of Stalin and Stalinism. I don't really know why that is, but I suspect it's because the people of that generation feel they owe their education and their careers to Stalinism. For young people who did not oppose the government, the 1950s were a time of amazing new opportunities.
And, of course, Stalinism also brought industrialization to the agricultural societies that existed in most of Eastern Europe.