True Left

Lastly, let's not forget settler-colonialism in the Russian Empire and USSR, and their respective geopolitical and territorial ambitions.

The USSR's territorial goals during their invasion of Poland (of course, the Allies never declared war on the USSR for their invasion, and they let the USSR keep their conquered territory after WWII!) was basically to take the Intermarium region.


Which is territory the Russian Empire lost to the Central Powers after WWI:


Yet all we hear about is Germany's territorial ambitions in WWII... To this day, WWII veterans and their descendants from the Baltic states who fought the USSR alongside Germany would disagree with how this is framed:

The pact was terminated on 22 June 1941, when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union, in pursuit of the ideological goal of Lebensraum.[13] After the war, Ribbentrop was convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials and executed. Molotov died in 1986.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact


The USSR was kicked out of the league of nations for their invasion of Finland, which rarely ever receives mentions in standard history classes:

On December 14, 1939, the League of Nations, the international peacekeeping organization formed at the end of World War I, expels the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in response to the Soviets’ invasion of Finland on November 30.
[...]
Germany and Japan voluntarily withdrew from the League in 1933, and Italy left in 1937. The true imperial designs of the Soviet Union soon became apparent with its occupation of eastern Poland in September of 1939, ostensibly with the intention of protecting Russian “blood brothers,” Ukrainians and Byelorussians, who were supposedly menaced by the Poles. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were then terrorized into signing “mutual assistance” pacts, primarily one-sided agreements that gave the USSR air and naval bases in those countries. But the invasion of Finland, where no provocation or pact could credibly be adduced to justify the aggression, resulted in worldwide reaction.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ussr-expelled-from-the-league-of-nations

The Soviets were allowed to keep the territory they took from Finland:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War


You will always hear of Germany's non-existent aim of "global domination" during WWII. You will not as frequently hear about how, you know, the USSR was a communist state advocating for global communist revolutions...

Why do history textbooks focus on some fantasy of Germany controlling the entire globe when the communist bloc led by the USSR literally had this.


There were even concerns that France would fall to communism after WWII. The high-ranking French general, and later high-ranking NATO commander, Alphonse Juin confided to American General Patton that he was deeply disappointed WWII had destroyed Germany, which Juin viewed as the only nation which soundly opposed the USSR.

"At dinner with [French] General [Alphonse] Juin, the remarkable statement was made by him to me that "It is indeed unfortunate, my General, that the English and Americans have destroyed in Europe the only sound country--and I do not mean France--and therefore the road is now open for the advent of Russian Communism.""[1]

[1] Patton's diary. Entry August 18, 1945.

--

After the collapse of the Chinese Empire in 1911, Tuva gained independence. After they became anti-USSR, the USSR organized a coup and later annexed the nation:

The 1929 Tuvan coup d'état took place in the Tuvan People's Republic. It occurred in January after the Tuvan government under Prime Minister Donduk Kuular attempted to implement nationalist, religious and anti-Soviet policies, including making Tibetan Buddhism the official religion. With support from the Soviet Union, five Tuvan youths successfully overthrew the government, and one of them, Salchak Toka, became supreme ruler as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Tuvan People's Revolutionary Party. They quickly reversed Donduk's policies and brought the republic closer to the Soviet Union. The Tuvan People's Republic later joined the Soviet Union in 1944.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Tuvan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

Mongolia also gained independence. The Russian general Roman von Ungern-Sternberg led the rebel forces to secure Mongolian independence. Soon after, Bolshevik forces overthrew his government and executed him.

often referred to as Baron Ungern, was an anticommunist general in the Russian Civil War and then an independent warlord who intervened in Mongolia against China. A part of the Russian Empire's Baltic German minority, Ungern was an ultraconservative monarchist who aspired to restore the Russian monarchy after the 1917 Russian Revolutions and to revive the Mongol Empire under the rule of the Bogd Khan. His attraction to Vajrayana Buddhism and his eccentric, often violent, treatment of enemies and his own men earned him the sobriquet "the Mad Baron" or "the Bloody Baron".

In February 1921, at the head of the Asiatic Cavalry Division, Ungern expelled Chinese troops from Mongolia and restored the monarchic power of the Bogd Khan. During his five-month occupation of Outer Mongolia, Ungern imposed order on the capital city, Ikh Khüree (now Ulaanbaatar), by fear, intimidation and brutal violence against his opponents, particularly the Bolsheviks. In June 1921, he travelled to eastern Siberia to support anti-Bolshevik partisan forces and to head off a joint Red Army-Mongolian rebel invasion. That action ultimately led to his defeat and capture two months later. He was taken prisoner by the Red Army and, a month later, was put on trial for "counter-revolution" in Novonikolaevsk. After a six-hour show trial, he was found guilty and on 15 September 1921 he was executed.
[...]
The Bolsheviks started infiltrating Mongolia shortly after the October Revolution, long before they took control of the Russian Transbaikal. In 1921, various Red Army units belonging to Soviet Russia and to the Far Eastern Republic invaded the newly independent Mongolia to defeat Ungern. The forces included the Red Mongolian leader Damdin Sükhbaatar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_von_Ungern-Sternberg

Although Mongolia was never annexed by the USSR, it was firmly a puppet:

In 1934, Peljidiin Genden visited Moscow and angrily accused Stalin of "Red imperialism". He subsequently died in the Great Purge after being tricked into taking a holiday on the Black Sea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_People's_Republic

The Soviets tried to make Xinjiang a puppet as well, although they expelled the Soviets in 1943.

--
Moving on, the Russian Empire and the USSR pursued settler colonialism of ethnic Russians in the Baltic states, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

Map from 2011 showing the percentage of ethnic Russians in the Baltic states. Undoubtedly this was much higher during the Soviet period:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Percentage-of-ethnic-Russians-in-the-Baltic-states-2011_fig1_288344208



Briefly searching, I stumbled across some research papers raising the important fact that studies examining colonialism in the USSR are severely lacking:

This essay works through some of the necessary preliminary questions in thinking about Soviet colonialism in the Baltics. It opens by tracing the prehistory of critical thinking about Soviet colonialism in the 1960s and considers why the topic of Soviet colonialism has not (or not yet) become a dominant way to understand Soviet history. The central question posed by the article is whether one can speak about the Soviet invasions of the Baltic States as ‘colonization’. It proposes that, initially, communist Russia did not in fact seek to colonize the Baltic States and instead ‘occupied’ them; however, this initial period of occupation later developed into a period of a colonial rule.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233431195_The_Problem_of_Soviet_Colonialism_in_the_Baltics
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43212457?seq=1

Political repressions followed with mass deportations of around 130,000 citizens carried out by the Soviets.[3]:48 The Serov Instructions, "On the Procedure for carrying out the Deportation of Anti-Soviet Elements from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia", contained detailed procedures and protocols to observe in the deportation of Baltic nationals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_occupation_of_the_Baltic_states_(1940)#Sovietization_of_the_Baltic_states

The USA and many other nations never recognized the official sovereignty of the USSR over the Baltic states. Somehow the USA was staunch enough in its position that it never even recognized that the USSR 'de facto' controlled the Baltic states. But, again, the brief war time occupations by Germany somehow get chapters upon chapters in the textbooks, but I didn't even realize basically the whole world refused to accept the USSR's control over the Baltic states until writing this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_continuity_of_the_Baltic_states

Light blue, orange, and yellow = did not legally recognize Soviet control of the Baltic states. Dark blue = states which never took an official position.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_non_recogntion_of_the_Baltic_states.png

The Welles Declaration was a diplomatic statement issued on July 23, 1940, by Sumner Welles, the acting US Secretary of State, condemning the June 1940 occupation by the Soviet Union of the three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) and refusing to recognize their annexation as Soviet republics.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welles_Declaration

--

I don't feel like writing a huge analysis on this at the moment, but the type of settler colonialism which happened in the Baltics has also allowed Russia to seize Crimea and start ethnic conflicts in eastern Ukraine today.

For example, this paper seems to put forward the thesis that Russia's recent occupation of Crimea is something that has been long in the making:

The focus is on Crimea as a settler colony during the first years after the USSR’s collapse. The main argument is that the 1990s conflict in Crimea was mainly around decolonization attempts and resistance by the settler colonial system. Contrary to the analysis of ‘conflicts that did not happen’ it argues that Crimea is a case of a conflict that never stoppedsince the late 18th century. It analyses how settler colonial structures fought for their own preservation in opposition to the forces of decolonization represented by the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar national movements, maneuvering between the Russian and Ukrainian capitals, which in turn triggered perceptions of Crimean separatism.

A main theme is control over the narrative. Crimean settler colonial institutions maintained their monopoly over ‘the truth’ about the peninsula’s past and present. This dissertation demonstrates how this continued in the 1990s, how Crimean newspapers forged the meaning of ‘Crimean,’ redesigned boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in order to marginalize Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar activists. Another important issue is the role of hybrid institutions including government structures in Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet, both which conducted subversive operations (informational and military) to counter and reduce the growing presence of the Ukrainian state on the peninsula.

https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/7077/


What helped ethnic Russians in the USSR gain more control over Ukraine? The holo-what?

The Holodomor (Ukrainian: moryty holodom, 'to kill by starvation'),[a][3][4][5] also known as the Terror-Famine[6][7][8] and sometimes referred to as the Great Famine,[9] was a famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The term Holodomor emphasises the famine's man-made and intentional aspects such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs and restriction of population movement. As part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country, millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine.[10] Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine[11] and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.[12]

Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials varied greatly.[13] According to higher estimates, up to 12 million[14] ethnic Ukrainians were said to have perished as a result of the famine. A United Nations joint statement signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7–10 million perished.[15]
[...]
Whether the Holodomor was genocide is still the subject of academic debate,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Depopulation from the famine. It is not clear if this is only deaths, or deaths + people being displaced.

Some scholars have classified the famine in Ukraine and famine in Kazakhstan as genocide committed by Joseph Stalin's government,[19][20] targeting ethnic Ukrainians and Kazakhs while other critics dispute the relevance of any ethnic motivation, as is frequently implied by that term, and focus instead on the class dynamics between land-owning peasants (kulaks) with strong political interest in private property, and the ruling Communist Party's fundamental tenets which were diametrically opposed to those interests.[21] In addition to the Kazakh famine of 1919–1922, these events saw Kazakhstan lose more than half of its population within 15 years. The famine made Kazakhs a minority in their own republic. Before the famine, around 60% of the republic's population were Kazakhs, but after the famine, only around 38% of the population were Kazakhs.[22][23]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%9333

The Kazakh famine of 1931–1933, also known as the Kazakh catastrophe, Asharshylyk and Zulmat[9] was a famine where 1.5 million (other sources state as many as 2.0–2.3 million[10]) people died in Soviet Kazakhstan, of whom 1.3 million were ethnic Kazakhs; 38% of all Kazakhs died, the highest percentage of any ethnic group killed in the Soviet famine of 1932–33.[3][7] Some historians assume that 42% of the entire Kazakh population died in the famine.[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_famine_of_1931%E2%80%931933

What, cattle cars? Nations with rail infrastructure using trains instead of forcing people to just walk?

The deportation of the Crimean Tatars was the ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide of at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars in 18–20 May 1944 carried out by the Soviet government, ordered by Lavrentiy Beria, head of the Soviet state security and secret police, acting on behalf of Joseph Stalin.[11][12][13][14] Within three days, the NKVD used cattle trains to deport mostly women, children, the elderly, even Communists and members of the Red Army, to mostly the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away. They were one of the several ethnicities who were encompassed by Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union.

The deportation officially was intended as collective punishment for the perceived collaboration of some Crimean Tatars with Nazi Germany; modern sources theorize that the deportation was part of the Soviet plan to gain access to the Dardanelles and acquire territory in Turkey where the Tatars had Turkic ethnic kin.
[...]
In 1956, the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, condemned Stalin's policies, including the deportation of various ethnic groups, but did not lift the directive forbidding the return of the Crimean Tatars, despite allowing the right of return for most other deported peoples. They remained in Central Asia for several more decades until the Perestroika era in the late 1980s when 260,000 Crimean Tatars returned to Crimea. Their exile lasted 45 years. The ban on their return was officially declared null and void, and the Supreme Council of Crimea declared on 14 November 1989 that the deportations had been a crime.

By 2004, sufficient numbers of Crimean Tatars had returned to Crimea that they comprised 12 percent of the peninsula's population. Soviet authorities neither assisted their return nor compensated them for the land they lost. The Russian Federation, the successor state of the USSR, did not provide reparations, compensate those deported for lost property, or file legal proceedings against the perpetrators of the forced resettlement. The deportation was a crucial event in the history of the Crimean Tatars and has come to be seen as a symbol of the plight and oppression of smaller ethnic groups by the Soviet Union. On 12 December 2015, the Ukrainian Parliament issued a resolution recognizing this event as genocide and established 18 May as the "Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Crimean Tatar genocide".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars


I keep stumbling across so many articles about things I've never even heard of before, even though I am generally interested in WWII history. Thank you politically-motivated Western revisionist history curriculum for never mentioning any of this.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Koreans_in_the_Soviet_Union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Soviet_Greeks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Soviet_Greeks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Soviet_Union