Well, the countries you mentioned were extremely hostile toward the Soviet union, and pretty fascist on the top of it too. I case of Poland, the Soviets could see it as perfectly justifiable to re-gain territories east of the Curzon line (today's Belarus and parts of Ukraine) they lost to a Polish invasion in 1920. So the Ribbentrop-Molotov pacy can be seen as a largely defensive/preemptive move by the Soviets, probably more defensive than, say, the official NATO propaganda. None of the NATO countries has ever been invaded by any of the Eastern European country, whereas eastern Europeans and Russian faced numerous invasions from the West.
That of course, does not mean that the soviet union was not an imperialist country - it is just that its imperial interests and thus imperialist behavior were different from those of western european and american imperialists.
>
>Furthermore, the Soviets won the war against Fascism because they were
>attacked. You claim Stalin did this to "prepare for war," but there is no
>reason to believe Stalin ever planned to fight Hitler, at least none that
>I'm aware of. By all accounts the Russians were taken by surprise by the
>German invasion.
amen.
wojtek