>Despite his anti-Soviet perspective, he was
>fully convinced that the Nazi-Soviet pact with a brilliant and necessary
>maneuver since it gave the Soviets the opportunity to move much of its
>industrial capacity to the east.
> Charles Brown wrote:
>
> > Soviet-German non-Agression Pact is and was eminently supportable.
> >It helped saved the world from Nazism.
The Hitler-Soviet Pact was not the most pleasant deal, and the invasion and subjection of Poland was reprehensible, but the need for the deal was obvious after the West had made its own deal at Munich - essentially pointing Hitler in Russia's direction. The Western powers have no standing to criticize Stalin on that point after happily handing Central Europe over to Hitler.
What was more reprehensible was not the deal but the contortions of the CPUSA and other communist parties in its ideological approach to the deal. Instead of promoting it as a pragmatic way to deal with the threat of Hitler, the CPUSA suddenly dropped their anti-fascist position in favor of their "The Yanks aren't Coming" propaganda line - a reversal that discredited them intellectually among a wide range of folks who could understand the pragmatic threat to the Soviet Union but not the ideological backflip.
And the backflip when Hitler invaded just added to the cynicism towards the Party and its maneuverings. The contortions were essentially the beginning of the end of the party's broader influence and assisted the anti-Communist forces in their conservative ascendancy in unions and other broad formations.
-- Nathan Newman