11. Did the Soviets Owe the Western Powers and Poland Anything in 1939?
As the Soviets saw it, they owed the Western Powers and Poland nothing. The Western Powers were viewed as capitalist foes. Soviet leaders remembered that Britain and France had tried to strangle the Bolshevik Revolution in its cradle, and had sided with the Whites against the Reds during the Russian Civil War. As to the Poles, they had fought a war against the Soviets only two decades earlier, and the USSR still had outstanding border claims against Poland.
The Germans offered to satisfy those claims, while the British and French offered little. Seeing how they were expected to do the bulk of the fighting and dying in a war against Germany, it seemed like chutzpah to the Soviets for Germany’s foes to offer so little in exchange for the high price the USSR would pay for siding with them. So they opted for benevolent neutrality with Germany.
