If Denmark was a mystery then certainly Norway should have been mentioned as well in this article. Northern Norway was liberated by the Soviets and to my knowledge no allied forces ever set their foot in Norway at the end of the war.
Thus in principle the Russians could have claimed all of Norway.
They did not which I think is one of the reasons we in Norway retained a pretty good relationship with the Soviet Union through the Cold War sometimes to anger and bitter resentment by our American NATO allies which seemed to prefer to refer to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire”.
I cannot vouch for others, but I didn't think much of it; while no-one are seriously expecting a Russian occupation of Norway, we're rather aware that we are a NATO member, the Russians very much not - and that there is bound to be some strain in the relationship, despite it (in particular in the border zone up north) being good on a day-to-day basis.
For instance, citizens of both countries living in a defined zone either side of the border can visit under a visa waiver-esque program.
IIRC the debate following the TV series was more about how some figured the plot - that the EU wanted access to our natural resources and were willing to use force (by proxy) to get it - seemed plausible if international relations deteriorated sufficiently.
While plot in the current political climate is obviously a stretch, it’s an allusion to the annexation of Crimea. Overall, given constrains, it’s well executed.
> Bornholm was quietly evacuated leaving no Soviet presence in Scandinavia.
Arguably incorrect, since the Soviets maintained a naval base in Porkkala, Finland, just west of Helsinki, until 1956. (Arguably because Finland is culturally but not strictly geographically Scandinavian.)
Also, the Red Army liberated the northernmost part of Norway (Which, incidentally, also is the easternmost - the town of Kirkenes lies to the east of Istanbul) in the autumn of 1944; they quietly left in the autumn of 1945.
From what I've been told by my grandmother, who along with a lot of other locals had dodged the forced evacuation ordered by the retreating Germans and hid for weeks in mines outside the town, cooperation with the Red Army was excellent, with very little friction - to the extent that when rebuilding of Finnmark started (the retreating Germans having blown up everything they couldn't burn!), some construction materials were shipped in from the Soviet Union, which presumably had enough rebuilding to do on their own turf...
Finland isn't a part of Scandinavia. The culture doesn't matter. A lot of countries share a "Western Culture". Doesn't mean that what happens in 1 country, happens in all of them.
This Wikipedia link actually describes it well. I am originally from Finland but been living abroad most of my life. After few years abroad I learned that there is no use to correct people "Finland is not Scandianvia" because apart from Finland and actual Scandinavia rest of the world says Scandinavia.
A lot of people confuse 'Scandinavian' with 'Nordic'. Scandinavia is a geographical description, Nordic is more cultural, which includes Scandinavia, Finland and Iceland.
I was actually considering including Estonia in my list, but they are not a member of the Nordic Council. And Estonia's Nordic bona fide is a matter of dispute. Personally, I believe Estonia to be a Nordic country, including having the Nordic Cross design variant of the Estonian flag hanging on my wall.
Furthermore, in an article about military history, Scandinavia is understood - in a military geopolitical context - to only include Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
> The war with Japan, to which the Soviet Union was committed by Treaty, and in which it played an immense role, continued until the end of August.
Really? I think the Soviet campaign in the Far East began 3 months after VE day, after the US had dropped 2 atomic bombs on Japan, and lasted less than 4 weeks. Its real strategic importance was that it forced the Japanese to realize the Soviet Union would not broker a negotiated peace with the other Allies. The Soviets had no beef with Japan, to them it was a land grab,
The Soviet campaign in Manchuria started before the bombings.
Japan's forces on the mainland were swept away by experienced, battle-tested, and overwhelmingly large armies redeployed from the Eastern front.
Japan's plan for the defense of the home islands consisted of pulling everyone they could out of Manchuria, but relying on its resources and industry to support the war effort. This obviously required the Soviet Union to uphold it's end of their non-aggression pact. Which it didn't.
With Manchuria under Soviet occupation, and the Japanese armies routed, this plan completely fell apart. The invasion convinced Japan that capitulation was the only solution more than the bombs did.
> The Soviet campaign in Manchuria started before the bombings.
No. (And also no to JackFr.) The Soviet campaign in Manchuria started on August 8, after Hiroshima but before Nagasaki.
The Japanese plan to use Manchuria for defense of the home islands would never have worked. The US could have put enough naval forces there to make transport of troops and material impossible.
My mistake. I must have gotten confused because of its inter-bombing timing. The argument that it played a bigger role in their capitulation than the second bomb is still a reasonable one, though.
> The US could have put enough naval forces there to make transport of troops and material impossible.
Japanese war planning was quite optimistic. But once Manchuria fell, it was clear to everyone that there was no hope.
Most likely Stalin hoped that Denmark would become neutral in any future division of Europe (Finnish and Austrian Neutrality is highly useful for the USSR).
I think this is consistent with the withdrawal of Red Army troops from places like Austria.
There are much more significant instances of Soviet retrenchment and retreat during this period. Probably the most notable is the withdrawal from Austria. The USSR held a significant amount of territory in Austria at the end of the war, with the US holding the rest, and quickly agreed splitting the country into 4 allied sectors of control, and doing the same in Vienna. Shortly afterwards, the USSR withdrew from Austria completely. Why? Well, Stalin was not one to share his strategic thinking with the public, so we can only guess. Probably he did not want to deal with a "West Vienna" along the lines of "West Berlin". But who knows.
As for Bornholm, I really don't see why people think it would have some great significance. The Soviets already had many bases in the Baltic which were contiguous with their territory. What would an island add? The Soviets did not have a good record of supplying their forces by sea. During WW2, i.e. immediately before the time in question, they suffered a number of disasters when their forces were cut off from supplies by land and had to be supplied, and then evacuated, by ships. There was the disastrous evacuation of Tallinn at the beginning of the war, the battle (and evacuation) of Odessa, the loss of Crimea, and the Leningrad front with immense civilian and military losses. Bornholm would have looked like a death trap to the Soviet commanders of the time, rather than some great asset. No wonder they agreed to return Porkkala to Finland 40 years early, and never placed naval assets of any significance there.
Not related to Bornholm at all, but it struck me how the "Map of the North Sea and Baltic Sea, 1914" emphasizes railways (the thick black-and-white lines) over roads (the much thinner dashed lines). Of course, those were the heydays of the railroad, and road travel was still largely by horse-drawn carriage...
And rail was several orders of magnitude more efficient at moving goods. The 'roads' were tracks made by repeated wagon traversal. Bumpy, muddy, rocky, eroded.
Malmö was even then Sweden's third largest city. Copenhagen was a global city and Denmark the center of European pork production. Prussia's huge estates were the foundation for the aristocracies' wealth.
To get goods to market, or to a rail hub, good roads helped a lot.
The vast European rail network has enabled much of troop movements during both world wars, but at the present time we only have about 50% of rail infrastructure compared to before WW2. The other half has been destroyed.
She (Caroline Kennedy-Pipe ) - and the Hamlet thing is mostly colour but it did send me down a clickhole of tracking down 'Stalin hated Hamlet'. That the "story of bloody intrigue in the court of Denmark supposedly reminded Stalin of Kremlin politics" sounded a bit off to me - after all, Stalin famously commissioned Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible.
It seems around 1940 or so Stalin did stop a Hamlet production (based on a Pasternak translation) at the Moscow Art Theatre. Recollections vary somewhat but the most plausible explanation is that Stalin felt Hamlet (the character) was weak. Completing the circle, the Russian wikipedia page on Ivan The Terrible has a quote from a Central Committee critique of a different movie in which, as an aside, part two of Eisenstein's film is criticized as ahistorical and as portraying Ivan as too weak "like Hamlet". The second part was not screened until some years after Stalin and Eisenstein's deaths. Hamlet itself was not staged in the last 12 years of Stalin's life.
I'm imagining the Stalin from Death of Stalin sitting around complaining that Hamlet takes nearly two hours and doesn't hardly kill anybody! And then dies himself!
Hah, it's hinted at in the movie but Stalin was actually something of a performing arts (and theatre in particular) superfan - that's why the Hamlet bit caught my eye.
My fist thought was what could Denmark trade at that time for the return of Bornholm? My first thought was the atomic secrets that the Neils Bohr group had.
> The country was ultimately liberated by the Americans in Greenland [...]
Hmm. "On 8 April 1941, the United States occupied Greenland to defend it against a possible invasion by Germany."[1] So, first, there never were any German occupiers to liberate Greenland from, and second, the US occupation of Greenland started 4 years before 1945.
> Furthermore, there were emplacements for massive guns with 42 kilometre range, which could close the strait south of the island to the coast of what is now Poland (then Germany).
First, the strait is 90 kilometres wide.[2] Second, the last German stronghold on the southern coast of the strait, the port of Kolberg (Kołobrzeg) fell to the Polish People's Army on March 18.[3] Calling the coast "then Germany" in May is pretty weird.
> Calling the coast "then Germany" in May is pretty weird.
Founded in 1255 by Germans, Kolberg was part of Prussian Pomerania from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia until the August 1945 Potsdam Agreements which implicitly recognised the Soviet capture of eastern Poland and gave Poland eastern Germany in return; this was not finalised until the 1990 Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany. It's perfectly reasonable to refer to Prussian territory in early 1945 as Germany.
(I am not complaining about the transfer to Poland — after the inhumanity of the German occupation of Poland itself it was only just. It does seem a bit unjust that eastern Poland is still part of Russia though!)
Such issues featured prominently in the Yalta conference, where the starting point for the discussions and negotiations was the de jure status quo ante. And if Bornholm ws not de jure Danish territory, there would be no issue here (or, at least, a different one - if it had been German, I imagine it might have become part of the DDR.)
The point of mentioning the guns was that whomever controlled the island could limit the ability of ships and submarines to transit to and from the inner Baltic Sea. If you have guns on the coast of Poland and on the island, then it leaves a very narrow set of channel where you can't bombard passing ships.
> our American NATO allies which seemed to prefer to refer to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire”.
It wasn't an entirely inappropriate term, given the Holodomor, the Katyn massacre, the massacre of the Cossacks, the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Berlin Wall, the gulag system, the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan &c. The U.S. was imperfect too, of course, but most of the badness was non-policy like the My Lai massacre, or evil or wrong policies (e.g. segregation) which pale in comparison, and anyway whatboutism isn't really wise: one should call out misbehaviour anywhere it rears its head.
It's fair to say that even in its kinder, gentler post-Lenin and post-Stalin form the Soviet Union was a malign force in the world. 'Evil empire' was a fair shorthand.
Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. It just leads to even more and even worse, as it did below. This is why the site guidelines ask people not to post like this.
I don't think that's very actionable direction, because every post, no matte how dryly factual, can trigger someone who reads it. No doubt there is someone reading right now who would react violently to a post about an experiment with statically-typed programming languages, and someone else who is still really unhealthily incensed about the War of Jenkins's Ear. All one can do is apply a reasonable-man standard: would a reasonable man think that a post is starting or perpetuating an ideological flamewar? I don't believe a reasonable man would think that about my post, which I believe falls well within the guidelines.
>The U.S. was imperfect too, of course, but most of the badness was non-policy like the My Lai massacre, or evil or wrong policies (e.g. segregation) which pale in comparison
I disagree. The biggest badness was support for murderous dictators and paramilitary groups in Iran (1953-1979), Chile (1973-1981), Iraq (at least from 1980-1988 or so), Nicaragua (during the 80s), and numerous other places. This was completely intentional, calculated policy that led to the death of thousands of people.
I find it mildly amusing that the parent poster mentions the failed Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as one of an evil empire's many crimes, but in your counterpoints, the now-failed US invasion of Afghanistan is not brought up.
(The Soviets had a great, ah, excuse for doing it - they were 'just' trying to combat religious extremism and terrorism... And were 'definitely' not playing balance-of-power games in the Middle East.)
I would'nt be so cocksure as that. Much of western peoples view of Soviet Union is coloured by the cold war propaganda still.(Witness the recent HBO series Chernobyl, even West based Russia-scholars feel that it gives a very inaccurate portrayal of Perestroika era Soviet Union. Even it was made with no Russian/Ukrainian talent either in the front or rear of the camera.
Imagine a drama of Three Mile Island, made entirely by Russians, with a wholely Russian cast and crew, how preposterous it would be.).
There was much incompetence surely, but pure malice, I think is yet debatable.
May be RT is not the most reputed organ, but that particular article seemed written with an authentic motive:
"These elements of Soviet life may seem like the background to the central human stories, but in fact they dictated how each scene shown in Chernobyl unfolded in real life. And although occasionally the show hits upon the right note, perhaps when it sticks closest to a verbatim recreation, it does not seem to realize it. Most of the time, those involved act wrong on the wrong motivations, talk about the wrong things, and say them in the wrong order with an alien cadence that is more than just a different language."
"The most jarring scene is a Soviet minister bargaining with coal miners at gunpoint to persuade them to dig a tunnel under Chernobyl. Moscow mandarins did not negotiate with those 10 rungs below them – they sent down orders and didn’t need bullets to enforce them."
"Mazin’s party officials are more like sullen gangsters protecting their own patch – they bully, shout, laugh ostentatiously, and bang their fists on the table. Stellan Skarsgard’s senior cabinet minister threatens to throw Jared Harris’s renowned academic off a helicopter, then to shoot him, but the conversation is as implausible as it would be if it were shown between Vice President George H.W. Bush and physicist Richard Feynman, to pick two contemporaries."
Are they Russians in Russia, who supported the Soviet Union? Or Russians that left Russia because the Soviet Union nationalised their land?
Most cases of "I know Russians and they say X" or "I know Cubans and they say Y" are claims in the West that are informed by the fleeing bourgeoisie that would of course be critical of the regime change.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. This is a big leap in the wrong direction, and it gets worse downthread. Nothing new or interesting comes of such arguments, so they're off topic here. HN is a site for curious conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want to claim that Wikipedia is "fascist propaganda", sure, go for it. But then we can end this exchange right here and now with nothing accomplished.
The 1956 uprising started with students, led by a member of the previous fascist government. There are some historical reports of racial violence against Jews and the uprising's demands included the re-introduction of capitalism. Most of what I learned about this was from Romanian history books, I can't find relevant English sources right now.
Wanting to re-introduce capitalism. How very fascist of them. How dare they? /s
The fact that you include that in the list of things wrong with the 1956 uprising speaks volumes about where you're coming from.
I agree. If true, it's very bad news. The rest of lucian1900's posts on this topic have been colored enough, however, to make me less than certain of the truth of this statement.
Heh. How can you think a fringe, extremist and ideologically-based organization like the "Communist Party of Great Britain" is objective and credible about the USSR? These communist organizations have a vested interest in lying about the humanitarian and economic disaster that 20th-century experimentation with communism was. I suspect you're in that boat as well, in that you couldn't support these communist regimes if the mainstream historical account of their societies is true - right?
Do capitalist organisations not have a vested interest in lying about socialism?
It's very frustrating that the economic system that vastly improved the material condition of my ancestors is casually slandered by Westerners. Capitalism was imposed on Eastern Europe and now my country is worse off than when my parents were my age. Capitalism is only good for the exploiter, but a disaster for the exploited.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_austerity_policy_in_Roma... seems true:
my own father passed through there in the 80s as a part of an army exercise, local people needed cans with food from the soldiers.. and we are talking about bulgarian soldiers, Bulgaria wasnt well back then at all itself. I went to Romania several weeks ago and the difference between what i've heard about Ceausesku's time and what i've seen now is huge, so dont mislead people.
Dont get me wrong: I am honestly not a fan of capitalism, but to praise in any way murderous/socipath-based regimes as those ones.. is very sad
There was austerity in the 80s in Romania, just like in the 70s in Poland. In both cases, it was enforced through IMF policy that came with the loans given. The loans were sought in both cases in order to increase industrial production and sell goods to the West.
After WW2 and the fascist dictatorship, Romania was extremely poor and basically feudal. It is truly astonishing how quickly it was industrialised and how quickly the people's material condition improved: https://mobile.twitter.com/isgoodrum/status/1136693839526223...
No one was homeless (rent was max 5% of income) or unemployed (guaranteed jobs), essentials were cheap (food, clothes and trains), all education and healthcare were free, etc. While mistakes were made back then and technology has advanced since, economic inequality has vastly increased after 89.
But industrializing fast just gets you to one point: two problems with that in Bulgaria.
First: yeah, this was a good thing .. until technology moved forward which was very hard to replicate in plan economies.. in Bulgaria hard industry and many factories were built without good economy reasons and they didnt really compete with western stuff which was made obvious after the changes. Yes, some of this privatization stuff seemed so chaotic and yes, we did have our own mafia years.. but AFAIK it was deeply (and still is) connected to the same class that ran the "communist" country before that
which gets me to the second point: you cant just say economic equality, without context: yes, on paper stuff was like this, but from what i've heard reality was much more a gray zone: inequality was being pronounced in other means, ability to travel, development in army/life/job(after all: you didnt have much choice as the government decided on most of that), all kinds of car/apartment/other government assistance things, secret police pressure: it wasnt a rosy picture just to get stuff that is available in many nordic countries
Yeah mate, you can tell that stuff to westerners, but not to local people, sorry: Bulgaria and Romania were a victim of this cultish insane "system" for ~45 years, not anymore. And closing one's eyes for communist atrocities is not more normal than nazi supporters lying about the holocost: you have to understand that both ideologies have much in common in their hateful antiutopic histories.
I mean, think about it: really, you don't think a more logical conclusion is that all of USA, commie powers and nazi germany used "political ideologies" for power, war and control? You think "nomenclatura" really cared about financial equality? come on
Listen, I like your enthusiasm: I really want to show you the other side of the story: I know that what one hears from relatives/favorite ideologs makes some things very hard to swallow. However you should search for the truth and in this case there is more to the story.
I am mostly telling you our own bulgarian experience:finally, communism was also forcefully imposed in Bulgaria: so many people died after the "People's court" and in "Belene" camp(I think even my grandpa was there for a bit as a part of a 10 year sentence, thank God, he survived).
The red army/russians stayed and helped the socialist get the power, gradually isolating everyone else politically.
Those things happened, they are not a "fabricated story" sadly. We shouldn't leave modern communism erase this part of history
You can't do this here, regardless of the provocation. When another comment is egregious, don't feed it by replying. Flag it or, if particularly bad, email us at hn@ycombinator.com. This is in the site rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Wrecking the commons further is not a valid option, so please don't.
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