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Comment by s_baby | Hacker News Reader

>People don't fight hard against invaders if their "home" rulers are dictators--World War II provides other examples of that principle.

You don't think the Russians fought hard?

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I assume I have a limited knowledge of WWII history on that front, but from what I was taught in history class, the biggest deterrent of the Nazi invasion of the USSR was the weather. What we learned was that the Russians were invading Germany more than the Germans could invade Russia. Basically the Russians weren't fighting to keep the Nazis from invading, but were focused on a counter-invasion.

I could very well be wrong, as I took WWII history in the US (which tends not to focus on European involvement in WWII).

Weather helped somewhat to slow blitzkrieg down in 1941 (though it applies to both sides equally; Soviets were just better prepared), but it doesn't win wars. If you look at casualty figures, 2/3 of all Axis casualties in WW2 (this includes Japanese!) happened on the Eastern Front in Europe; and most of those weren't frostbite.

Soviets paid two for one in terms of casualties, though. But they could keep doing that for longer, and their industry could keep up as well (war production figures for Reich vs USSR are rather telling).

That sounds more like Napoleon's Russian excursion, than the Nazi one.

Well when I took WWII history in the U.S. it had no such inaccuracies, though it did tend to gloss over the Eastern Front in general.

Of course the schools I've been to have also stayed away from trying to teach creationism as biology so maybe it's different elsewhere in the U.S.

I had Ukraine in mind as one outstanding example. For some parts of the territory Japan invaded, too, the local people thought at first that maybe the invaders would be better rulers than their previous rulers.

Ukraine had very recently suffered an artificial famine caused by Stalin so it had less to do with form of government and more to do with that genocide does not breed loyalty.

Ukraine had just suffered a forced famine (Holodomor) that killed millions.

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