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Jeff St. Clair on FB:
Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop
"Non-Aggression" Pact. It's easy to see why Stalin signed the deal. The
Red Army was in no condition to confront the Wehrmacht, largely owing to
Stalin's own dark work. Many of the Red Army's top officials had been
swept up in the Army purges of 1937, including Konstantin Rokossovsky,
who was arrested, tortured and tossed into the notorious Kresky Prison
until 1940 on suspicion of being a Trotskyist. He was subjected to two
fake firing squads and by the time he was released all of his
fingernails had been extracted under interrogation by Lavrentiy Beria's
thugs. He turned into the best field commander in the Red Army and
probably saved Moscow during the great battle of 1941. In 1944,
Rokossovsky was leading the march of the 1st Belorussian Front toward
the border with Germany when he was abruptly removed from his post and
replaced with Gen. Zhukov. Why? Rokossovsky was half Polish and Stalin
didn't want a Pole to sack Berlin.
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