What if the Soviet Union had not signed the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact?
In History there is no “if”. Thus, any ideas that will be presented here are only theoretical ideas that promote discussion and by no means could they be used as “certainties”.
One interesting discussion would be what would have happened if the Soviet Union had not collaborated with the Nazis in 1939 so that they divide Europe in their own interest. Soviet Union did not join the allies’ war against the Nazi Germany in 1939, but on the contrary sieged an attack against Finland, the Baltic States, Eastern Poland and a part of Romania. Hitler had solved one of the biggest problems of the WWI for Germany: he did not have to deal with a double-front in the same time against the great powers of Great Britain, France and Russia (Soviet Union in 1939).
So what if Soviet Union had rejected to collaborate with the Nazis? One very simplistic theory would be that Hitler would finally not attack Poland at that time. He might be afraid of participating in a war where he could be very soon encircled by all the important European countries and thus he would wait for a “better” for him time later. In this part it is important to “imagine” whether there would be a pact between Great Britain and the USSR. If Hitler knew that by invading Poland he would be in the same time in war with those countries, then it is possible that the invasion in Poland would be delayed.
Another possibility is that he would invade Poland and then he would try to stop the war there and not extend it to the other countries. Mussolini also attacked Ethiopia, the great powers reacted, but they all finally accepted it. The same happened with the annexation from Hitler of the rest of Czechoslovakia. However, this case was different. Great Britain and France declared war on Germany a couple days after the invasion in Poland, so even if Hitler did want to avoid a war against them, it is possible that he would not be able to avoid it.
There is, however, another very interesting theory. What if Hitler invaded Poland and then Soviet Union? Would Great Britain and France try to help the Soviet Union? Well, that’s not as obvious as it might seem. In 1941, France was under occupation and Great Britain in a harsh war against Germany. It was totally clear that they would be allies with the Soviet Union after Hitler’s invasion to USSR. Nevertheless, I am not 100% sure that the same would happen if Hitler was in a big war against Soviet Union in 1939. The arguments of the Westerns? “Why should we involve in a war between two “dictatorships”?”. Behind the doors, the discussion could be like “let them get both weakened and destroyed and we will involve when necessary”. I don’t claim that this would happen. However, this is something that would surely be considered by the Western leaderships.
All those theories are very interesting. And now even more generally, what if Soviet Union had not collaborated with the Nazis and the “allies” had fought against Germany from the first time? We can never know, but I guess that the most possible outcome would be million less dead people and faster ending of the war. Maybe Italy would have joined the war faster (if the War would finally take place, which is not sure), but I don’t believe that Germany and Italy would be able to win together against Great Britain, France and Soviet Union.
Should this theory be right, another important alleged “outcome” is that the Soviet Union would not have been geopolitically as powerful as it was in 1945. In 1945, France was a very weak state, the UK was not anymore a great power, while the Soviet Union had annexed new territories and had established communist regimes in its borders. Soviet people were destroyed and died in the long-term due to Stalin’s decision not to eliminate the Nazi aggressiveness from its very start, but the territorial ambitions of Stalin were finally satisfied. A country with more than 20.000.000 km2 area finally annexed countries like Latvia, for example, whose area was less than 70.000 km2. I guess Stalin believed that all those deaths were acceptable should he have the chance to impose to those small countries his socialist “paradise”.
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