So I was reading this short book in school with pictures of WWII and the beggining of the Cold War there were a few problems with the book I saw. 95% of the book was on the Allies while only 5% was on the Soviet Union even though they did a bit more than the allies in WWII, they took over the majority of Europe, they even took over Berlin... and all they got was 5% and that five percent consisted of a 2 page entry about Stalingrad, and calling Stalin a " trianical facist dictator. " And said that if he was in command of the Soviet Army during stalingead ( which by my knowledge he was ) he would have lost Stalingrad and proably lost. Also it said in 1943- 1950 Stalin killed 80,000 polish civilians. Anyhow what do you think of this?
Of course it was like that, you live in America. America is very known for two things, 1. acting like it won WW2 pretty much on it's own and 2. hating those commie bastards. So yeah, it doesn't surprise me that the Soviet accomplishments in the war were not properly credited.
Whern you think about it... The Allies were pretty slow in WWII. I do have to give them credit for Normandy but England got there ass kicked by Rommel and the allies took rome with no reisitance from the Itlian people which is one of the biggest things you have to worry about when invading a country.
In my US History textbook they devote almost an entire section on bashing Stalin and then when talking about WWII, squeeze the USSR into a paragraph or so. Then again this is a US History textbook.
Yeah it was kind of like that in my American History class, but our teacher was a bit secular saying the Soviets were the force to be reckoned with, and saying Stalin killed more people than hitler and all that jazz. We even had to do a battle report, We picked Operation Torch.
Yeah we have the same problem with our history textbooks in school.Like take the cold war for example. The book tells you that the socialist states made low-grade/shitty products that were useless,like the fridges that were made by the DDR that can still work today since the seventies...Or the Kalashnikovs that the USSR made that always never broke...
I remember talking with my economy teacher about this; it was about a car (I think it was the Skoda), aesthetically it was horrible, but you could crash it against a wall and nothing would happen to the vehicle
We have an entire unit devoted to Russia. I mean our history textbooks has a couple of chapters just on Russia.
A picture in one textbook had on the left a kid shopping in a fully stocked American grocery store, and on the right there was an old women picking up the left loaf of bread in a Russian market. -.-
I used to think it was normal for US history books to have a couple chapters on Russia. Now I feel like my history book is the only one...
No my textbook had a whole section on russia, another the russian revolution and another on the soviet union. It might be the fact that I don't go to public school so the textbooks are a little different.
Hmm, Maybe it's just the state, you live around PA right? We probably get the same texbooks. Other states, especially the southern states, probably use textbooks that downplay the soviets.
Nor was the ideology of which Stalin acted on. He isn't a Fascist, he is the polar opposite of it, and then some.
In AP Euro we did a pretty large part of WW2 regarding Russia. However, we focused more on the political events rather than the battles. In US, we focused on the US' role in the war because the whole thing was US history. Still, there was still a good portion devoted to the Russian war effort, but most of it was setting up to teach about the beginnings of the Cold War.
American books are horrible. One Finn, who studied in the states called our press and told about this horrible book about Finland. I wish I could find the article that had shot of the page. Basically in the map they had few places that no one has ever heard of and left all important cities out etc. If you want a good book that has entire WW2 in balanced view I'd recommend Max Hasting's Inferno 1939-1945 World at war. Now I've had a chance to dig in to it as I'm reading another one, but it looks really cool and is big as hell. Also thing about Poles could be partly true in a sense that Stalin did not execute them at will, but it's very likely that those numbers include anything between Polish people rebelling against USSR to poles found guilty of helping Germans during WW2.
Oh I thought I remember you saying you lived around philadelphia, but I guess i was wrong. However we still might get textbooks from the same supplier.
