Bit of a cheap pivot, isn’t that? Not all nationalist movements are good, many are highly reactionary, even fascist in nature. On the whole, Soviet foreign policy was cleary in the interests of the working class, from helping Cuban workers liberate themselves from the fascist Batista regime, to helping Algeria throw off the colonizing French, to helping Palestinians resisting genocide, to assisting China with throwing off the Nationalists and Imperialist Japan.
I don’t think it’s a cheap pivot at all. If you want to say “look at all these places where the people there wanted freedom!” While completely ignoring that they were violently surpressing those same scenarios within their own annexed territories? That’s just willful blindness.
Did they support liberation movements in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland etc etc?
Bit of a cheap pivot, isn’t that? Not all nationalist movements are good, many are highly reactionary, even fascist in nature. On the whole, Soviet foreign policy was cleary in the interests of the working class, from helping Cuban workers liberate themselves from the fascist Batista regime, to helping Algeria throw off the colonizing French, to helping Palestinians resisting genocide, to assisting China with throwing off the Nationalists and Imperialist Japan.
I don’t think it’s a cheap pivot at all. If you want to say “look at all these places where the people there wanted freedom!” While completely ignoring that they were violently surpressing those same scenarios within their own annexed territories? That’s just willful blindness.