In the interest of full disclosure, both are true. I was indeed trying to say that the Russians weren't innocent, blameless victims in the whole mess, and therefore hadn't risen to that rarefied air of unfettered sympathy.

But I was also laboring under an erroneous belief that at some level, there were coordinated efforts among the members of the League of Nations to deal with Germany, and that the Soviet Union was party to those. The US itself was in a dramatically isolationist phase and wasn't engaged on the international stage very strongly, but I thought the former Allied Powers were trying to work towards a unified solution for dealing with Hilter, and I believed the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement to be a backroom deal that betrayed those efforts.

This view is rather limited and probably inaccurate. The Soviet Union had declared itself to be an island in an ocean of capitalism, and had made no bones about using any means of espionage and subterfuge to hamper Western capitalist nations available to it, including funding British workers strikes and launching coups in Britain and France in the 30's.

An expectation that the Stalin would set all that aside and could be counted on as a partner to counter Nazi aggression in 1938 & 1939 would be extremely naive, and therefore I'd like to retract the use of the term "betrayal" and instead substitute "manipulation and self-interested calculation".