Quote Originally Posted by cegorach
They had severla opportunities to stop Hitler before if they wanted. Actually there was strong military cooperation with Germany earlier ( tank commanders trained in Russia freely) and Staling changed little, there was much talking, but almost no action to stop Hitler made by the SU.
By all accounts whatever else he was Stalin was brutally pragmatic and had few qualms about kicking ideology to the sidelines for expediency. Anyway, I've read the joint military developement program Germany and the USSR had going was really a pre-Hitler thing - unlike Stalin Adolf was a True Believer in his own junk, and I understand he didn't much like the idea of close cooperation with Bolshevik Untermenschen. By that point the German military had nonetheless already picked up the proto-Blitzkrieg ideas the Soviets were toying with and later put them into good practice, but one side effect was that came Barbarossa the Germans only had some very vague ideas of what the Soviet military was or wasn't...

Anyway, AFAIK Stalin was never one to go out looking for trouble. As far as he was concerned Hitler could do his thing somewhere else so long as he didn't try to horn in on his turf, and would no doubt have been quite happy with the two of them leaving each other alone if it came to that. Hitler wasn't running on a similarly unscrupulously rational program though, which is apparently one reason Barbarossa came as such a shocking surprise to Stalin - he couldn't comprehend someone would try an irrational gamble like that just because.

Help in Spain ended when the gold of Republican government run out, besides NKVD spent a lot of time killing trockists and anarchists rather than doing something positive.
AFAIK Stalin loathed the Spanish socialists. True to form the Iberians went very much their own way even in ideology, and Comintern Stalinism was quite at odds with the eclectic jumble of anarchists, branch socialists, Trotskyists and whoever else made up the Spanish ideological Left. Which in practice meant the Soviets made some efforts to support the Republicans for the sake of appereances - unscrupulous as he was Stalin still had to maintain some facade of ideological credibility, and undermining your self-declared arch-fiends like Fascists was just common sense - but was more concerned hijacking and/or undermining the whole operation.

To some degree. Tey more tried to use the SU sacrificing eastern Europe. Actually it is amazing how naive they were when dealing with a country which openly declared all capitalists enemies and used terrorism, political assassinations to overthrow at least a couple of governments e.g. in Bulgaria.
Komintern was nothing more than a state funded terrorist organisation - just check the kind of training they got in Russia - 'how to plant explosives' was a good example.
To be fair, the Soviets had zero reason to be even remotely amiable towards the "West" - the latter had, after all, made some spirited if war-weary contributions at an attempt to "stamp out the Red virus" during the Russian Civil War. Given that after the dust settled the USSR was functionally a pariah in world politics, and had some justified reasons the suspect about everyone else really did want to see it crash and burn, it is perhaps understandable they were pretty paranoid.

'Course, the way "saboteurs" were regularly blamed for the many shortcomings of the Soviet system and the isolation of the state did nothing to lessen any of that, and the revolutionary Communism it at least claimed to follow was pretty much by definition an export good...

By destroying the buffer completely actively supporting Germany and helping them in making the war with Poland in 1939 notably shorter...
Basic logic tells something different.
Strategic depth, pure and simple. When the Soviet front positions were in Poland any trouble would begin that much farther from the Soviet heartlands; additionally, if Stalin had any ambitions about further expansions - for example at the expense of a Germany worn out by a drawn-out war against the Western Allies with most of its troops somewhere else... - this would be that much better forward base to realize any such from.

Buffer zones are nice, but then again if it's made your territory you can make use of its resources to help your own defense plan, as well as see for yourself that the defenses are suitably strong. Another problem with buffer states is that if you don't happen to be in an outright military alliance with them the enemy can potentially overrun them on his own accord and come right to your doorstep without you having any say in the matter...