more history and current events from larry johnson and i suspect much of it you don't know as our history books are selective as we have no honest and reliable official source of current events as well;

The Warsaw Pact, as it was known in the West, was created in 1955 and included the USSR and a number of its neighbors. The West described it as a pretend treaty of victim countries subjugated by Soviet expansionism; the USSR described it as a voluntary fraternal union of socialists. But those are propaganda statements and have little to do with reality.

Forget the “socialist brothers” stuff and look at it from a post-war Soviet perspective. Germany – attacked the USSR. Czechoslovakia – the Czech half was absorbed by Nazi Germany in 1939 and the Slovakia half was an ally of Germany as were Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. (Albania doesn’t really count because it was too independent, rebellious during the anti-Stalin Khrushchev years and quit in 1968, probably to Moscow’s relief.)

Western countries see Poland as one of the great victims of the war, but Moscow has a different view. When Russia collapsed in 1917, Poland, recreated at Versailles, invaded and got deep into what we now call Ukraine and Belarus. The Red Army rebounded and, by the summer of 1920 had pushed the Poles out and advanced close to Warsaw where it was stopped. Poland was the first country to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler’s Germany. Poland took a piece of Czechoslovakia in 1938. And, finally, during the abortive British-French-Soviet talks in 1939, it refused the Soviets passage rights to get at Germany.

A British-French-Soviet alliance with agreed access through Poland might have changed Hitler’s calculations, don’t you think?

This is missing from the conventional American story and Poland is presented as an innocent victim of a Hitler-Stalin attack. But, intelligent intelligence has to consider how Moscow sees Poland and I submit that, after the war, Moscow regarded Poland as 1) a former and potentially future enemy, 2) a Hitler collaborator and 3) an obstacle to the only chance of stopping him. Victim? Not from Moscow’s perspective – more of an unreliable neighbor that it had to get a good solid grip on........more...........