Is that why his academic integrity has been called into question?
In a word, yes.
Yikes. No. Stalin collaborated with Hitler in order to avoid a conflict at all costs because he knew the Red Army was unprepared for one.
Did I not mention the fact that the Non-aggression treaty gave the USSR time and space, surely you know that that helped the Red Army?
He certainly did not predict the invasion of the USSR with any sort of inevitability
With the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the refusal of Britain and France to help the Czechs in alliance with the Soviet Union, Stalin surely knew that an invasion of the USSR was inevitable. Consider also the war with Finland and the Anglo-French reaction to that, and the ''Sitzkreig'' in the West as Poland was demolished. No, Stalin knew.
, the whole point of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was precisely that it couldn't be predicted.
All other nations in Europe had signed non-aggression pacts with the Third Reich previous to the Molotov-Ribbentrop neutrality pact, the Soviet Union was the last, after vainly seeking some military alliance against Germany during an inevitable Second World War.
This is of course utter bullshit. Western Marxists, anarchists, left communists, demsocs and leftists from all around the world traveled to Spain to fight fascism, not Stalinism.
They mainly got in each other's way, engaged in onanistic military and political displays, fought each other, and proved that it has been the Left that is always disunited against the Right.
Now you're accusing these same people of sabotaging their own cause in order to help fucking Hitler invade Russia and slaughter millions in the process?
Strawman. Trotsky and his minions were hoping that a Fascist invasion of the USSR would result in a collapse of Stalin's power and they could then sweep in as the saviors of the Soviet, destroying what they saw as the ''Red Fascism'' of Stalin and his crew and the Fascism of Hitler.
You might as well be arguing that everyone who wasn't a Stalinist was a through-and-through fascist.
No. But there's a reason why Stalin beat Hitler and the others did not.
lol. Stalin was first and foremost interested in protecting the integrity of the theory of Socialism in one country, not defeating fascism.
Socialism in one country was going to be the only way to beat the Capitalist reaction in Stalin's view, which came in the form of Fascism, so your comment is a false dichotomy.
This necessarily meant undermining the efforts of Spanish workers to crush fascism, organize themselves and carry out a proletarian revolution, all of which would have completely discredited Marxism-Leninism.
Spain was never going to go Communist in any case, and Stalin knew that, so the point is moot.