Stalinist elements of Alexander Nevsky

The film was not made in a political vacuum. And the fact that Eisenstein used his films as a propaganda tool has some relevance too. No one was saying that these points where unique, but that does not make them irrelevant.


- This comment is most likely authentic and fairly close to what I intended to say -

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There was no alliance with Hitler. A pact of neutrality is not a pact of friendship. Germany and Poland in 1939 were bound to a non-aggression pact; of course, this non-aggression pact did not render them allies. The USSR had signed numerous pacts of neutrality including with Germany in 1926 and Japan in 1941.

The Nazi Soviet pact went much farther than a treaty of friendship -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact#Nazi.E2.80.93Soviet_rapprochement

With the Western nations unwilling to accede to Soviet demands, Stalin instead entered a secret Nazi-Soviet alliance:[8] On August 24, a 10-year non-aggression pact was signed with provisions that included: consultation; arbitration if either party disagreed; neutrality if either went to war against a third power; no membership of a group "which is directly or indirectly aimed at the other."

Most notably, there was also a secret protocol to the pact, revealed only on Germany's defeat in 1945, according to which Hitler and Stalin divided the states of Northern and Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. In the North, Finland, Estonia and Latvia were apportioned to the Soviet sphere. Poland was to be partitioned in the event of its "political rearrangement"—the areas east of the rivers Narev, Vistula and San going to the Soviet Union while the Germans would occupy the west. Lithuania, adjacent to East-Prussia, would be in the German sphere of influence. In the South, the Soviet Union's interest and German lack of interest in Bessarabia, a part of Romania, were acknowledged. A German diplomat Hans von Herwarth informed his U.S. colleague Charles Bohlen of the secret protocol on August 24, but the information stopped at the desk of President Franklin Roosevelt.

Concerns over the possible existence of a secret protocols were first expressed by the intelligence organizations of the Baltic states scant days after the pact was signed, and speculation grew stronger when Soviet negotiators referred to its content during negotiations for military bases in those countries. The German original was presumably destroyed in the bombing of Germany, but a microfilmed copy was included in the documents archive of the German Foreign Office. Karl von Loesch, a civil servant in Foreign Office, gave this copy to British Lt. Col. R.C. Thomson in May, 1945. The Soviet Union denied the existence of the secret protocols until 1988, when politburo member Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev admitted the existence of the protocols, although the document itself was declassified only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992. In December 1989, the first democratically elected Congress of Soviets "passed the declaration admitting the existence of the secret protocols, condemning and denouncing them".

It lead to the partition of Poland between Hitler and Stalin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland_(1939)

On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Red Army invaded the eastern regions of Poland in cooperation with Germany. The Soviets were carrying out their part of the secret appendix of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which divided Eastern Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence

The USSR treated POWs well.

That's just not true. Neither the Germans, nor the Russians followed the Geneva conventions with POWs from each other's countries. Though the Germans did with British and American prisoners -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_war#World_War_II

Between 1941 and 1945, the Axis powers took approximately 5.7 million Russian prisoners. Approximately 1 million of them were released during the war, in that their status changed but they remained under German authority. A little over 500,000 either escaped or were liberated by the Red Army; 930,000 more were found alive in camps after the war. The remaining 3.3 million prisoners (57.5% of the total captured) died during their captivity.[8] In comparison, 8,348 British or American prisoners died in German camps in 1939-45 (3.5% of the 232,000 total).
...
The Soviets captured 3.5 million Axis and German soldiers, of which more than a million died.[13] By contrast, allied nations such as the U.S., UK, Australia and Canada, tried to treat Axis prisoners strictly in accordance with the Geneva Convention.

"Im Archipel Gupvi" by Austrian historian Stefan Karner shows that for the 10 years German and other POWs were held in the USSR, the overwhelming majority survived. There were deaths only because of general economic destruction in the USSR. Out of 2,388,443 German POWs, only 356,687 or 15% died. Out of 513,766 Hungarian POWs, only 54,753 or 10.5% died
Firstly, killing 'only' 15% of your POWs is not something to brag about, and secondly that figure isn't true. More than a million German POWs died in captivity in Russia, or around 40% -

http://www.historynet.com/historical_conflicts/8556717.html?featured=y&c=y

In early April 1945, the United States was responsible for 313,000 prisoners in Europe; by month’s end this total had shot up to 2.1 million. After the fall of the Third Reich, the number rose to a staggering 5 million German and Axis POWs. Of those, an estimated 56,000, or about 1 percent, died—roughly equal to the mortality rate American POWs suffered in German hands.

Those held in Soviet-occupied territory fared far worse. Officially, the Soviet Union took 2,388,000 Germans and 1,097,000 combatants from other European nations as prisoners during and just after the war. More than a million of the German captives died. The immense suffering Germany and her Axis partners had caused surely played a key role in the treatment of enemy POWs. "In 1945, in Soviet eyes it was time to pay," wrote British military historian Max Arthur. "For most Russian soldiers, any instinct for pity or mercy had died somewhere on a hundred battlefields between Moscow and Warsaw."

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