“freed half of Europe from the Nazis and they were in the fight from the beginning.”
Is that a joke? They were “in the fight from the beginning” when THEY INVADED THE BALTIC STATES AND TOOK HALF OF POLAND IN 1939, FOLLOWED BY PART OF FINLAND IN 1940. Do you know what they did in those areas before Hitler threw them out in 1941?
They didn’t “free half of Europe”; they invaded the half of Europe that chose alliance with Hitler instead of Stalin-supported communist insurrection and Soviet occupation. The Soviet role in Spain’s civil war (1936-1939) wasn’t lost on Europe, and a few years later many people made it clear they were terrified of Stalin far more than they were of Hitler. Hitler’s murderous rampage doesn’t excuse Stalin’s murderous rampage; don’t gloss over what the USSR did in the 1930s and 40s. They didn’t “liberate” Ukraine, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, eastern Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria; they occupied them by force after failing in earlier attempts to overthrow their governments by funding/supporting communist takeovers there.
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”
― Theodore Dalrymple
That was the purpose of this monument. To humiliate Latvians and to show them that Moscow is in charge and can force this lie of “liberating” on them at least in public spaces.
I think you need to brush up on your history. Germany and Russia were never allies but the Soviet union in America were allies from 1941 to 1945. That was a true formal alliance with lend lease and billions of dollars given by America to Stalin. The Baltic states were no more invaded by Stalin then France was invaded by America - both countries were on their way to defeat Hitler in Berlin and the surrounding countries of the Nazi empire were liberated one by one from the east and the west. After the war Churchill Roosevelt and Stalin together agreed to carve up all of Europe into spheres of influence. These three made the decision between them to occupy Europe. Today, Russia no longer occupies eastern Europe but America still occupies a vast European empire of vassal states and by breaking agreement after agreement and pushing eastward to enrich the MIC, we created thecurrent Ukrainian carnage with 150,000 Ukranian men dead. Study more, project less.
The reason that the Soviets didn’t ally with Britain and France in the first place in 1939, was because they wouldn’t allow the Soviets to have Poland.