Question by : How many nations did the USSR bombed compare to the United States?
Was USSR invasion of Afghanistan the only country we invaded in?
I know that America bombed Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama and Iraq 1991(the heaviest bombing in Aerial history).
I means during the cold war. sorry.
Answers and Views:
Answer by Ernesto
The USSR bombed Helsinki quite heavily in WWII, I can’t think of any major ones post WWII. It’s just a fact that the US has bombed more people than any other country in history.
edit – You may be confused Sythian, the question mentioned the USSR, not Russia. The USSR lasted 75 years and did NOT bomb (in the sense of air-raids) even 1/10th of the number of countries the USA has bombed.
And the history of meddling in other sovereign countries is much wider in the case of the U.S. as well as the fact that it is still ongoing on a very large scale.
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Scythian1950 says
A question like this needs to be more narrowly defined, because both Russia and United States have had long histories of invading or meddling in other countries. Russia for much longer, simply because Russia has been around longer. But to start somewhere, after the Russian Revolution, Russian invaded and acquired Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and then Finland. After an ill-fated agreement with Hitler, went on to seize part of Poland, and then continued with the Baltic States, Bessarabia, and part of Romania. World War II interrupted the process, but when that was over, Russia, now in control over East Germany, went on to seize control in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Its aspirations didn’t stop there, it continued with proxy wars elsewhere around the world, as much as the United States was. For that matter, China was also notably involved in a number of proxy wars as well, such as the Korean War and Vietnam War, in which Russia shared an interest in and had sent in equipment and advisors. Let’s not kid ourselves, there were real reasons why we had the Cold War. Fortunately, the three principal players eventually came to their senses and we don’t have a Cold War any more. Money has become more important than ideology.
Presently, at least until either or both Russia and China get back to becoming miltiary superpowers, it is only the United States that have been finding all kinds of “reasons” to “enforce security” around the world. But this is unfortunately nothing new. How many Americans living today are familar with the historical details of the Mexican-American war, or even the Spanish-American war, both which were hardly any different from the Iraq War in 2003 as “wars of opportunity”? None of them were essential for national defense, but executive adminstrations during all three found reasons to go ahead with them anyway. It is a truism that when one has a hammer, everything looks like nail. The rest of the world worry that the United States has far too much military power, and seems to be becoming increasingly economically and idedologically unhinged. I share the same fears.
Edit: This is a better, more pointed question, “In which countries did the USSR engage in massive aerial bombings during the Cold War from 1946 to 1991?” If we discount the proxy wars, such as Vietnam, discount the post-WWII invasions (which didn’t involve massive aerial bombings), and discount support of “communist revolutions” (mostly done through covert work), then there’s really only Afghanistan, or “USSR’s Vietnam”. And this war was one of the reasons (out of many) that eventually led to a dissolution of the USSR.
Right after that, the Pentagon, at a loss for a reason to continue planning for a global war, decided that perhaps China is the next threat. That lasted only until 9/11.
Edit 2: I understood the spirit of this question, Ernesto, which is why I discounted acts done during both WW1 and WW2. Or just WW2 if we are just talking about USSR. History is a nice, very complicated subject, and the last thing we need is ideologically-driven oversimplification. All are both saints and sinners. For example, Great Britain bombed more German cities into complete ruin than the Nazis have ever done to the cities of Great Britain. Does that make the Nazis “better”?