Why didn't Russia help out China when Japan invaded? I thought

Soviets weren't in any position to help anyone at the time. They relied on Roosevelt's Lend Lease Act to get their foot off the ground. It wasn't until after World War II did they start assisting other communists around the world.

>>2405654

When the Japanese invaded, China wasn't Communist; you had an ongoing civil war between the KMT "Nationalists" and the communist insurgency/revolt.

Not to mention that Mao actually didn't like the Soviets that much; he thought they were controlling and domineering and committed to locking in his revolutionary movement into a model that wouldn't work very well in China, one based around mobilizing an urban proletariat population that was tiny and almost powerless. So as it stood, you actually had Soviet military advisors to the KMT helping them (a little) stamp out fellow communists. Chuikov, the guy who commanded the defense of Stalingrad, was one such person at the outbreak of the German-Soviet war.

>>2405654
This >>2405711
and also Socialism in One State. Not to mention the Commie Chinese let the Chinese state wear themselves out on Japan so they could conquer them later.

>>2405734

> Not to mention the Commie Chinese let the Chinese state wear themselves out on Japan so they could conquer them later.

That's not entirely true. While the Chi-Coms did use the reprieve of the outbreak of hostilities to flee and re-establish themselves after getting battered in the mid 1930s, once they had rebuilt their base areas, they actually tended to be more aggressive about fighting the Japs, (man for man anyway, they still did a lot less given the KMT had something like 7 times the number of troops), than the Nationalists were. They weren't letting the KMT exhaust themselves, they were making a bid for legitimacy based on a notion of

>Hey, you , peasant. We'll protect you from the Japanese, and your "rulers" won't. We're the better ones to support, no?

And in large part, it worked. KMT legitimacy was hugely damaged by the war, despite their hoarding of resources and being materially stronger by a wide margin in 1945 than they were in 1937, but they were unable to do much about the Chi-Coms.

>>2405654
GO AND READ A FUCKING HISTORY BOOK OR GOD FORBID EVEN THE WIKI. HISTORY THREADS LILE THIS ARE EVEN WORSE THAN HUMANITIES THREADS.