H on Nostr: That the USSR "needed" to do that is suggestive that they knew that they would be ...

That the USSR "needed" to do that is suggestive that they knew that they would be entering a large war with Germany. They didn't need to do it (at least at the time), they chose to because they had every intention of invading their eastern nations with or without provocation. That's a choice. If they had needed to divert to fund a war effort against Germany at a later stage it would be fair to say they needed to do that. Stalin starved his own people to feed his aspirations.