Stalin's Contributions

To return to the OP :the role of Stalin during the war :My POV is that after 1960,he has been made a scape-goat by the generals for the initial Soviet losses in 1941.

 

This is an interesting point. France didn't suffered purges, and this didn't prevented military incompetence from their part. I'm wondering at which point Stalin's purges really affected the Red Army.

 

Maybe Hitler expected more from the purges? Of course killing trained officers and Generals in your army means a big deal about your army´s capability to act, but then again Stalin gave them orders from the beginning not to step back. There was no room for normal tactical maneuvring thus. So Wehrmacht had an easy task bagging the divisions from day one with Blitzkrieg. For Wehrmacht the problem was that the Red Army soldiers were determined to kill as many as possible German soldiers before dying themselves and the German losses , I´d believe, were much bigger in the East that in the Western front campaigns. And I am sure that is bound to create fear even among the aryan super soldiers.

 

It was also the quality of the Soviet generals, Budenny, Voroshilov still thought that the Russian civil war was still a valid basis for knowledge of warfare. They had no concept of how to fight a German style attack. My favorite is Marshall Kulik who wanted to abolish all tanks and use only calvalry.

 

We must also remember the Red Army was in the middle of renewal of tank force tactics. Since May 1940 they had been aware of the Blitzkrieg force and army tactics and panzer divisions were being fused to serve that tactic. Before they had been practically going into a totally different direction. Also if the German attack had been in 1942, there would have been 10-15,000 more T-34´s at least to face the Blitzkrieg....

 

Kai-Petri, the "Blitzkrieg" is something of controversy about it's existance.

As for Red Army's poor performance in 1941, actually the RKAA proved to fight well for it's conditions, and it was this determination that culminated in the defeat of Barbarossa.

The Soviet leadership deserves more criticism for what it (not) did before the war started. The Red Army of 1941 had enough manpower and equipment, but most most of the equipment and the personal were not combat-ready. Obviously this is a problem that would affect any Army facing a combat-ready and experienced force such as the WM.

Stalin had simiar powers as Hitler, so one can conclude that Stalin was a serious responsible for much of the mistakes done. What mistakes were these? I do not have knowlege...

 

I think Kai's figures for T-34 tanks, had Russia another year of peace are a bit high. Yes they could produce that number because they did, but they were on a total war footing at that point. I suspect had Germany behaved the number of new T-34's produced in the course of summer 1941 to summer 1942 would be much closer to about 2,000 to 2,500, or about 1/4th to 1/5th this war time production.

this would still be an impressive figure and a nightmare for a 1942 German invasion.

 

The soviet system was very efficient at mass producing weapons, centralized planning proved lot less good when it came to sofisticated logistics (think spares) that required good "middle managment" and this was a shortcomming they never did really made good preferring instead to develop a rather coarse "brute force" approach to many issues that, together with some outstanding generalship and the dogged determination of the troops eventually got them to Berlin.
I'm not sure historical T-34 production is a good paragon for what they would have done without Barbarossa, on one side the were not on a war footing but on the other the huge disruption caused by the move East of the factories would not apply.

Thinking of war production Stalin, like Hitler, had a tendency to muddle in weapon design, on average he proved a lot more rational than his counterpart in his decisions, the Soviets were cerainly not obsesssed "with high tech is better", as the choice of going with the WW1 vintage Mosin-Nagant instead of the semi auto Tokarev shows, But there is one instance where his endosment of a weapon system possibly cost the Soviets a lot of lives and that is the IL2. Despite propaganda the huge production figures testify to equally huge losses, the red air force would probably have been better served by a good radial engined fighter bomber like the P 47 or the Fw 190F than with something that looks suspiciously like an armoured Fairey Battle, but after Stalin's well known endorsmment of the type nobody probably had the guts to come up with criticism for it , far less a proposal to cut production in favour of something better, and it ended up being the most widely produced plane of WW2.

 

I am not a Devil's solicitor but I have my humble view on the subject of this conversation.

It is difficult to view "Stalinism" in isolation from history of Tzarist Russia. Some sources go that far to consider Stalin as the greatest RussianTzar. However, it would be more correct to see Stalin as a continuation of the Russian Tzarst tradition. The term "Stalinism" is more or less a product of biassed, political view on the Russian history. Each country and each nation have different past and different traditions. Observing other nations through an optics of own nation and own tradition is distorted because it introduces own criteria and prejudices. Hence terms Stalinism and it's antithesis, Anti Stalinism distort the view on history in general.

From the positive side it is so easy to conclude that Stalins major contribution to the history is that he has helped to save the Europe and to save the world from the Nazi Plague. For me, that's good enough. I don't care for political qualifications too much.

 

Read from a Finnish officer´s high quality book on Red Army tanks that Zhukov recalled in his memoirs that " in March 1941 it was decided to create 20 more Mechanized Army Groups. Altogether this would mean some 30,000 tanks of which 13,200 would be of the new versions. However it was not realized that the factories could not do this in one year." So that was the plan. Not sure how Leningrad, Kharkov and Stalingrad could have done that, but if Stalin had pushed reserves to that plan, who knows. Did not find plans for other factories but Kharkov was expected to make 500 t-34´s by the end of 1940, and 3650 in 1941 alone. Cheers!

 

Not haveing purges doesn't mean that you are going to be competent but having purges which eliminate many competent senior leaders for questionable reasons is almost going to guarantee it. The US hasn't had any purges either but historically there have been more than a few "margnially competent" US generals at the start of major conflicts.

I think you are overstating his contributions and what Tamino stated. Certainly Stalin and the USSR helped prevent a Nazi conquest of Europe. It's far from clear that the Nazi's would have survived in the absence of Stalin however. Indeed it's possible that the war would not even have occured in his abscence.

 

This is true. Unfortunately many things believed to have been "soviet" have actually been only "Russian". Not much seems to have been changed during the centuries. One can only hope...

Hardly a "positive" side since he replaced the Nazi Plague with the commie Plague - which has proven to be at least an equally bad option, maybe even worse.

 

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:eyebrows:
This reminds me to Truman’s response when asked why he decided to fire General MacArthur:

“I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President…I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the laws for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.”

Regarding the second part: remove to see the reality. I have carefully used the a phrase "helped to save .." instead of outright "saved ..."

 

I wasn't familiar with that quote. I'll have to remember it. One of the things I liked about Truman was he had a tendency to not mince words.

I thought that was the case.

 

Karjala, Hitler was worst than Stalin, specially to the Slavs (which in the majority would be eliminated with the Generalplan Ost).

Here's an article by Timothy Snyder about the number of deaths from Stanilism and Hiterlism: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more/?pagination=false

 

The Communist were certainly responsible for more deaths than the Nazis. However the Nazis managed to do it in a bit over a decade and under the control of one country. One cannot reasonably lay the responsibility for all the casualties of communism at the feet of Stalin. As to which is worse? If you lived in a country under their control or were a weak neighbor I'm not sure there was much difference. If neither of the above were true Hitler would likely be considered worse.

 

lwd, by "worst" I considerate Hiter's wish to exterminate so many people. Not that Stalin wasn't able to act in a form similar to the Nazis in some situations (e.g. persecution of some minorities during the Great Purge). Karjala considerates the Soviet victory as something equal or worst than the Nazism. This is not the case. The Soviets conquered and created several satellite states, which were held in a dictatorial manner, but specially after WWII were not as violent as Stanilism and much less Nazism. If Nazism had won, however, the majority of the Slavs would be killed and slaved, and the Jews exterminated from Europe. As for Hitler's continued expansionism, I guess he would go ahead with it until 1945, but after the US obtained the atomic bomb, the Nazis would reduce their conquest impetus.

 

Btw, in DDR i.e. East Germany there were more Secret Police men than during nazi Germany so I guess that tells were things were heading for. As well the USSR kept on bringing the farming goods to the USSR which kept on the Eastern Europe countries in low production and actually it did not show the true face until 1989-90 when the USSR collapsed,too.