Loser Stalin. War

Stalin's incompetence and the impunity associated with absolute power cost the country dearly and led to huge losses in the war.

Continuation. Start: Loser Stalin , USSR , Holodomor , Comintern .

We had so much outright idiocy in the pre-war years and during World War II that a person who believes in conspiracy theories should probably recognize Stalin as a German saboteur, secretly infiltrated into the Soviet leadership in order to destroy the country. I, however, do not believe in such approaches and believe that everything created by the “father of nations” then was the result of his phenomenal incompetence, multiplied by the impunity associated with the possession of absolute power.

Firstly, it was precisely in those years when the military threat began to really emerge in connection with the rapid rearmament of Germany that Stalin carried out repressions against the army command staff. It would be nice if he had another command staff in reserve - young bison who could replace the nominees of the Civil War. But, as the experience of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War showed, in the second echelon of military leaders there were craftsmen who, in a matter of days, lost territories comparable in size to the largest European states. What saved us was that the Red Army had somewhere to retreat. If Stalin, with his phenomenal incompetence, had headed not the huge USSR, but a country of a standard size, neither mass heroism nor mass repression would have helped him survive the fight against Hitler.

Secondly, the conclusion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact seems completely pointless in terms of preparing for a big war. Sometimes they say that Stalin delayed the invasion in order to better prepare. But this is obvious nonsense. Hitler started the war exactly when it was convenient for him, without paying any attention to the pact. He would have acted exactly the same way if Molotov and Ribbentrop had done nothing.

The thesis seems a little more substantiated, according to which Stalin, by annexing part of Poland and the Baltic states to the USSR under the terms of the pact, moved the border further to the West, which helped us during the war: there was, they say, where to retreat.

Formally, this may be so, but in reality, the general unpreparedness of our army led to the fact that the Germans crossed this space very quickly. In other words, rather than concluding such pacts, it would be better to professionally prepare the army to repel a German attack.

Thirdly, Stalin did not provide normal training for the army. He himself was captured by the idea of friendship with Germany. I didn’t believe in intelligence reports about an imminent enemy invasion, although there were plenty of them. Hitler openly led Stalin by the nose, as evidenced by the strange actions of the “father of nations” on the first day of the war. Despite all the requests of his generals, he delayed the order to resist the Germans, believing that Hitler did not know about what was happening, since the invasion was only a provocation of the German military leaders. And when Stalin was forced to admit the start of the war, he fell into depression and for several days was completely unable to lead the state. Even the speech before the people was blamed on Molotov.

Stalin's personal confusion, combined with the incompetence of a number of military leaders whom he placed in place of the repressed generals, caused the monstrous losses in the first days of the war. The soldiers, who should have been prepared for battle, were surrounded and then captured, and therefore quickly mobilized civilians had to be put in their place. Military equipment in huge quantities was destroyed by the Germans, which negated many years of efforts carried out during industrialization.

Fourthly, having recovered over time from the shock received in the first days of the war, Stalin began to command the troops. It took more than a year for him to understand his incompetence in military matters and begin to listen more to the opinion of the generals. The Supreme Commander-in-Chief learned from his mistakes, and they cost the army dearly. In particular, it was Stalin’s stubbornness and reluctance to retreat that largely explained the catastrophic defeat near Kiev in September 1941, which was discussed, in particular, by leading Soviet military leaders Zhukov and Vasilevsky.

Stalin promised the people a victorious end to the war in 1942. Apparently, this is how he wanted to justify his pre-war failures. But his reluctance to reckon with reality resulted in endless demands on his part to conduct an unprepared offensive. And this led to new victims and new defeats. But, thank God, the country was large and still left room for retreat, which the European nations occupied by Hitler did not have.

As a result, the Soviet Union was saved not by those career military personnel and not by those weapons that Stalin “carefully prepared” for war in the 1930s, but by those ordinary people who joined the army after the first catastrophic defeats, and those who created a new one. military equipment while working behind the lines.