The Allies had not cooperated with the USSR?

Not offense to russians, but i have this idea that the su is extremely backward and rural.

how is it that for a country majority of peasants (at that time) and certainly not much education and economically disadvantaged, be technological and industrially superior than Germany?

 

I am not a student of Soviet history, but I have some impressions. Soviet military planning and execution were like their industry. Things were centrally planned, there were leaders, and then there were the troops. The Soviet industry was not as technologically advanced, but it was solid. It was also placed on a 24/7 schedule immediately. THAT is one of the biggest differences that I have seen illuminated here on the forum. The German industrial machine COULD have out produced the Russians before the allies eventually made serious dents in the production. The problem is that they did not. It was not until 1943 that they reached their potential. That is too late. When you add to this that they could not decide on one or two solid designs and maximize reliability instead of doing new research and it becomes easy to see how the Russians could move all of their industrial tooling accross the country and still out-produce them.

 

That's the problem with stereotypes, it all depends on what you hear all your life. If you only listen to redneck jokes you would only get the impression that the USA* is "extremely backward and rural", to quote yourself.

You'll have to bear in mind that Russia had not been touched by the Industrial revolution until well into the communists came into power, actually it was only under Stalin's dictatorship that things started moving in a big way (and at enormous cost) and in fact when the war started the military-industrial complex, to use Eisenhower's phrase was in full swing.

Building a 22,000 tank force (for an instance) can't be done just by throwing acorns to pigs. For that you need large plants like the ones at Stalingrad, Voronezh, Kharkov, Tula, Moscow, Leningrad, Kazan, and later at Nizhni-Tagil, renamed Tankograd for a good reason

Also it helped that sticking to two damn good designs worked, the T-34 and KV-1 and their respective successors instead of that plethora of designs the Germans made. This may be terribly exciting to a modeller but industrially it's a disaster! And the problem was the Soviets weren't making any models, they had their hands full already trying to win a war!

The Germans managed to make two good tanks as well from inception (well, almost), the Panther and Tiger, but only made this when they realised their own tanks were not nearly good enough and had to do pull their pants up and design something good to face the better Russian tanks!

Or do you care to compare the T-34s and KV-1s with the 37mm and short 50mm gunned Pz IIIs or the short 75s Pz IV the Germans invaded with? Totally outclassed! Luckily the Pz IV had some development potential which the PzIII didn't any more, so they managed to field a decent tank after a while.

Sorry, no, until the Germans came up with the tanks above they were improvising like mad to try and keep up.

Cheers!

* please note I wrote "USA" with capitals, not simply "su" as you did...

 

Stalin himself noted when he started the 5-year plans that if the USSR does not succeed in industrialization of the country it will be crushed by the western powers in war.

Unfortunately for people the welfare and production of the land was used for making factories and for instance in Ukraine people died like flies early 1930´s in famine. Thanx to Stalin that is.

Here´s some stats on 5-year plans

http://www.johndclare.net/Russ11.htm

The Ukraine famine

The death toll from the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine has been estimated between six million and seven million. According to a Soviet author, "Before they died, people often lost their senses and ceased to be human beings." Yet one of Stalin's lieutenants in Ukraine stated in 1933 that the famine was a great success. It showed the peasants "who is the master here. It cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay."

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/ukra.html

http://209.82.14.226/history/famine/gregorovich/

Was it six million jews in Holocaust? It was as much in Ukraine 1932-33 alone!

 

arrgggghhhhh....you are banging my balls because i wrote without caps ? you can write usa without caps if you wish . fine with me.

 

very true.
i had always thought that the USA is the land of the free and home of the brave. stereotyping is bad but we have to live with it.

 

Of course I'm aware of that and all the rest of your post, but we have to be careful on how we phrase things.

Although both acts resulted in an appalling massacre, there is a difference in the original intent. One was the entire eradication of an entire swath of mankind (well, not exactly mankind in the view of the perpetrators), the other - in general terms - was a side effect of the application of a new economic model, a social engineering experiment performed in an egregiously incompetent and callous way.

Who is the worst monster? God will have the answer for that question. If "one deat is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic" then we're talking of an enourmous amount of statistics.

I'm quite happy when discussing purely military matters, when I have to raise the carpet and look at what's beneath I get a bad taste in my mouth.

 

I wouldn't dream of damaging your anatomy! There are other forums I surf in where if you dared write USofA without caps you'd get a visit in the wee hours