Russian invation of Germany

Another interesting idea that might have some truth in it...

On Edvard Radzinsky´s book Stalin

"In May Hitler was in the Balkans, and it was getting late for attacking Russia. If Hitler would attack Russia still in 1941 he would have to prepare for winter.Which means he would need millions of fur coats and that would mean that lamb meat price would go down in the markets and as well the lamb skin prices would go up. The Russian security service had not noticed anything like this happen..."

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Maybe, maybe not....

 

Soviet Tank Operations
in the Spanish Civil War
by Steven J. Zaloga

http://libraryautomation.com/nymas/soviet_tank_operations_in_the_sp.htm

And some book tips, maybe?

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Stalin's Folly by Constantine Pleshakov

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0297846264/026-0128184-2789205


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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1710095,00.html

What Stalin Knew by David E Murphy

In 1941 Zhukov, chief of the general staff, continued to suggest to Stalin, although it enraged him, that Hitler was planning to attack Russia. Standing up to Stalin was a risky business, as Zhukov knew, but doing so may have aided his survival. Proskurov, however was not so lucky. Put in charge of Soviet intelligence by Stalin, he deluged him with blunt details of Germany’s plans. Stalin resented this, then blamed him for the 1939-40 war against the Finns that saw Soviet losses of 25,000. Proskurov paid for his loyalty; after being tortured, he was executed without trial in 1941.

 

Consideration should be taken of one of the central tenets of the Stalinist theory, known as "Socialism in one country". The revolution would be developed in the Soviet Union only, independently of outside developments. This did not preclude a few spanners thrown in other countries by the communist parties - see intervention in the Spanish Civil war, see the tight control of communist parties elsewhere - but the fact remained that revolution was not to be exported in part to avoid creatind de-stabilization and foreign policy troubles, and in practice it simply had not worked (yet) in other countries due to insufficient mass preparation. This theory was set down by Stalin and Bukharin in 1924, right after the Civil War.

Quite on the opposite we have the theory of "Permanent Revolution" (revolution in more advanced countries, which to Stalin et al would be detrimental to revolution in the SU) which is the theory espoused by another soviet grand name, L. Trostsky, but we know who won and who had to take refuge in Mexico, don't we?

So, beside the classical objections to the purported preemptive Soviet attack, we also see that it went against the political grain, which is something that ought not to be taken lightly in the context.

As an aside it can be argued that the formation of the post-war satellite states had nothing at all to do with the export of the revolution, but to create a large buffer zone to protect the Soviet Union against Western Aggression.

(I will be glad to invite you to my dahsa for a fuller lecture on the intrincacies of communist theory )

If you want another instance of this pervasion (or perversion) of military by political thought, there is the problem of severe dearth of light machine guns in the Red Infantry at the beginning of the war. Why? Because one of those great minds, Marshal G.Kulik (I wonder why he was took so long to get shot, only well after the war!) declared the machine gun to be a capitalist weapon - it consumed too much ammunition - while the true worker/soldier weapon was the rifle with it's bayonet!

( This is totally beside the point, but here is a pretty site! http://lenbat.narod.ru/eng/ )

 

Thanks for the insight everyone, especially Chocapic. It looks like history stands as written. Large numbers of Russian troops were in the newly occupied territories on Russia's Western border with the resto of Europe. They were not an invasion army, though. They were also a long way away, years, from being ready to be an invasion army. To me that cancels any argument anyone would try to make for Operation Barbarosa being a defensive

 

I'm not at all sure that I can agree. History is written by the victors, sometimes with little consideration for the truth. The scarcity of supporting information does not mean it can't be found eventually. One fact that that is sometimes obscured is that Stalin was as big a murdering criminal as Hitler, and about as trustworthy.

 

Za Rodinu,

Indeed Stalin had this program "Socialism in one country ". However he also had Communist International, or Komintern (1919-1943).This was ended in 1943 due to Roosevelt saying he did not like it. Komintern´s task to my knowledge was World revolution. Any comments on that? Just that it existed means to me that plans were being made to continue the revolution as soon as time was right. And like we´ve seen communistic spies were everywhere starting from German Military Staffs to British Secret Service to US A-bomb project....



[ 09. March 2006, 03:11 AM: Message edited by: Kai-Petri ]

 

Yes, but when I see something that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck it probably is a duck. I think Bigiceman saw the duck.

 

Kai, again here we have the struggle between two tendencies: Trotskyist and Stalinist. One believed on World Revolution, all right, while the other twisted Komintern to it's own purposes of controlling and burocratizing the international parties. Eventually the split came when Stalin effectively decreed that the international parties should form Popular Fronts with all ainti-fascist parties - as in Spain and France - as against the Trotskyist view that alliances should be made only with socialist-or-more parties. This Stalinist view effectually diluted the power of communist parties, reducing their autonomy and in practice making them more dependent from the Moscow central.

The last Comintern Congress repudiated the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism as the purpose of the Comintern. Trotsky felt this was the end of the Comintern as a revolutionary International and therefore a New International had to be built. Trotsky also viewed the Stalinist parties as having become emmasculated reformist parties, unworthy of the name communist.

As a result, Trotsky formed the Fourth International in opposition to the Comintern. The constituting parties believed the remaining Comintern was no longer capable of revitalizing itself into a proper revolutionary organization. Ther especially believed the disastrous defeat of the communist movement in Germany by the Nazis as proof that the Comintern was indeed worthless in practice and a tool for Stalin's centralized control of the international parties for his own purposes.

See for example the fact that when the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact was signed all of a sudden all communist propaganda (well, the international parties of the socialist tendency) went under a sudden silence with no more mention of the nazis at all! This included even the tiny but very active Portuguese communist party, which had simply no reason to go quiet at the time of an anti-nazi war, but quiet it did go! Ditto for the Spanish and French parties, to great revulsion on the base side! Such was the power of Stalin's Comintern.

"Smoke and mirrors", Kai I doubt S. could care less for what Roosevelt wanted. More likely he felt that he didn't need Comintern any longer, or more likely it just continued under a different name in the same address in Nevskaya Boulevar !

Now that's entirely different, that's the honest to goodness spying business everyone incurs into, nothing specifically commie about that

 

Concerning the comment by Fury. I have to agree with the comments about Stalin. He was not a beneficent dictator, nor was he uninterested in spreading his influence. He was almost as big a megalomaniac as Hitler. His quest for power and his fear of losing it resulted in more Russian deaths than Jewish deaths caused by Hitler. I only wanted to try to flesh out if any details were known by other forum members that would lend any credence to a theory someone had put out.

As far as history being written by the victors. I agree, it is. The perspective of time will usually paint things in a more balanced light. We are seeing this in the new historical research being conducted. Access to hitherto unavailable Soviet records is finally allowing a more balanced view of the Second World War. The battle between Germany and Russia is getting studied now with the perspective of both sides records and not just the German perspective and Russian public propaganda. Some people are trying to abuse this perspective of time, though. There are people out there with an agenda I cannot understand who are trying to use the passage of time as a smoke screen. They are using the gullability of people and their penchant to believe whatever they see in print or media. They take advantage of this by presenting phony information that they count on being accepted without further research. They also count on people believing that "history is written by the victors". They use this as a basis for the difference between the lies they present and the truth.

 

Thanx Za Rodinu,

That was interesting! Once I finish my Nachtjagd books I´ll try to see what I can find on Comintern. Got any suggestions?

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Also quite weird to know there was a Finn close to Stalin. Why I remember him here is that he participated in the founding of the Comintern and worked from 1921 there as Secretary General.

Otto-Ville Kuusinen

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/kuusin.htm

He was among others a member of the Politburo, the highest Soviet organ, and Stalin's ideological adviser and ghost writer. Kuusinen also continued his career during the reign of Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964). Nobody knows why Kuusinen was one of the few Communist leaders near Stalin, who survived the great purges, although his family members and close friends were arrested.

Kuusinen died in Moscow on May 17, 1964. Kuusinen's ashes were buried in the Kremlin wall.

 

Unless you go for doctoral thesis work - difficult to sift - it will certainly be impossible to find anything on the subject that will be non-partisan, from either side.

If you want to read the classics you can find it all, but absolutely all here !!

You will find absolutely everything from Lenin's complete works (incredible mind!) to : Bukharin, Gorky, Kamenev, Radek, Radovsky, Zinoviev (all sharing the common trait of having been shot by Stalin...) and L. Trotsky (who wasn't shot but had his brains picked instead...).

Strangely in the source above the Maoists are absent.

About Kuusinen, I'm aware of him but quite frankly I can't explain him away. The International Communist movement was a snake with many twists.

I'd like to give you a fuller reply (or a more long-winded one ) but I'm writing in a fit of insomnia so I'm not in my better performance (if I ever was )

 

Oops, sorry, here are the Maoists !

Hmmm, I suppose it would be a good idea to start delving into one of the most obscure authors, that would do it for my insomnia!

 

Get a copy of Mao Zedong's " Little Red Book of Quotations ". Should knock you out for at least 6 hours. I wished I had a copy to dazzle the forum with quotations.

 

Marxist dialectical materialism, which connotes the constant struggle between opposites in an empirical setting, is the best method toward constant improvement. Objective analysis of problems based on empirical results is at a premium.

Getting sleepy yet ?

 

Who says I don't have one? Peking, 1972 Quite interesting, really, not the arid Engels prose at all.

 

Just checked Zhukov´s memoirs ( probabaly the censored ones ) which does have quite alot of details on the troops´ movements during the spring 1941 as well as the development of the Red Army 1940-41. Zhukov mainly tells of the preparation for German attack which was expected to come through Ukraine area. All in all some 10 pages or more on this. And no plans on attacking Germans first.

The Khruschev memoirs is "interesting" as he does not go very deeply into military planning but claims that Stalin was by summer 1941 scared as hell due to German´s Blitzkrieg successes and kept on mumbling " they´re coming and they´ll crush us..." and "We are doomed! There´s nothing we can do about it!" and was totally paralyzed thus...( well, maybe not )

 

Exactly! The grand majority of Soviet units (and possibly the best) were deployed in the Ukraine, closer to the Soviet-Romanian border, not further North, where a Soviet invasion of Germany would have to take place.

This is not the case with the Soviet-German war, I'm afraid. We, Westeners, were for many years fooled by a prejudiced anti-communist version of History and the sources available came from magalomaniac criminals: i.e. the German generals, who blamed all defeats on Hitler and all crimes on the SS… The Soviet interpretation of History, in the other hand, was that of propaganda.

Only until the XXI century, after Soviet archives have been made accessible, when anti-Sovietism is dying away and new studies are being made, we can get a clearer vision of what really happened then.

 

I seem to remember that prior to Barbarossa the Soviets had wargamed the attack on Ruusia by the Germans and an allied Poland. Zukov took command of the Soviet force . He blunted the attack directed at Moscow and counter attacked in the south through Hungary I think and got a victory. Now this is the basis of the beleif of a Soviet attack. Some point out that the southwest district had the majority of the newer model T-34s and KVs and were at a higher state of readiness. This leads one to assume that Stalin might have been preparing to execute Zukov's southern offensive before Hitler attacked.

 

Hmm, Suvorov's "Icebreaker" raises it's head again

See The Russian Battlefield for an opinion on this.