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Right before the outbreak of WWII Stalin purged many of the generals and leaders, but had he not done that do you think the initial Nazi Germany invasion could have done better?
Another "what if" story?
Yes, Germany would have won the war, if traitors inside the country would have not been eradicated. Problem was, he didn't manage to get all of them, resulting in say heavy artillery positioned at the boarder line but shells for them stockpiled 150 km inland. Or, bastions built along northern boarder, with turrets for machine guns installed, that didn't match any Soviet machine gun. Or, supplies of fuel for airplanes being located same way - far away inland.
You all have no idea......
And by the way. By far, not all of the trozkist elite in militaries and industry was eradicated. What resulted in massive casualties due to intentionally sabotaging commanders decisions. All the way through to his death (from poison) he kept fighting them. yet, trozkist like Khrushchev survived and got how far?
Why do you people keep starting these senseless threads?
I think the thread is reasonable. It doesn't have to be a 'What if?'. For example, it could have been titled "To What Degree Did the Great Purge Effect Soviet Performance Against Germany?". Exact same question, just phrased to not pose it as a counterfactual. Any debate of historical judgment has a toe in the pool of imagining what might have happened if something else had been done.
Really, this thread only went off the rails with the "Stalin didn't kill enough people and he was poisoned!" follow-up that sounds like it comes from some guy named Alexei Jonesky.
And btw. What is commonly contributed to Comrade Stalin as "purges" , is period between 1925-1938. None of that had any to do with him and was done by blood mongering old bolshevik elite that he was successfully, yet too slowly, eradicating. Y'all need to learn Russian and go read real history of that time, not propaganda fed to you by media and so called historians.
No way to tell if the purged leaders were any better than those Stalin put to replace them. I doubt it, since the ones who were purged were largely political appointees themselves. The Soviets sucked at tactics, and had old and outdated equipment. See the German invasion of France for an example of a more advanced army being overrun as well. The new mobility and tactics were hard to defend against without any experience to draw on. The Soviets did figure out wide massive mine fields worked, and had an extensive belt of them in place by winter, though. they also developed some very good anti-tank guns as well.
And btw. What is commonly contributed to Comrade Stalin as "purges" , is period between 1925-1938. None of that had any to do with him and was done by blood mongering old bolshevik elite that he was successfully, yet too slowly, eradicating. Y'all need to learn Russian and go read real history of that time, not propaganda fed to you by media and so called historians.
and then follow the series all the way through his death. This is about the most heavily documented documentary, pun intended, I have seen.
Exactly! Thank you!
It is said that those who start revolutions are rarely the ones who end up finishing. Well Lenin and the Bolsheviks got rid of Kerensky (and by extension the Czar, his family and as much of the Romanovs as they could lay hands upon), then under Stalin it was some of (old school) Bolsheviks who often became the hunted.
On a *very* basic level there was a growing (but perhaps small) number of Russians (including a good number of Bolsheviks) who felt they didn't fight a revolution and dispose of one tyrant ruler (the Czar) for another system (Lenin) to become a long term replacement. What happened in years during and after the Russian Revolution *may* have been excessive, but a firm hand was needed at that time. Some actually believed Russia would move to a more open democracy such as other parts of Europe. Sadly for them Stalin had different ideas....
The original Soviet Constitution was almost a direct copy of our own; maybe they intended to be an open society at first and then realized replacing a large complex state and legal and economic system from the ground up was going to take a long long time, and drunken Russian peasants weren't exactly the best culture to start all that with.
Most successful revolutions are those that spring from the middle classes or upper classes; those that spring from poor oppressed proles usually just disintegrate into violent anarchy and a far worse aftermath than what they overthrew.
I think Hitler would have more reticent in going to war with the USSR until Britain was knocked out of the war. The Russo - Finnish War dealt a devastation blow to Soviet military prestige. That combined with Stalin's purge of the Red Army's officer corps reinforced Hitler's belief that the Wehrmacht would do to the Red Army the same it did previously to the French, British and Polish armies. With that in mind Hitler broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact earlier than anticipated before Soviet military reforms could be completed.
With that in mind Hitler probably decides to finish off and occupy Britain as to deny the US staging grounds for an invasion of Europe in case the US decides to enters the war. The Soviet Union still prevails in the end of a long brutal war of attrition with Nazi Germany in which Stalin ends up in control of all of Europe. This is all opinion of course.
I think Hitler would have more reticent in going to war with the USSR until Britain was knocked out of the war. The Russo - Finnish War dealt a devastation blow to Soviet military prestige. That combined with Stalin's purge of the Red Army's officer corps reinforced Hitler's belief that the Wehrmacht would do to the Red Army the same it did previously to the French, British and Polish armies. With that in mind Hitler broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact earlier than anticipated before Soviet military reforms could be completed.
With that in mind Hitler probably decides to finish off and occupy Britain as to deny the US staging grounds for an invasion of Europe in case the US decides to enters the war. The Soviet Union still prevails in the end of a long brutal war of attrition with Nazi Germany in which Stalin ends up in control of all of Europe. This is all opinion of course.
Hitler had no ability to 'finish off and occupy Britain' except, maybe, by means of a long blockade that would take years to bring the UK to its knees. He could not cross the Channel and he utterly failed to defeat the RAF in the air. His only chance was to try and starve them out, and the British had a lot of capacity for belt-tightening that would stretch that you, even if it ultimately might have succeeded, for years. And then it could only succeed if the United States (and Canada and Australia) for some inexplicable reason decided not to intervene. Which wouldn't happen.
The combination of the Channel, the Royal Navy, and the global Anglosphere meant that there was virtually no chance of Germany occupying Britain.
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