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Stalin (KOBA) Attacks the Red Army

Litwin

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Why this crazy tyrant (czar) is still so popular in Muscovy ?

Stalin More Popular Than Putin, Russians Say - Newsweek
Jun 26, 2017 - Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin has been voted the most “outstanding” figure in Russia's history, beating the country's most beloved poet, ...
For Russians, Stalin is the 'most outstanding' figure in world history ...
Jun 26, 2017 - MOSCOW — More Russians consider Joseph Stalin the “most ... to name the “top 10 most outstanding people of all time and all nations.” It also ...

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"
Stalin had been purging his enemies—real and chimerical—for years, including military officers. Then the 1941 German invasion exposed the Red Army’s real problems.

In late June, 1941, without a declaration of war, the Axis armies of Germany, Hungary, and Romania invaded the Soviet Union along a broad front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Much of the Red air force was destroyed on the ground in the first week of the war, leaving the army at the mercy of the German Luftwaffe. The Red Army leadership reacted clumsily and ineffectively to the German blitzkrieg style of war, and by the end of September, the Axis had conquered large swaths of territory in the Baltic States, Belarus, and Ukraine, and had killed, captured, and wounded millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians. Soviet general secretary Joseph Stalin reacted to the German advance by blaming his generals and had several of them executed on baseless charges of cowardice, as examples to the rest."
 
In October the Germans launched their drive on Moscow and made it to within 12 miles of the Kremlin. Weather, sheer exhaustion, massive casualties (750,000), and lack of supplies were among the factors that halted their advance, but mostly it was the Red Army’s refusal to quit fighting. After the war, while Stalin lived, discussions of who was responsible for the disaster of 1941 were forbidden. But once he was gone, the army was quick to blame him, citing the ongoing purge of 1937–1939.

....

From 1938 to 1939 the army had commissioned only 158,147 officers. These new officers, who would lead platoons and companies into battle in 1939 in Poland, Finland, and Mongolia, were woefully underprepared. The majority—77,971 of them— were junior lieutenants who had trained for six months or less, while some 62,800 went through shortened courses of one or at most two years at military schools; the remaining 17,376 officers were reservists called up for temporary service and given only abbreviated refresher training. In contrast, young officers who had been recruited after the civil war and before the rapid expansion of the army (1922 through 1937) had typically spent four years in a military school preparing for their commission.

General Efim A. Shchadenko, head of the personnel office for the Commissariat of Defense, estimated that the officer corps would need to grow by 50 percent between January 1, 1939, and March 1940—that is, from 240,000 to approximately 357,000. Despite their best efforts, the army and the Communist Party failed to recruit enough officers, and with 9,093 officer casualties in combat in 1939–1940 (in the invasion of Poland, the Battle of Khalkin-Gol with Japan, and the Winter War with Finland), the army was, in March 1940, undermanned by 125,000 officers. Shchadenko then reported that in order to have the officer corps fully manned by 1942, at the completion of the projected expansion, a total of 438,000 additional officers would be needed. A mind-boggling 980,000 sergeants would also be required over the same two years to lead the soldiers at the squad level; privates, however, abounded. By May 1940 the army numbered almost 4 million soldiers, an increase of 2.2 million over 1937.

One week before the Nazi invasion, on June 15, 1941, the Red Army had 439,143 officers, half of whom had been in the military for two years or less. This number was 15 percent (67,000 men) fewer than it needed. The hundreds of thousands of officers added to the rolls since 1937 were simply not prepared to lead their semitrained and underequipped men, and many companies and even battalions were commanded by recently minted lieutenants as young as 19. The catastrophe to come, then, had roots that went far deeper than the Ezhovshchina. The purge and the expansion together crippled the leadership capacity of the Red Army officer corps at the most critical time in Soviet history.

In sum, the disaster of 1941 was the result of a combination of factors: a shortage of officers due to the purge as well as the rapid expansion of the armed forces; hasty and abbreviated training of junior officers after 1937; the brief time in command positions before promotion or transfer or both; and lack of talent among many of the senior officers. Harder to quantify is the effect of the politicization of the officer corps and Stalin’s interference in personnel policy regarding the promotion, assignment, arrest, and release of top generals. The effect of the purge was not only to remove many competent officers but to create an air of distrust among the officers and their men, who, influenced by state-controlled media propaganda, became predisposed to believe that their commander could be a traitor or a spy. Overall, Stalin’s interference in military affairs was unhelpful and destabilizing, but it was the rapidity of the war itself that dealt the greatest blow to the Red Army.



Roger Reese is a professor of history at Texas A&M University and a leading expert on the Soviet military under Stalin. The most recent of his four books on the subject is Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought (2011)."
......
 
I have a theory...

Stalin is more popular now because most of the people that had to live under him are dead or dying now.
and those still alive have been conditioned to not talk too loud about anything they do not like.

My Russian teacher's father was a baby back then, but he is still alive, but has dementia.
He damn near burned their flat down three weeks ago by putting a plastic bowl on the burner to cook something.
...but she remembers him telling her to not complain about anything out in public...even how cold it might be.....nothing!
Of course, he was an Army missile engineer too.

Russia is still not a good place to voice descent.
Remember the reporter who "slipped" and fell 5 stories to his death by writing a story about Russian mercs getting romp stomped my US forces?
They are slipping up, (pun) ....PROFESSIONALS always say use 7 stories or higher for a guarantee, not 5.
 
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I have a theory...

Stalin is more popular now because most of the people that had to live under him are dead or dying now.
and those still alive have been conditioned to not talk too loud about anything they do not like.

My Russian teacher's father was a baby back then, but he is still alive, but has dementia.
He damn near burned their flat down three weeks ago by putting a plastic bowl on the burner to cook something.
...but she remembers him telling her to not complain about anything out in public...even how cold it might be.....nothing!
Of course, he was an Army missile engineer too.

Russia is still not a good place to voice descent.
Remember the reporter who "slipped" and fell 5 stories to his death by writing a story about Russian mercs getting romp stomped my US forces?
They are slipping up, (pun) ....PROFESSIONALS always say use 7 stories or higher for a guarantee, not 5.

have you seen this documentary ?



https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3oq8ym
 
The DICTATOR movie shows that Stalin worked late into the night reviewing typed reports on individuals to be sent to labor camps. Stalin made lists of Thousands of people a day,e who were to be sent to labor camps, on a daily basis


Also, during 1939. Stalin was encouraging his military officers to collaborate with the German Nazi military.


"Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, at first indifferent to Hitler’s capture of the Sudetenland, the German-speaking area of Czechoslovakia, suddenly snapped to life when Poland became threatened. He made it plain that Britain would be obliged to come to the aid of Poland in the event of German invasion. But he wanted, and needed, an ally. The only power large enough to stop Hitler, and with a vested interest in doing so, was the Soviet Union. But Stalin was cool to Britain after its effort to create a political alliance with Britain and France against Germany had been rebuffed a year earlier. Plus, Poland’s leaders were less than thrilled with the prospect of Russia becoming its guardian; to them, it was simply occupation by another monstrous regime.

Hitler believed that Britain would never take him on alone, so he decided to swallow his fear and loathing of communism and cozy up to the Soviet dictator, thereby pulling the rug out from the British initiative. Both sides were extremely suspicious of the other, trying to discern ulterior motives. But Hitler was in a hurry; he knew if he was to invade Poland it had to be done quickly, before the West could create a unified front. Agreeing basically to carve up parts of Eastern Europe—and leave each other alone in the process—Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, flew to Moscow and signed the non-aggression pact with his Soviet counterpart, V.M. Molotov (which is why the pact is often referred to as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact)."


https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-hitler-stalin-pacta


Glen Beck showed a 2008 movie RUSSIA, on his show, but I can't find a reference to the movie.


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The name of the movie on Stalin on Glen Beck's show was titled THE SOVIET STORY, 2008



"The Soviet Story is a 2008 documentary film about Soviet Communism and Soviet–German collaboration before 1941 written and directed by Edvīns Šnore and sponsored by the UEN Group in the European Parliament.

The film features interviews with western and Russian historians such as Norman Davies and Boris Sokolov, Russian writer Viktor Suvorov, Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, members of the European Parliament and the participants, as well as survivors of Soviet terror.

Using these interviews together with historical footage and documents the film argues that there were close philosophical, political and organizational connections between the Nazi and Soviet systems.[1] It highlights the Great Purge as well as the Great Famine, Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Katyn massacre, Gestapo-NKVD collaboration, Soviet mass deportations and medical experiments in the GULAG. The documentary goes on to argue that the successor states to Nazi Germany and the USSR differ in the sense that postwar Germany condemns the actions of Nazi Germany while the opinion in contemporary Russia is summarized by the quote of Vladimir Putin: "One needs to acknowledge, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century".




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soviet_Story
 
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The name of the movie on Stalin on Glen Beck's show was titled THE SOVIET STORY, 2008



"The Soviet Story is a 2008 documentary film about Soviet Communism and Soviet–German collaboration before 1941 written and directed by Edvīns Šnore and sponsored by the UEN Group in the European Parliament.

The film features interviews with western and Russian historians such as Norman Davies and Boris Sokolov, Russian writer Viktor Suvorov, Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, members of the European Parliament and the participants, as well as survivors of Soviet terror.

Using these interviews together with historical footage and documents the film argues that there were close philosophical, political and organizational connections between the Nazi and Soviet systems.[1] It highlights the Great Purge as well as the Great Famine, Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Katyn massacre, Gestapo-NKVD collaboration, Soviet mass deportations and medical experiments in the GULAG. The documentary goes on to argue that the successor states to Nazi Germany and the USSR differ in the sense that postwar Germany condemns the actions of Nazi Germany while the opinion in contemporary Russia is summarized by the quote of Vladimir Putin: "One needs to acknowledge, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century".




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soviet_Story

great tip thank you, but with all respect to Edvīns Šnore, but gestapo was not even close to NKVD cruelty , size , etc.
ps

 
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