Download To what extent did Stalin`s policies after 1934

To what extent did Stalin’s policies after 1934 prepare the Soviet Union for
the Great Patriotic War?
Stalin was responsible for preparing the Soviet Union economically to fight a total war
against the Germans. However, he was also responsible for leaving the Red Army largely
unprepared to counter the Nazi blitzkrieg in 1941.
Economically, the three Five Year Plans introduced by Stalin transformed Russia from a
backward semi-developed nation to one which could match Germany in industrial output. For
example, production of oil and gas rose by 130 percent between 1929 and 1938. Over that
same period, production of coal and iron ore rose by 230 percent each, steel by 267 percent,
electricity by 540 percent, and chemicals rose by almost 1000 percent.
Stalin also took steps to increase Russia's military preparedness - giving priority to the
build-up of the nation’s military-industrial capacity, increasing the defence budget, and
reorganising the military, so that its tactics were based on the ideas of Tukhashevsky.
From the mid 1930s onwards, the Red Army began to see the benefits of all the industrial
progress, receiving more and better military equipment. By 1941, it enjoyed numerical
superiority in terms of tanks (20,000, compared with the Germans’ 4,700) and aircraft (7,000
– more than the rest of the world’s air forces combined).
However, preparations for war were halted by the purges, and were only resumed in 1939.
The three year delay meant that the Red Army was left with serious weaknesses. In particular,
most of its equipment was inferior to that of the Germans, its leadership was weak and its
forces were deployed in very vulnerable positions.
The most serious problem the army faced was the loss of its leaders. In June 1937, Stalin
had nine senior generals – including Marshall Tukhachevsky himself – arrested and charged
with conspiracy and treason. They were tried and executed the next day. Stalin then unleashed
a full scale purge of the Red Army officer corps. In all, 43,000 officers were either shot, sent
to labour camps or permanently dismissed. As the Russian historian Roy Medvedev has said,
“never has the officer corps of any army suffered such great losses in any war as the Soviet
Army suffered in this time of peace.” (Medvedev: 424)
The purge was damaging to the army not only because of the numbers involved. Many of
those arrested were veterans of the Civil War and had military expertise which could not
easily be replaced. Of the senior officers that remained, most were Stalin's cronies from the
south-western front during the Civil War. These men were unfit to apply the new military
theories developed by Tukhachevsky and his colleagues. The situation was so bad that by the
end of 1940, not one of the regimental commanders in the Red Army had been trained
sufficiently. Hitler knew this, and used it as a way of persuading his generals that an attack on
Russia would succeed.
The purges also affected the Russian economy, leaving large numbers of technologists and
managers languishing in prisons or labour camps. As a result, the Third Five Year Plan was
nowhere near as successful as the previous two.
Stalin reacted to this situation by increasing the level of compulsion in the industrial and
agricultural sectors. Working hours were increased, holidays reduced. However, the workers
and peasants were exhausted, so his attempts to increase productivity failed.
Stalin also increased the size of the Red Army by 150 percent between 1939 and 1941, and
shored up some of the gaps in its ranks by releasing 4,000 officers from imprisonment. He
also put 100,000 men to work building fortifications on the German border. Even so, glaring
deficiencies still remained.
One of the most serious weaknesses in Russia’s defensive capability was the location of the
its industries. Most of the new enterprises established in the two years before the German
attack were built in the western regions of the country - in areas the Germans could quickly
overrun. Stalin also ordered the abandonment of the so-called ‘Stalin Line’ - the fortifications
that had been built along the Soviet Union's western frontier. In their place, he ordered the
construction of a new defensive line along the USSR's expanded borders, but this was
nowhere near complete by 1941. To make matters worse, the old fortifications were stripped
of their guns before the new ones could be activated. The problem was just as bad with regard
to the air force. In February 1941, Stalin approved a plan to build 190 new air fields, but in
the meantime the bulk of the USSR's planes had to be kept at civilian airports near the border
with Germany. This made them very vulnerable. Stalin also refused to accept proposals that
the Red Army's reserves of fuel, food and raw materials be stored to the east of the Volga
River. Instead, they were kept in the frontier regions, and since there was no contingency plan
for what to do with them in the event of a German attack, they were quickly captured or
destroyed. Worst of all, there was no plan as to how the Red Army should react in the event
of a German invasion.
In many ways, these problems were merely symptomatic of deeper problems plaguing the
whole Soviet system. The purges had robbed the Red Army and the government of their
initiative. Officers and political commissars were fearful of incurring Stalin’s wrath, so they
kept their ideas to themselves. As a result, many new ideas were not developed. For example,
advanced weapons had already been developed by 1941, but few had been produced or put
into the field. Where they were, they were often used in an inappropriate manner. For
example, the new T-34 tanks were dispersed among existing units, instead of being used to
form self-sufficient armoured divisions. Few tank crews had more than an hour's operational
experience with their machines.
The problem was most serious at the top of the political system. All the nation’s senior
political and military figures were creatures of Stalin, and were unwilling to tell him things he
did not want to hear. To make matters worse, Stalin ignored the advice of those few senior
officers who did tell him the truth.
Even so, Stalin did use diplomatic initiatives to try to forestall a German attack. His initial
aim had been to persuade the French to join him in the defence of Czechoslovakia, but when
this proved impossible, he settled on a non-aggression pact with Hitler. This, he hoped, would
delay war long enough for the Red Army to be retrained and re-equipped.
However, Stalin failed to understand the ideological nature of the German threat. He
assumed that Hitler would not attack Russia before defeating Britain or before building up
sufficient forces. As Alan Bullock put it, "His conclusion was that if Russia could not escape
an eventual war with Germany, it would not occur until 1942-43, leaving him two or three
years longer to prepare for it…. This miscalculation was responsible, more than anything else,
for the disasters of 1941, and was made all the more serious by the stubbornness with which
Stalin persisted in it, in the face of the increasing evidence to the contrary in the first six
months of that year." (Bullock: 763)
To this end, Stalin ordered his troops to avoid provoking the Germans, in the hope that this
might forestall an invasion. Worse still, he continued this policy, even when it was clear it
would not succeed. He tolerated hundreds of German reconnaissance flights over Russian
territory - flights which gave the Germans precise information about Soviet military
deployments (and thereby allowed the Luftwaffe to destroy the bulk of the Soviet air force in
the opening days of the war). He even ignored reliable information provided by his spies in
Japan – information which gave the exact date and time of the German attack.
Hence, while Stalin must be commended for initiating the economic and military build-up
that allowed the USSR to defeat the Germans, he must also be condemned for leaving the
nation vulnerable to a surprise attack.