Russia. A History полностью

It was in part this ill-conceived order that enabled the Wehrmacht to achieve astonishing results on the very first day of the invasion. By 23 June, for example, elements of Army Group Centre had already advanced sixty miles. Directives from Moscow, commanding Soviet units to launch vigorous counterattacks, only played into German hands. Since most of the Soviet air force had been destroyed on the ground, and since Soviet formations were poorly organized and undermanned, the abortive counter-attacks tore even larger holes in Soviet defensive lines. By mid-July the Germans had conquered Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia, and most of right-bank Ukraine. By August Army Group North had put Leningrad under siege, Centre had captured Smolensk, and South was investing Odessa on the shores of the Black Sea.

At this point Hitler intervened, redirecting offensive operations to achieve the rapid capture of Leningrad and Ukraine. Although Kiev fell in mid-September, Leningrad continued to resist. Hitler changed his strategic emphasis once again, this time detaching over 1.8 million men for ‘Operation Typhoon’—an assault on Moscow. By mid-October the German army was within sixty miles of the capital.

During these first few dreadful months of war, Germany and her allies—Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Finland—had overrun territory larger than France. They took two-thirds of the pre-war Soviet industries and lands that produced one-third of the country’s total agricultural output. By the end of 1941 the invaders had destroyed almost 84 per cent of the pre-war active Soviet armed forces: 1.5 million Soviet troops were dead while another 3 million were German POWs. Two million of the latter would perish by February.

Soviet Weakness in 1941

What accounted for Soviet weakness in June 1941? It clearly did not stem from a neglect of defences. By the late 1930s the Soviet Union was a thoroughly militarized state; Soviet defence outlays in 1941 amounted to over 43 per cent of the country’s GNP. Nor was there a gross imbalance in numbers or technology: in the immediate invasion zone roughly 2.8 million Soviet soldiers confronted about 3 million Germans, supported by twelve Finnish and six Romanian divisions. Similarly, whereas Germany and her allies attacked with 3,600 tanks and 2,500 planes, the Soviet armed forces disposed of over 20,000 tanks (of which 1,862 were modern T-34s or KVs) and at least 10,000 combat aircraft.

What then were the reasons behind Russia’s dismal military performance that summer? One reason was clearly the quality and skill of its enemy. At the operational and tactical levels of war the German Wehrmacht was then the finest army in the world. Other reasons, however, inhered in a series of self-inflicted wounds—a bitter legacy of the 1930s.

One of the gravest was the political purge of the Soviet military. It began in June 1937 with the announcement that Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii and seven other prominent Soviet soldiers had been convicted of treason and executed. At the same time Stalin delivered a speech in which he called for the discharge of ‘all vacillating army men’ from their posts—a statement taken by the Soviet political police, the NKVD, as a direct order for comprehensive terror against the Soviet officer corps. The pretext here was the putative existence of a ‘Trotskyite conspiracy’ within the Red Army that was scheming to stage a coup and install a military dictator. Although accurate statistics are still lacking, it would appear that some 35,000–40,000 officers were removed from their commands (many of them shot or condemned to hard labour in the camps). In other words, at least 35 per cent of the officer corps was purged. The eliminated included three of the five Soviet marshals, thirteen of the fifteen army commanders, fifty-seven of the eighty-seven corps commanders, 110 of the 195 divisional commanders, and all but one fleet commander in the navy.

The impact of this repression upon the Soviet armed forces cannot be exaggerated. It served to demoralize the Red Army, not only because of the arrests and executions, but also because Stalin upgraded the role of the political commissars and reinstituted dual command. However, those removed possessed invaluable technical knowledge. Tukhachevskii, for example, had been the prophet of mechanization and motorization; yet the purges eliminated not only Tukhachevskii but also some of his closest associates. Repression was a never-ending spiral: arrest was followed by interrogation and torture, which did not end until the accused confessed and named ‘accomplices’. To be minimally plausible, such accusations typically implicated immediate associates; as a result, the purges were most destructive to the more technical branches, especially armour.