On the Soviet production miracle, we should remember it could never have happened without Allied inputs, especially US raw materials and trucks. And let's not forget between June 1941 and early 1942 most of the lendlease was being delivered by the British via the treacherous Arctic convoys to Murmansk, when the US was still neutral and Britain was stretched to the limit.
Soviet losses in the first months of the war were so horrendous that 75% of the tanks defending Moscow in December 1941 were British! You can argue Britain saved the Soviet Union in the first year of the war, just as the US fuelled the Soviet war economy and industrial mobilisation between 1942-45. You also have to accept that just as Soviet totalitarianism made total mobilisation possible in 1941-45 it was also the reason for the swift decline in the quality of the Soviet military after the war that emphasised quantity over quality and was the main reason for the defeat in Afghanistan and the USSR's collapse in 1991.
"If there was a productive “miracle” in World War II it was not to be found in the West, not in Britain, the United States or Germany, but in the Soviet Union...it was out of that furnace that the Soviet military emerged as the most formidable land army the world had ever seen."
Great pieces as always. But remember the "Soviet production miracle" would never have been possible without the massive lendlease deliveries especially the raw materials Russia needed to build these weapons on that scale. So while the Soviet sacrifice was enormous, the western allies, especially the US after 1942, effectively bankrolled the Soviet war effort and got scant recognition in return to this day.
The Soviets gave their blood, vast manpower and superior military hardware, especially tanks and artillery. But without western support, the Soviet economy and industry would likely have collapsed in 1941/42.
And as much as the allies may be guilty of not giving enough credit to the Soviet war effort, the same is even more true in Russia, where the allied contribution is dismissed as a minor sideshow. In the numbers involved in actual combat that maybe true. But the west's material was still the decisive lifeline that kept Russia in the war.
One significant example can be seen in the crucial early phase of Barbarossa, after the catastrophic Soviet losses in the early months of the German invasion. As the exhausted Panzer divisions approached Moscow, 75% of the tanks defending the Soviet capital were British, transported via the Arctic convoys, the only viable transport route to their new Soviet ally. So Britain arguably saved Russia in 1941, as the loss of Moscow would have been an enormous prestige, morale, strategic and logistical loss to the Soviet Union's capacity to fight on.
So the Soviet machine that emerged from WWII was in large part a product of the mass material and industrial mobilisation you describe. The west outsourced the heavily combat lifting to the Soviets who were simply geographically and in terms of human resources and hardware better placed to wage the land war on that scale and degrade Germany's awesome military might.
The sheer scale of the fighting and length of front and Soviet numerical superiority allowed them to switch the point of attack at will. But that too was only possible thanks to thousands of US trucks and halftracks that made the strategy possible and successful. Without that, the Soviet losses already horrendous throughout the war, would have been unsustainable. And despite their superior hardware, the Red Army even more than the western allies, relied on sheer weight of numbers, material mass and brute force to bludgeon the mighty Wehrmacht into submission. There was very little tactical subtlety involved. And of course, Stalin's Soviet Union was far less squeamish about sacrificing its people to defend itself than its western allies, having already murdered or imprisoned up to 30 million before the war!
And is it a surprise that the mighty Soviet war machine swiftly fell into decline once it was deprived of access to western technology and industry in the post-war era? The myth of the Soviet steamroller pushing through to the Atlantic in two weeks has long been debunked not least by the Soviets who admitted their military prowess looked far better on paper than the propaganda claimed.
Despite the early successes of its space industry, the Soviets quickly fell behind the west technologically and were only able to keep up militarily through their massive industrial espionage programme. But even that was not enough.
As Soviet military spending started crippling its economy, Reagan and Thatcher renewed the allied war strategy of mass material and economic superiority that had made D-Day possible, but this time they outstripped and out produced their former allies, the Soviet Union. So the 1984 D-Day celebration had even greater symbolic significance by marking the renewal of the western alliance and strategy that had won WWII with Soviet help, but this time to win the Cold War and defeat the Soviet Union. Predictably the Soviets boycotted the D-Day events with a lot of derision and criticism. 1984 marked a lowpoint in Cold War relations, the same year the Soviets and Warsaw Pact satellites boycotted the LA Olympics.
But 1984 was also the turning point. The Soviet Union just could no longer match the west's technological and consumer-driven industrial superiority and in the late 1980s it came close to collapse. The great irony perhaps is that the last general secretary, Gorbachev, was reduced to begging subsidies from its former existential arch enemy Germany just to keep the Soviet economy going in return for supporting German reunification and pulling the rug from under the DDR!
Perhaps one more postscript is that Reagan's focus on high-tech weaponry especially "Star Wars" (SDI) so terrified the Soviets it forced them back to the negotiating table and triggered Gorbachev's reforms. It was arguably the final and decisive expression of the military-industrial-technological complex that had not only won WWII, built the A-bomb that created the nuclear age, and finally humiliated the Soviet Union and created the US dominated post-Cold War paradigm since 1990.
I've often though that while SDI may have been a technological fantasy beyond the reach of the time, the huge investment in new technologies and R&D created an enormous new industrial network of high-tech industries and infrastructure, demand for IT engineers and software developers that played a huge role in the US tech boom that kicked off in the early 1990s and is today the biggest contributor to US GDP.
A vast defence infrastructure network suddenly redundant, with thousands of highly qualified former US defence tech workers found themselves unemployed all thanks to the Cold War "peace dividend", flooding the jobs market, joining or founding start ups, just as the internet was taking off. Not forgetting, of course, that the Internet itself was a former US military project (Arpanet). So the link to that massive military-industrial war effort that started in 1941 still shapes our world in more ways than we realise.
Also, the sheer number of millions killed by communism has likely no reflection in reality. But hey, communism is evil. By the rule of ten, that goes throughot human history, those numbers are easily reduced. Andrei Martianove presented in an old posting numbers from the Soviet archives (photographed pages) of the population in work camps. What can I say, HTS has shown the stats on the prisoners in Syria's prisons. Really underwhelming (account that there are also all sorts of criminals included).
And the civil war was horrendous, like the US civil war, same in China. The commies won because they offered a better deal, while the holders of the old world had their hand empty.
The present structures, built through several millenia, were built by abuse, killings and violence. Restoring or resetting that, which many would present as TINA, would require some violence. The problem bith the bolsheviks was that they started adopting too many of American managerial principles and that they truly did not believe in democracy - of course, the threat of subversion of the other side (oligarchy), was always present.
The BBC has a great documentary series on the Spanish Civil War. It is very educational.
Nowadays, with the proposed anti-communism law passing through the US Congress and Senate, fascists are added in the numbers of the victims of communism, as freedom fighters.
Nevertheless, Adam's essay is admirable. Just ordered the books.
Lengthy yes, but some good points made. Phillips Obrien’s “how the war was won” also downplays the significance of so-called decisive battles like Stalingrad and makes a convincing argument that logistics and the prodigious productivity of the western allies, particularly in the air/sea components , was the real war winner.
Well, Soviet memoirs weren't exactly known for critical self-reflection or impartiality. The article is such a hodge-podge of half-truths, mendacity and cold-war anti-US propaganda I wouldn't know where to start. Referencing Gaza but ignoring Russia's targeting of civilians in Ukraine or its wholesale destruction of Grozni in the 1990s. Not forgetting its almost genocidal conduct in Afghanistan, which claimed the lives of over a million Afghans and a third of the population as refugees, during which the Red Army terrorised the population using the same methods of retaliation against civilians used by the Nazis in WWII, and likely copied from them.
The most popular was locking women, children and the elderly (as there were no young men left) into buildings and setting them alight. Ironically the harrowing Soviet war film "Come and See" made in 1985 at the height of the war contains just such a scene where Wehrmacht soldiers perpetrate this same atrocity and turn it into an impromptu party. One can only assume Red Army soldiers on leave saw the scene and copied it. And then to argue the Red Army didn't target civilians!
The only reason it didn't carry out bombing raids on Germany in WWII is because it lacked the bombers of adequate range or the skills and technology to do so. Stalin certainly never criticised allied bombing at the time. On the contrary, it was he who demanded the allies bomb Dresden as it formed a vital transport hub that would maximise disruption ahead of the Red Amy's advance on Berlin in early 1945. It doesn't mention the Nazi-Soviet pact which left the Soviet Union defenceless and allowed the Wehrmacht to reach Moscow.
He doesn't mention the massed rapes and atrocities committed by Zhukov's own army and sanctioned by the high command as it conquered and invaded Germany, estimated at over two million German women. Not forgetting the brutally cynical act of sitting out the Warsaw Rising in 1944 allowing the SS to crush the Polish resistance and raise Warsaw to the ground, while the Red Army stood on the Vistula and looked on. Stalin even refused to allow the allies to fly in supplies to the Polish resistance.
And it's simply not true to say the allies faced no serious resistance in the west and numbers never tell the full story. The allies faced the cream of the German army in the west in the last year of the war, including most of the SS panzer divisions. Hitler's strategy in 1944-45 was to delay and even knock out the western allies in the hope they would make a separate peace to end the war. Uncertainty as to the location of D-Day forced Hitler to keep several armoured divisions in reserve, sitting idle for months, including the powerful SS panzer divisions, the strongest in the German army. Not to mention over 300,000 troops in Norway and several divisions tied down in Italy 1943-45.
As for the claim the allies opposed denazification that is utterly preposterous. The Soviets effectively gave Germans in their sector amnesty for Nazi crimes under the spurious claim that all the Nazis had fled to the allied zones. Also worth remembering that during war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg the Soviets were represented by "mad dog" Andrei Vyshinsky the same prosecutor who had presided over the sham Stalinist show trials of the 1930s and who presumed that the Nuremberg war crimes trials would follow the same script. The result was a horribly and embarrassingly ill-conceived misjudgment which showed the Soviets completely out of their depth: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/178/article/841198
"He doesn't mention the massed rapes and atrocities committed by Zhukov's own army and sanctioned by the high command as it conquered and invaded Germany, estimated at over two million German women."
Two million women that lived to tell the tale, eh. As opposed to Russian women that were summarily killed after the deed. Harks to the memories of Japanese soldiers in Nanking, when they were doing the raping they were considering them humans, when killing, they were just pigs.
US soldiers were also engaged in a lot of raping. The biggest scourge in the Canadian troops in WWII was... wait for it... syphillis...
Remind me please, who said, "you must destroy the village in order to save the village"?
The Soviets didn't bomb German cities because they, in good Clausewitzian fashion, focused on destroying the Wermacht. Like they do now. And presently, please check the number of civilian victims in the war (on both sides) and also compare to just the number of Palestinian children killed by US and German made amunition.
The high moral horse you place the west, that after wwii immediately made used of all those nazis, which blamed Hitler on their defeat, and the human wave attacks, which wasn't really a thing, the way it is not now either, is the continuous posturing that nobody believes it any longer.
The past 30 years have blown the edifice down, and the hypocrisy is in full display. As for the memoirs from the west, why would they have more credibility? I see no evidence for it. It is all agrandizment.
Just repeating the same catalogue of lies and propaganda in the article. Have you ever seen women who are subject to massed rapes? There's not a tale to tell, eh. They often die from the experience or infections, are unable to bear children and are traumatised for life! Yes I'm sure other armies committed rapes but for the Soviets it was a matter of policy.
It compliments that other ugly Russian tradition the anti-Jewish pogrom which grew in scale and frequency until they reached genocidal dimensions during the First World War and Civil War, claiming the lives of over 200,000 Jews. Events that transformed Zionism and the demand for a Jewish homeland from a fringe into a mass movement turning a trickle of Jewsih migrants to Palestine into a flood. Also worth remembering that it was Russian emigres who inspired Hitler's anti-semitism and planted the seeds of the Holocaust.
Rewriting history to portray the Soviet as saints who didn't target civilians or rape women and claim they won the war on their own when they would have been defeated in 1941 without allied help. Not forgetting the Stalin was Hitler's best ally until June 1941 and carved up eastern Europe deporting hundreds of thousands to the gulags and murdering over 40,000 Polish officers at Katyn and giving Hitler the green light to begin the Final Solution. Whatever the faults and failings of the allies, and there were many, they were never accomplices to genocide and other mass crimes like the Soviets.
Again, please compare the Red Army rapes and the Wermacht Rapes. For the Wermacht, raping was the payment before killing the Russians, see Generalplan Ost.
After 25 million Soviet citizens killed by Germans and a country left in ruins - Germans knew they were loosing, but were decided to inflict as much pain and suffering as they could in their retreat - and they really didn't get their comuppence, you are coming here to demand that Russian Army soldier, who likely had a relative killed or starved by Germans, to behave like a knight in shining armour?! Heck, the US soldiers didn't stop themselves from raping German girls (and I don't include here the bought sex for nylon stockings or a soap, or some chocolate). Your double standards are visible from the Moon mister.
As for military terror, we can look and easily find good traditions in high places, can we? First concentration camps ever? British ones, in South Africa, with Boer families (women and children) locked in camps and starved to death, to induce their husbands, brothers, and fathers to stop resisting.
Paying for the scalps, that seems to be a British concotion. The raids on civilian population in Germany started with British, Germans just retaliated on London and Coventry, etc. Oh, the layered history of British occupation of India and Southeast Asia...
As Henry the VIIIth or his father kicked Jews out of England, Russians had the Settlemnt of Pale, which forbade Jewis settlement in Russia proper. The pogroms were carried mostly by Ukrainians or Poles, and Ukrainian and Polish Jews are at the origin of present crop of Israeli leadership...
I thought that it was US racial segregationism and the decimation of the natives that inspired Hitler, this is the first time I hear such a nonsense. As for the antisemitism of the Russian aristocracy, they likely immitated their more refined peers in Europe. Everywhere, aristocracy despised and hated the money lenders...
The history revisionism concerning Soviet alliance with Germany that you are peddling is reeking of falshoods. A Canadian historian has written the opus on how it went, recently published:
Michael Jabara Carley - Stalin’s Gamble_ The Search for Allies against Hitler, 1930–1936
Michael Jabara Carley - Stalin's Failed Alliance_ The Struggle for Collective Security, 1936-1939
The pacts with Hitler were started by the Poles and the Brits (with the Brits was the deal concerning the size of navies) in 1936 or so.
As a Romanian, I am not blaming Stalin for invading and taking part of Romania in 1940, I am blaming Hitler for agreeing and allowing that to happen, so that it can collect allies further down the road. The Finns can say the same thing, and the Poles, etc.
Are you telling us here that Hitler received Stalin's approval for the Final Sollution?! Next, you will have the audacity to tell us that the Generaplan Ost was concoted with the participation of Stavka.
Incidentally most of the pogroms were initiated by the White Volunteer Army which was overwhelmingly composed of former Tsarist i.e. Russian officers and soldiers. The fact that it happened on Ukrainian was simply due to the fact that that's where most Jews lived and where the fighting took place. Stalin's pact with Hitler gave Hitler the security to carry out the Holocaust while Stalin carried out his own atrocities on his side of the fence.
You're seriously comparing the "quality" of rapes!? What a wretched collection of whataboutery. I see the legacy of Ceaucescu and Soviet occupation has left its deep scars
No wonder you just voted for a fascist Putin puppet. A country that spent most of its ugly history being either a lackey of the Russians or Germans and which happily handed over millions of Jews and Gypsies Hitler to be gassed. And let's not forget Romania sent troops to fight on Hitler's side most of whom were buried ignominiously in the frozen wastes of Grossman's Stalingrad or carted off to Gulags never to be seen again. A fitting end to a shameful and cynical collaboration with the most evil regime in history and you attempt to defend that with the most feeble moral relativisation and whataboutery about British colonies or Vietnam! At least the Finns had enough self respect to confine their alliance with Hitler to recapturing territory taken by Stalin during the Winter War.
As for civilian bombing the Germans pioneered it in Spain. The British welcomed Jews under Cromwell fleeing persecution in Spain and elsewhere. The Russian pogroms against Jews were on a scale not seen until the Holocaust and provided the inspiration for the Final Solution, a crime you were complicit in and remain in denial of.
Your obnoxious and abusive sign off is a fitting end to a shameless litany of lies, propaganda and half truths by someone who has lost the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction.
You could do worse than just flush your brain down the drain. You'd hardly notice the difference.
"The soil of hope – a hope that was senseless and sometimes dishonest and despicable – gave birth to a pathetic obedience that was often equally despicable. The Warsaw Rising, the uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibor, the various mutinies of brenners, were all born of hopelessness."
Yes, this is a brilliant book, and your treatment of it is masterly! If it were possible to add more to his narrative, I would have extended it back to long before the war, when Stalin's victory was made possible because he hired American firms to build the 550 factories that produced his war material, back in the early 1930's. If the war was about masses crushing against each other, the one with the better weapons will win. Of course, wars end in surprising ways some times; the Russian defeat in WW1 came with a protest march by Russian women. Lenin followed behind the aprons. History is so rich! Thank you for your coverage!
Among those firms was Winkler-Koch (Nazi Germany was also a customer) which supplied cutting edge technologies to the petroleum industry. Now Koch Inc. it is the second largest privately held company in the US. Led by Charles Koch the enterprise has funded hundreds of millions of dollars in “research” in the fields of climate change denial, working to rollback environmental, health and safety regulations, and “reimagining education” in the US.
A small and slightly pedantic point; Paulus was just a plain Paulus. His family background was a relatively humble one, and his surname never had the aristocratic prefix of ‘von’.
My mother's younger brother (they grew up in Berlin) was an 18-year-old German recruit killed at Stalingrad. My father's younger sister (they grew up in St. Petersburg) was a medical resident at the siege of Leningrad. (She later recalled there were not enough live bodies to clear the dead off the streets.) In May 1945, my father--exiled to the gulag as a nineteen-year-old in 1931, later to defect through the free-fire zone in '41--was helping submerge Gehlen's Eastern intelligence archives for safekeeping in Lake Constance. After the war, my aunt was exiled for her entire working life to Tashkent, where she served as chief pathologist of the Karaganda city hospital. (My parents met in Freiburg in '46, and we emigrated to America in 1953.) In the 1980s, when my father and his sister were finally able to meet once again, in Germany, my aunt told him, "I feel like Alice in Wonderland. I thought Germany lost the war."
"Stalin wasn't stallin' when he beat the beast of Berlin", 1943, Willie Johnson, originally recorded by Golden Gate Quartet (Johnson was a member), 1943. Cover version by Robert Wyatt, 1980.
And wishing Adam a speedy recovery and seasons greetings.
Upon brief scrolling through several biographic articles, I came across the statement that he was raised by a Russian babysitter who called him “Vasia” (diminutive from Vassily) instead of “Yosia” (diminutive from Josef), and the name stuck. And, seemingly, his understanding of his identity as a Jewish-born Russian writer only crystallized during the war years (see Black book mentioned in the newsletter); before that, he defined himself as a Soviet Russian. After 1952, he was forced to acknowledge his Jewishness because of the brutal “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign initiated by Stalin.
So the pseudonym apparently was not hiding his Jewishness, rather it distanced Josef the man from Vassily the writer. Thanks for the comment, as it made me think a bit more than I expected!
Thank you for such a fierce and wrenching essay. I missed it the first time it was out, and I was captivated this time. Also, I read Ehrenburg’s memoirs recently, and the whole postwar choking of Grossman is incredibly depressing.
"Vassal states" that's even worse. They controlled you without having to occupy. That means you were part of the Ottoman empire!
Romania was one of the most enthusiastic participants in the Holocaust and Hitler's wars of extermination. 380,000 victims were ascribed to the actions of Romanian fascist forces in the areas it controlled in the USSR as well as the hundreds of thousand of Jews and Gypsies you surrendered to the Nazis. That's more even Italy or Vichy! Is that your defence of Romania's honour?
There was no way logistically Britain could support Poland in 1939 but the Poles continued to fight on the British side until 1945 while you allied with Hitler. The Poles are deeply grateful for Britain's role. Britain fought for longer on more fronts against Hitler and Japan than any other from 1939-45 In the west, Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, in Italy, Africa, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean Burma. And for most of the war it fought alone.
It was Britain that kept the USSR in the war in 1941/42 without whose support through Arctic convoys and bombing German cities it would have collapsed. So it was Britain that saved the Soviets. Soviet losses in 1941 were so enormous 75% of the tanks defending Moscow were British.
And what was Romania doing? Helping Hitler with all its feeble, inept might just to expand its own territory while joining in the Holocaust and other atrocities. The most bloodstained record of any of Hitler's allies and you attack the Finns for surrendering 8 Jews!
Without Britain the US would never have entered the war in Europe but left it to Hitler and Stalin. So without Britain either Hitler or possibly both would have won the war and occupied all of Europe. Not that you would care. You would have accommodated yourself with their criminal tyrannies and made yourself useful.
Romania's conduct in WWI was not as shameful but still opportunistic self serving and in the end totally inconsequential to the war's outcome. Again it was Britain that bore the brunt of the fighting that kept Russia and France in the war, defeated your former masters Ottoman Turkey and took the brunt of the German offensive in 1918 that led to the collapse of the German army and final victory. In 1914 Britain's army was smaller than Romania's. And yet you collapsed inside a year!
Britain has fought and won all its wars and fought honourably often against impossible odds. Yours is a history of defeat, cowardly, capitulation occupation and proudly calling yourself a vassal state for most of your history. Your history since has been one of autocracy, cruelty, corruption, duplicity, tyranny, torture and bloodshed. It's only thanks to the EU that you haven't returned to your natural state of primitive barbarism, autocracy and kleptocracy.
Britain hasn't been conquered or even invaded for over millennia. We are never defeated. Britain has always been the beacon of freedom for those who want to live in peace.
Hi Adam, I hope you are recovering well! I very much enjoy your wrtitng and podcasts and hope you'll be back in the saddle soon. I've learned a lot from you. Here are my own reflections of being a patient. Perpahs there is something here that you'll find helpful: https://substack.com/@onbeingapatient
Beautiful and compelling. I read every word and could not stop til I reached the end of this unforgettable essay. Thank you!
On the Soviet production miracle, we should remember it could never have happened without Allied inputs, especially US raw materials and trucks. And let's not forget between June 1941 and early 1942 most of the lendlease was being delivered by the British via the treacherous Arctic convoys to Murmansk, when the US was still neutral and Britain was stretched to the limit.
Soviet losses in the first months of the war were so horrendous that 75% of the tanks defending Moscow in December 1941 were British! You can argue Britain saved the Soviet Union in the first year of the war, just as the US fuelled the Soviet war economy and industrial mobilisation between 1942-45. You also have to accept that just as Soviet totalitarianism made total mobilisation possible in 1941-45 it was also the reason for the swift decline in the quality of the Soviet military after the war that emphasised quantity over quality and was the main reason for the defeat in Afghanistan and the USSR's collapse in 1991.
I wrote the comment below to a previous AT chartbook: https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-289-d-day-80-years-on-world, sorry for the length.
"If there was a productive “miracle” in World War II it was not to be found in the West, not in Britain, the United States or Germany, but in the Soviet Union...it was out of that furnace that the Soviet military emerged as the most formidable land army the world had ever seen."
Great pieces as always. But remember the "Soviet production miracle" would never have been possible without the massive lendlease deliveries especially the raw materials Russia needed to build these weapons on that scale. So while the Soviet sacrifice was enormous, the western allies, especially the US after 1942, effectively bankrolled the Soviet war effort and got scant recognition in return to this day.
The Soviets gave their blood, vast manpower and superior military hardware, especially tanks and artillery. But without western support, the Soviet economy and industry would likely have collapsed in 1941/42.
And as much as the allies may be guilty of not giving enough credit to the Soviet war effort, the same is even more true in Russia, where the allied contribution is dismissed as a minor sideshow. In the numbers involved in actual combat that maybe true. But the west's material was still the decisive lifeline that kept Russia in the war.
One significant example can be seen in the crucial early phase of Barbarossa, after the catastrophic Soviet losses in the early months of the German invasion. As the exhausted Panzer divisions approached Moscow, 75% of the tanks defending the Soviet capital were British, transported via the Arctic convoys, the only viable transport route to their new Soviet ally. So Britain arguably saved Russia in 1941, as the loss of Moscow would have been an enormous prestige, morale, strategic and logistical loss to the Soviet Union's capacity to fight on.
So the Soviet machine that emerged from WWII was in large part a product of the mass material and industrial mobilisation you describe. The west outsourced the heavily combat lifting to the Soviets who were simply geographically and in terms of human resources and hardware better placed to wage the land war on that scale and degrade Germany's awesome military might.
The sheer scale of the fighting and length of front and Soviet numerical superiority allowed them to switch the point of attack at will. But that too was only possible thanks to thousands of US trucks and halftracks that made the strategy possible and successful. Without that, the Soviet losses already horrendous throughout the war, would have been unsustainable. And despite their superior hardware, the Red Army even more than the western allies, relied on sheer weight of numbers, material mass and brute force to bludgeon the mighty Wehrmacht into submission. There was very little tactical subtlety involved. And of course, Stalin's Soviet Union was far less squeamish about sacrificing its people to defend itself than its western allies, having already murdered or imprisoned up to 30 million before the war!
And is it a surprise that the mighty Soviet war machine swiftly fell into decline once it was deprived of access to western technology and industry in the post-war era? The myth of the Soviet steamroller pushing through to the Atlantic in two weeks has long been debunked not least by the Soviets who admitted their military prowess looked far better on paper than the propaganda claimed.
Despite the early successes of its space industry, the Soviets quickly fell behind the west technologically and were only able to keep up militarily through their massive industrial espionage programme. But even that was not enough.
As Soviet military spending started crippling its economy, Reagan and Thatcher renewed the allied war strategy of mass material and economic superiority that had made D-Day possible, but this time they outstripped and out produced their former allies, the Soviet Union. So the 1984 D-Day celebration had even greater symbolic significance by marking the renewal of the western alliance and strategy that had won WWII with Soviet help, but this time to win the Cold War and defeat the Soviet Union. Predictably the Soviets boycotted the D-Day events with a lot of derision and criticism. 1984 marked a lowpoint in Cold War relations, the same year the Soviets and Warsaw Pact satellites boycotted the LA Olympics.
But 1984 was also the turning point. The Soviet Union just could no longer match the west's technological and consumer-driven industrial superiority and in the late 1980s it came close to collapse. The great irony perhaps is that the last general secretary, Gorbachev, was reduced to begging subsidies from its former existential arch enemy Germany just to keep the Soviet economy going in return for supporting German reunification and pulling the rug from under the DDR!
Perhaps one more postscript is that Reagan's focus on high-tech weaponry especially "Star Wars" (SDI) so terrified the Soviets it forced them back to the negotiating table and triggered Gorbachev's reforms. It was arguably the final and decisive expression of the military-industrial-technological complex that had not only won WWII, built the A-bomb that created the nuclear age, and finally humiliated the Soviet Union and created the US dominated post-Cold War paradigm since 1990.
I've often though that while SDI may have been a technological fantasy beyond the reach of the time, the huge investment in new technologies and R&D created an enormous new industrial network of high-tech industries and infrastructure, demand for IT engineers and software developers that played a huge role in the US tech boom that kicked off in the early 1990s and is today the biggest contributor to US GDP.
A vast defence infrastructure network suddenly redundant, with thousands of highly qualified former US defence tech workers found themselves unemployed all thanks to the Cold War "peace dividend", flooding the jobs market, joining or founding start ups, just as the internet was taking off. Not forgetting, of course, that the Internet itself was a former US military project (Arpanet). So the link to that massive military-industrial war effort that started in 1941 still shapes our world in more ways than we realise.
Also, the sheer number of millions killed by communism has likely no reflection in reality. But hey, communism is evil. By the rule of ten, that goes throughot human history, those numbers are easily reduced. Andrei Martianove presented in an old posting numbers from the Soviet archives (photographed pages) of the population in work camps. What can I say, HTS has shown the stats on the prisoners in Syria's prisons. Really underwhelming (account that there are also all sorts of criminals included).
And the civil war was horrendous, like the US civil war, same in China. The commies won because they offered a better deal, while the holders of the old world had their hand empty.
The present structures, built through several millenia, were built by abuse, killings and violence. Restoring or resetting that, which many would present as TINA, would require some violence. The problem bith the bolsheviks was that they started adopting too many of American managerial principles and that they truly did not believe in democracy - of course, the threat of subversion of the other side (oligarchy), was always present.
The BBC has a great documentary series on the Spanish Civil War. It is very educational.
Nowadays, with the proposed anti-communism law passing through the US Congress and Senate, fascists are added in the numbers of the victims of communism, as freedom fighters.
Nevertheless, Adam's essay is admirable. Just ordered the books.
Lengthy yes, but some good points made. Phillips Obrien’s “how the war was won” also downplays the significance of so-called decisive battles like Stalingrad and makes a convincing argument that logistics and the prodigious productivity of the western allies, particularly in the air/sea components , was the real war winner.
In his memoirs Mareshall Zhukov has a different take...
https://indi.ca/zhukovs-revenge-world-war-ii-all-over-again/
Well, Soviet memoirs weren't exactly known for critical self-reflection or impartiality. The article is such a hodge-podge of half-truths, mendacity and cold-war anti-US propaganda I wouldn't know where to start. Referencing Gaza but ignoring Russia's targeting of civilians in Ukraine or its wholesale destruction of Grozni in the 1990s. Not forgetting its almost genocidal conduct in Afghanistan, which claimed the lives of over a million Afghans and a third of the population as refugees, during which the Red Army terrorised the population using the same methods of retaliation against civilians used by the Nazis in WWII, and likely copied from them.
The most popular was locking women, children and the elderly (as there were no young men left) into buildings and setting them alight. Ironically the harrowing Soviet war film "Come and See" made in 1985 at the height of the war contains just such a scene where Wehrmacht soldiers perpetrate this same atrocity and turn it into an impromptu party. One can only assume Red Army soldiers on leave saw the scene and copied it. And then to argue the Red Army didn't target civilians!
The only reason it didn't carry out bombing raids on Germany in WWII is because it lacked the bombers of adequate range or the skills and technology to do so. Stalin certainly never criticised allied bombing at the time. On the contrary, it was he who demanded the allies bomb Dresden as it formed a vital transport hub that would maximise disruption ahead of the Red Amy's advance on Berlin in early 1945. It doesn't mention the Nazi-Soviet pact which left the Soviet Union defenceless and allowed the Wehrmacht to reach Moscow.
He doesn't mention the massed rapes and atrocities committed by Zhukov's own army and sanctioned by the high command as it conquered and invaded Germany, estimated at over two million German women. Not forgetting the brutally cynical act of sitting out the Warsaw Rising in 1944 allowing the SS to crush the Polish resistance and raise Warsaw to the ground, while the Red Army stood on the Vistula and looked on. Stalin even refused to allow the allies to fly in supplies to the Polish resistance.
And it's simply not true to say the allies faced no serious resistance in the west and numbers never tell the full story. The allies faced the cream of the German army in the west in the last year of the war, including most of the SS panzer divisions. Hitler's strategy in 1944-45 was to delay and even knock out the western allies in the hope they would make a separate peace to end the war. Uncertainty as to the location of D-Day forced Hitler to keep several armoured divisions in reserve, sitting idle for months, including the powerful SS panzer divisions, the strongest in the German army. Not to mention over 300,000 troops in Norway and several divisions tied down in Italy 1943-45.
As for the claim the allies opposed denazification that is utterly preposterous. The Soviets effectively gave Germans in their sector amnesty for Nazi crimes under the spurious claim that all the Nazis had fled to the allied zones. Also worth remembering that during war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg the Soviets were represented by "mad dog" Andrei Vyshinsky the same prosecutor who had presided over the sham Stalinist show trials of the 1930s and who presumed that the Nuremberg war crimes trials would follow the same script. The result was a horribly and embarrassingly ill-conceived misjudgment which showed the Soviets completely out of their depth: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/178/article/841198
"He doesn't mention the massed rapes and atrocities committed by Zhukov's own army and sanctioned by the high command as it conquered and invaded Germany, estimated at over two million German women."
Two million women that lived to tell the tale, eh. As opposed to Russian women that were summarily killed after the deed. Harks to the memories of Japanese soldiers in Nanking, when they were doing the raping they were considering them humans, when killing, they were just pigs.
US soldiers were also engaged in a lot of raping. The biggest scourge in the Canadian troops in WWII was... wait for it... syphillis...
Remind me please, who said, "you must destroy the village in order to save the village"?
The Soviets didn't bomb German cities because they, in good Clausewitzian fashion, focused on destroying the Wermacht. Like they do now. And presently, please check the number of civilian victims in the war (on both sides) and also compare to just the number of Palestinian children killed by US and German made amunition.
The high moral horse you place the west, that after wwii immediately made used of all those nazis, which blamed Hitler on their defeat, and the human wave attacks, which wasn't really a thing, the way it is not now either, is the continuous posturing that nobody believes it any longer.
The past 30 years have blown the edifice down, and the hypocrisy is in full display. As for the memoirs from the west, why would they have more credibility? I see no evidence for it. It is all agrandizment.
Just repeating the same catalogue of lies and propaganda in the article. Have you ever seen women who are subject to massed rapes? There's not a tale to tell, eh. They often die from the experience or infections, are unable to bear children and are traumatised for life! Yes I'm sure other armies committed rapes but for the Soviets it was a matter of policy.
It is a long tradition of Russian military terror and mass rape going back centuries such as the 100 year conquest of the the Caucasus. A tradition celebrated in Lermontov's poem "Ulansha" which describes a gang rape in sickening detail. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/25/russia-ukraine-war-literature-classics-imperialism-ideology-nationalism-putin-pushkin-tolstoy-dostoevsky-caucasus/
It compliments that other ugly Russian tradition the anti-Jewish pogrom which grew in scale and frequency until they reached genocidal dimensions during the First World War and Civil War, claiming the lives of over 200,000 Jews. Events that transformed Zionism and the demand for a Jewish homeland from a fringe into a mass movement turning a trickle of Jewsih migrants to Palestine into a flood. Also worth remembering that it was Russian emigres who inspired Hitler's anti-semitism and planted the seeds of the Holocaust.
Rewriting history to portray the Soviet as saints who didn't target civilians or rape women and claim they won the war on their own when they would have been defeated in 1941 without allied help. Not forgetting the Stalin was Hitler's best ally until June 1941 and carved up eastern Europe deporting hundreds of thousands to the gulags and murdering over 40,000 Polish officers at Katyn and giving Hitler the green light to begin the Final Solution. Whatever the faults and failings of the allies, and there were many, they were never accomplices to genocide and other mass crimes like the Soviets.
Again, please compare the Red Army rapes and the Wermacht Rapes. For the Wermacht, raping was the payment before killing the Russians, see Generalplan Ost.
After 25 million Soviet citizens killed by Germans and a country left in ruins - Germans knew they were loosing, but were decided to inflict as much pain and suffering as they could in their retreat - and they really didn't get their comuppence, you are coming here to demand that Russian Army soldier, who likely had a relative killed or starved by Germans, to behave like a knight in shining armour?! Heck, the US soldiers didn't stop themselves from raping German girls (and I don't include here the bought sex for nylon stockings or a soap, or some chocolate). Your double standards are visible from the Moon mister.
As for military terror, we can look and easily find good traditions in high places, can we? First concentration camps ever? British ones, in South Africa, with Boer families (women and children) locked in camps and starved to death, to induce their husbands, brothers, and fathers to stop resisting.
Paying for the scalps, that seems to be a British concotion. The raids on civilian population in Germany started with British, Germans just retaliated on London and Coventry, etc. Oh, the layered history of British occupation of India and Southeast Asia...
As Henry the VIIIth or his father kicked Jews out of England, Russians had the Settlemnt of Pale, which forbade Jewis settlement in Russia proper. The pogroms were carried mostly by Ukrainians or Poles, and Ukrainian and Polish Jews are at the origin of present crop of Israeli leadership...
I thought that it was US racial segregationism and the decimation of the natives that inspired Hitler, this is the first time I hear such a nonsense. As for the antisemitism of the Russian aristocracy, they likely immitated their more refined peers in Europe. Everywhere, aristocracy despised and hated the money lenders...
The history revisionism concerning Soviet alliance with Germany that you are peddling is reeking of falshoods. A Canadian historian has written the opus on how it went, recently published:
Michael Jabara Carley - Stalin’s Gamble_ The Search for Allies against Hitler, 1930–1936
Michael Jabara Carley - Stalin's Failed Alliance_ The Struggle for Collective Security, 1936-1939
The pacts with Hitler were started by the Poles and the Brits (with the Brits was the deal concerning the size of navies) in 1936 or so.
As a Romanian, I am not blaming Stalin for invading and taking part of Romania in 1940, I am blaming Hitler for agreeing and allowing that to happen, so that it can collect allies further down the road. The Finns can say the same thing, and the Poles, etc.
Are you telling us here that Hitler received Stalin's approval for the Final Sollution?! Next, you will have the audacity to tell us that the Generaplan Ost was concoted with the participation of Stavka.
go piss up a rope.
Incidentally most of the pogroms were initiated by the White Volunteer Army which was overwhelmingly composed of former Tsarist i.e. Russian officers and soldiers. The fact that it happened on Ukrainian was simply due to the fact that that's where most Jews lived and where the fighting took place. Stalin's pact with Hitler gave Hitler the security to carry out the Holocaust while Stalin carried out his own atrocities on his side of the fence.
You're seriously comparing the "quality" of rapes!? What a wretched collection of whataboutery. I see the legacy of Ceaucescu and Soviet occupation has left its deep scars
No wonder you just voted for a fascist Putin puppet. A country that spent most of its ugly history being either a lackey of the Russians or Germans and which happily handed over millions of Jews and Gypsies Hitler to be gassed. And let's not forget Romania sent troops to fight on Hitler's side most of whom were buried ignominiously in the frozen wastes of Grossman's Stalingrad or carted off to Gulags never to be seen again. A fitting end to a shameful and cynical collaboration with the most evil regime in history and you attempt to defend that with the most feeble moral relativisation and whataboutery about British colonies or Vietnam! At least the Finns had enough self respect to confine their alliance with Hitler to recapturing territory taken by Stalin during the Winter War.
As for civilian bombing the Germans pioneered it in Spain. The British welcomed Jews under Cromwell fleeing persecution in Spain and elsewhere. The Russian pogroms against Jews were on a scale not seen until the Holocaust and provided the inspiration for the Final Solution, a crime you were complicit in and remain in denial of.
Your obnoxious and abusive sign off is a fitting end to a shameless litany of lies, propaganda and half truths by someone who has lost the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction.
You could do worse than just flush your brain down the drain. You'd hardly notice the difference.
"The soil of hope – a hope that was senseless and sometimes dishonest and despicable – gave birth to a pathetic obedience that was often equally despicable. The Warsaw Rising, the uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibor, the various mutinies of brenners, were all born of hopelessness."
Gaza comes to mind immediately....
There was a recent profile of Grossman on BBC R4's Archive on 4: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b014m1px
My god what a powerful essay. Thank you.
Yes, this is a brilliant book, and your treatment of it is masterly! If it were possible to add more to his narrative, I would have extended it back to long before the war, when Stalin's victory was made possible because he hired American firms to build the 550 factories that produced his war material, back in the early 1930's. If the war was about masses crushing against each other, the one with the better weapons will win. Of course, wars end in surprising ways some times; the Russian defeat in WW1 came with a protest march by Russian women. Lenin followed behind the aprons. History is so rich! Thank you for your coverage!
https://barrygander.substack.com/p/russia-will-never-have-the-one-power
Among those firms was Winkler-Koch (Nazi Germany was also a customer) which supplied cutting edge technologies to the petroleum industry. Now Koch Inc. it is the second largest privately held company in the US. Led by Charles Koch the enterprise has funded hundreds of millions of dollars in “research” in the fields of climate change denial, working to rollback environmental, health and safety regulations, and “reimagining education” in the US.
Very true; the Koch brothers are a continuing joy...
Thank you very much for sharing your writings.
A small and slightly pedantic point; Paulus was just a plain Paulus. His family background was a relatively humble one, and his surname never had the aristocratic prefix of ‘von’.
For some reason this is a common mistake.
My mother's younger brother (they grew up in Berlin) was an 18-year-old German recruit killed at Stalingrad. My father's younger sister (they grew up in St. Petersburg) was a medical resident at the siege of Leningrad. (She later recalled there were not enough live bodies to clear the dead off the streets.) In May 1945, my father--exiled to the gulag as a nineteen-year-old in 1931, later to defect through the free-fire zone in '41--was helping submerge Gehlen's Eastern intelligence archives for safekeeping in Lake Constance. After the war, my aunt was exiled for her entire working life to Tashkent, where she served as chief pathologist of the Karaganda city hospital. (My parents met in Freiburg in '46, and we emigrated to America in 1953.) In the 1980s, when my father and his sister were finally able to meet once again, in Germany, my aunt told him, "I feel like Alice in Wonderland. I thought Germany lost the war."
"Stalin wasn't stallin' when he beat the beast of Berlin", 1943, Willie Johnson, originally recorded by Golden Gate Quartet (Johnson was a member), 1943. Cover version by Robert Wyatt, 1980.
And wishing Adam a speedy recovery and seasons greetings.
Wishing Adam a speedy recovery from his surgery!
Many thanks! I'm rereading Stalingrad now. It's even better the second time around.
The summons appears to be in the name of "Josef Solomonovich Grossman".
It is for a reason - Vasiliy was the pseudonym (mind that antisemitism was very much alive and well both before during and after WW2) he used.
I suspected as much, but "Grossman" ought to have been enough of a dead giveaway.
Upon brief scrolling through several biographic articles, I came across the statement that he was raised by a Russian babysitter who called him “Vasia” (diminutive from Vassily) instead of “Yosia” (diminutive from Josef), and the name stuck. And, seemingly, his understanding of his identity as a Jewish-born Russian writer only crystallized during the war years (see Black book mentioned in the newsletter); before that, he defined himself as a Soviet Russian. After 1952, he was forced to acknowledge his Jewishness because of the brutal “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign initiated by Stalin.
So the pseudonym apparently was not hiding his Jewishness, rather it distanced Josef the man from Vassily the writer. Thanks for the comment, as it made me think a bit more than I expected!
The Finster aims to please.
Thank you for such a fierce and wrenching essay. I missed it the first time it was out, and I was captivated this time. Also, I read Ehrenburg’s memoirs recently, and the whole postwar choking of Grossman is incredibly depressing.
"Vassal states" that's even worse. They controlled you without having to occupy. That means you were part of the Ottoman empire!
Romania was one of the most enthusiastic participants in the Holocaust and Hitler's wars of extermination. 380,000 victims were ascribed to the actions of Romanian fascist forces in the areas it controlled in the USSR as well as the hundreds of thousand of Jews and Gypsies you surrendered to the Nazis. That's more even Italy or Vichy! Is that your defence of Romania's honour?
There was no way logistically Britain could support Poland in 1939 but the Poles continued to fight on the British side until 1945 while you allied with Hitler. The Poles are deeply grateful for Britain's role. Britain fought for longer on more fronts against Hitler and Japan than any other from 1939-45 In the west, Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, in Italy, Africa, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean Burma. And for most of the war it fought alone.
It was Britain that kept the USSR in the war in 1941/42 without whose support through Arctic convoys and bombing German cities it would have collapsed. So it was Britain that saved the Soviets. Soviet losses in 1941 were so enormous 75% of the tanks defending Moscow were British.
And what was Romania doing? Helping Hitler with all its feeble, inept might just to expand its own territory while joining in the Holocaust and other atrocities. The most bloodstained record of any of Hitler's allies and you attack the Finns for surrendering 8 Jews!
Without Britain the US would never have entered the war in Europe but left it to Hitler and Stalin. So without Britain either Hitler or possibly both would have won the war and occupied all of Europe. Not that you would care. You would have accommodated yourself with their criminal tyrannies and made yourself useful.
Romania's conduct in WWI was not as shameful but still opportunistic self serving and in the end totally inconsequential to the war's outcome. Again it was Britain that bore the brunt of the fighting that kept Russia and France in the war, defeated your former masters Ottoman Turkey and took the brunt of the German offensive in 1918 that led to the collapse of the German army and final victory. In 1914 Britain's army was smaller than Romania's. And yet you collapsed inside a year!
Britain has fought and won all its wars and fought honourably often against impossible odds. Yours is a history of defeat, cowardly, capitulation occupation and proudly calling yourself a vassal state for most of your history. Your history since has been one of autocracy, cruelty, corruption, duplicity, tyranny, torture and bloodshed. It's only thanks to the EU that you haven't returned to your natural state of primitive barbarism, autocracy and kleptocracy.
Britain hasn't been conquered or even invaded for over millennia. We are never defeated. Britain has always been the beacon of freedom for those who want to live in peace.
Defeat is your way of life.
60. NO no
Hi Adam, I hope you are recovering well! I very much enjoy your wrtitng and podcasts and hope you'll be back in the saddle soon. I've learned a lot from you. Here are my own reflections of being a patient. Perpahs there is something here that you'll find helpful: https://substack.com/@onbeingapatient