Posted on 05/13/2019 7:53:33 PM PDT by marshmallow
That’s only a common sense.
And if Stalin were alive to hear that?
Stalin gambled an won on the bet the Germans would run out of bullets before Stalin ran out of bullet fodder. He won that bet. The Russians lost hard.
The first thing Stalin did after the Germans invaded was to appeal to Russian nationalism, not socialist glory.
Stalin wanted the highest number of dead, and still be able to win.
This accomplished several things. First, it reduced the population, so as to make the country easier to manage. It also allowed the USSR to use the number of dead as a bargaining chip, since they could claim that since they lost so many, they were entitled to certain concessions.
The USSR still could have accomplished all of their goals in WWII and lost a lot fewer of its citizens in the process, but Stalin wasn’t interested in that.
Enemy At The Gates
And heaven forbid if you were a POW returning to the Soviet Union after the war.
I would make the case that Stalin really was not much different than Hitler.
Stalin, despite being Georgian, very much believed that Russians were superior to the other Nationalities that composed the Soviet Union, this went against the diktats of Lenin and Trotsky, who were internationalists, and wanted to destroy all vestiges of Russian Nationalism.
Stalin imposed “Russification” of the Soviet Union, requiring Russian to be the first language all across the country. Ethnic minorities were uprooted, with native Russians displacing him. In essence, not much different than Hitler’s “Master Race”.
“” “” Stalin gambled an won on the bet the Germans would run out of bullets before Stalin ran out of bullet fodder. He won that bet. The Russians lost hard.”” “”
That’s a gross misconception already debunked. High Soviet death toll is mostly due to Nazi brutality towards POWs and civilians.
It is true that the Soviets did care less about casualties especially during important battles but overall since 1943 they were killing more Germans in action than Germans managed to kill them.
Russians lost 100,000 in just taking Berlin.
The Allies could have waltzed in there at a fraction of the cost, but the Russians insisted on taking the city themselves.
You are right. Battle of Berlin was the most important of all. As for Stalin it is very likely that Hitler would not dare to attack if not for the Stalin’s purges of the military.
Also, look at the areas that Stalin allowed Hitler basically to go into unimpeded at the start of Barbarossa, and note it was where the bulk of the Jews of the Soviet Union lived.
Stalin figured that Hitler might be able to help him with his own “Jewish Problem” in the meantime.
I don’t believe Stalin was antisemitic before late 1940s. He made antisemitism a capital crime before the war and it created an epidemy of false hate crimes typical to that you see in US. I don’t believe it was possible to choose where would the Germans go
He pretty much killed all of the Jewish Bolsheviks before the war. His anti-semitism was lifelong and well-documented. He just was more subtle than Hitler about it.
I think he killed them because they were Bolsheviks and rivals and Jewishness was a little factor if any. Soviet administration was still heavily Jewish until 1970s when Brezhnev allowed emigration.
If I were FDR, I would have never given Stalin his second front.
He didn’t really need it. The second front was to insure that Stalin would not go as far as Portugal.
Considering the fact that he had a large portion of the officer ranks purged he was lucky he didnt wind up speaking German.
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