"military genius" that Soviet military historians got down to the job of explaining what really happened.
The explanations given for the disasters of 1941 are numerous and touch on a very wide range of subjects. Among the principal long-term causes some were historical (e.g. the 1937 purges in the Red Army); some were psychological (the constant propaganda about the invincibility of the Red Army); some were professional (lack of any proper
experience of war among the Red Army as compared with the Germans and, in many
cases, a low standard of training); some, finally, were economic (the failure of the Soviet war industries, despite the breathing-space provided by the Soviet-German Pact, to turn the Red Army into a well-equipped modern army).
Whether, as seems likely, the Red Army would have been perfectly fit to fight the
Germans in 1942, it was obviously not in a condition to do so in 1941.
One of the most important recent Russian publications, printed in 1960, is the first volume of the official History of the War. This explains with refreshing candour many of the things that went wrong in 1941. In particular, it deals in considerable detail with the bad psychological conditioning for the "next" war of both the Red Army and the Soviet people generally.
Thus, it draws particular attention to the wishful thinking pervading the famous Draft Field Regulations of 1939 which said:
Any enemy attack on the Soviet Union will be met by a smashing blow from its
armed forces;
If any enemy inflicts war upon us, our Red Army will be the most fiercely-attacking army the world has ever known;
We shall conduct the war offensively, and carry it into enemy territory;
The activity of the Red Army will aim at the complete destruction of the enemy and the achievement of a decisive victory at a small cost in blood.
The present-day History strongly criticises this document, as well as other pieces of military doctrine current in the Red Army before 1941.
Soviet strategic theory [it says] as propounded by the Draft Field Regulations of 1939 and other documents did not prove to be entirely realistic. For one thing, they denied the effectiveness of the blitzkrieg which tended to be dismissed as a lopsided bourgeois theory. Soviet military theory was largely based on the principle of ending any attack on the Soviet Union with the complete rout of the enemy on his own
territory.
Thus, the whole emphasis of Soviet military theory was on the offensive, and the failure of both Poland and France to break the German attack was, all too easily, attributed to a) the lack of organised resistance and b) the nefarious activities of "fifth columns" in the rear in the case of France, and to the lack of national homogeneity in the case of the Polish army.
Soviet strategy (says the History) considered defence as an essential part of war, but stressed its subsidiary role in relation to offensive operations. In principle, our strategy considered a forced retreat as a possibility, but only on a limited and isolated part of the front, and as a temporary measure, connected with preparations for the offensive. The question of large forces having to break out of a threatened
encirclement was never seriously examined at all... (Emphasis added.) This makes, indeed, ironical reading in the light of what happened in 1941. There is another important point the History makes— namely, the "deadening" effect on Soviet military thought of the Stalin "personality cult":
This "personality cult" led to dogmatism and scholasticism, which impaired the independent initiative of military research. It was necessary to wait for the
instructions by a single man, and to look for the confirmation of theoretical
propositions, not in life and practical experience, but in ready-made formulae and quotations... All this greatly reduced the scope of any free discussions of military theory.
[IVOVSS, vol. I, p. 439. ]
There were other shortcomings. The Red Army had had very little actual experience of war. Its only major experience dated back to the Civil War of 1918-20, and the conditions in which that war was fought had very little relevance to modern warfare. Experience was, indeed, soon to show that heroes of the Civil War like Budienny and Voroshilov
were completely out of their depth in the war conditions of 1941. True, there had, since then, been the war in Spain, in which the Russians had participated in a small way, but, as the History says,
The limited and peculiar nature of the war in Spain was wrongly interpreted. Thus, the conclusion was reached that the concept of large tank units—though we were
the first to have applied them in practice— was erroneous. As a result our
mechanised tank corps were dissolved, and did not begin to be reconstituted again until the very eve of the German invasion.
[Ibid.]
There had also been, in 1938-9, the successful battles against the Japanese at Lake
Hassan and Halkin Gol, but these again were different from the vast war of 1941. Certain bitter lessons, it is true, had been learned from the Winter War in Finland, but had not yet been sufficiently implemented. As for the German invasion of Poland and France, there was still an irresponsible tendency in the Red Army to imagine that "it couldn't happen here". At least not along a vast front.
This irresponsible optimism and wishful thinking were faithfully reflected in the
"political-educational" work done in the Red Army in 1940-1. The History now readily admits that some appalling mistakes were made in this education, especially in all
questions concerning Germany. Under the influence of the Soviet-Nazi Pact, anti-Nazi propaganda was toned down to an almost unbelievable extent. Nothing was done to
suggest that the Germans were Russia's most likely enemies in the next war. Instead, the Molotov line continued to be plugged that it was in the "state interests" of both countries not to attack one another. Much of the propaganda both in the army and among the Soviet people generally was, in 1940 and even in 1941, full of the most infantile wishful
thinking.
On the eve of the War (says the History) great harm was done by suggesting that any enemy attacking the Soviet Union would be easily defeated. There were popular films
such as If War Comes Tomorrow and the like which kept rubbing in the idea... Even some army papers followed a similar line. Many writers and propagandists put across the
pernicious idea that any fascist or imperialist state that attacked us would collapse at the very first shots, since the workers would rebel against their government. They wholly underrated the extent to which, in fascist countries, the masses had been doped, how terror had largely silenced the rebels, and how soldiers, officers and their families had all acquired a vested interest in military loot.
[IVOVSS, vol. I, pp. 434-5.]
Nevertheless, even after the war had started, Molotov and Stalin still continued to
distinguish between the "long-suffering" German people and the criminal Nazi clique!
Such, according to the History, were the main factors of the psychological