unpreparedness of the Soviet people and of the Red Army in 1941, on the eve of the
German invasion. The picture, it must be said, is slightly exaggerated because, as will have been seen from our story of the Soviet-German Pact period, there was
unquestionably in the country a growing uneasiness which, especially after the fall of Yugoslavia in April 1941, developed into real anxiety.
No less serious than this psychological unpreparedness for an all-out war against Nazi Germany was the military unpreparedness of the Red Army both as regards the actual
training of the men and the quantity and especially the quality of their equipment.
A major question that arises in this connection is whether the Soviet Government really made full use of the twenty-two months' respite given it by the Soviet-German Pact. The argument put forward by present-day Soviet historians is that the Soviet Union had a very sound economic and industrial base in 1940-1, that "the importance of the defence measures taken during these twenty-two months cannot be overrated", but that the net result of it all was not as good as might have been expected. On the one hand it is true, Soviet economy had a material and technical base which would permit it to embark
on the mass-production of all forms of modern armaments ... and meet the needs of both the Armed Forces and the population in case of war... The armaments
industry, based on a heavy industry, was able, before the war, to supply the Army with all the necessary equipment, to set aside reserves, and fully supply new
formations with equipment once the war had begun. With vast raw material
resources, the Soviet Union was economically prepared to repel a fascist aggression.
[IVOVSS, vol. I, p. 405.]
The Soviet Union had the largest engineering industry in Europe, and some 9,000 large new industrial enterprises had been set up under the three Five-Year Plans—1,500 under the first, 4,500 under the second, and 3,000 during the first three years of the third (that is, up to 1941). In 1940 she produced 18.3 million tons of steel, 31 million tons of oil and 166 million tons of coal—these production figures were, moreover, to be substantially increased in 1941. Military expenditure had represented only 12.7 per cent of the budget during the Second Five-Year Plan, but had, since the beginning of World War II, risen to 26.4 per cent, and, in 1941, "there was a further increase in connection with the technical re-equipment of the Army". Since September 1939, in particular, measures had been taken by the Party and the Government to increase in the next one-and-a-half to two years the productive capacity of certain armaments industries, and particularly of the aircraft industry, by at least 100 per cent.
But all this planning was one thing, and the actual results were quite another. These, as the History admits, were still extremely disappointing by the end of 1940; nor were they spectacular by any means by the middle of 1941, at the time of the German invasion.
The new Soviet models—the Yak-1 and Mig-3 fighters and the Pe-2 bombers—began to
be produced in 1940, but only in very small quantities. Thus only twenty Mig-3's, sixty-four Yak-l's and one or two Pe-2's were produced in 1940. The position improved
somewhat in the first half of 1941, when 1,946 of the new fighter planes—the Mig-3's, Lagg-3's and Yak-1's—were produced, as well as 458 Pe-2 bombers and 249 Il-2
stormoviks.
But these quantities were totally insufficient to increase substantially the proportion of modern planes in the army, and, by June 1941, the great majority of army planes
consisted of obsolete models.
[ IVOVSS. vol. I, p. 415.]
The performance of the tank industry was no better. In June 1941 the Red Army had a
very large number of tanks, but nearly all of these, too, were obsolete.
The new tanks, the KV and the T-34—which were later to prove more than a match for
the German tanks—were not yet in production in 1939; in 1940 only 243 KV tanks and
115 T-34 tanks were produced; not till the first half of 1941 was there an impressive increase; during that period 393 KV's and 1,110 T-34's came off the assembly line.
Similarly, the production of guns, mortars and automatic weapons proceeded at "an intolerably slow pace". For this the Deputy Commissars for Defence, G. I. Kulik, L. Z.
Mekhlis and A. E. Shchadenko are blamed; Kulik, in particular, is taken to task for
having neglected the production of automatic rifles, the value of which he persisted in denying, and the lack of which was to put the Russian infantryman at a great
disadvantage. The production of ammunition in 1941 was lagging behind even that of the guns. Although the first special anti-tank rifles were made in Russia in 1940-1, these had not yet been supplied to the Army by the beginning of the war.
[Ibid., p. 416.]
Another very serious weakness of the Red Army was the absence of a large-scale
automobile industry in the Soviet Union; in June 1941 the Soviet Union had a total of only 800,000 motor vehicles, and a large proportion of guns had to be drawn either by horses or by wholly inadequate farm tractors.
On the other hand Russian artillery is estimated by Russian experts to have been better than German artillery; jet rockets, first used in the Finnish War, began to be produced on a large scale in 1940-1, and Kostikov's famous katyusha mortars were extremely popular with the Red Army almost from the very beginning. They first came into action at
Smolensk about the middle of July.
Radar was still in its infancy in the Red Army, and even ordinary wireless
communications between army units were not the general rule. "Even the minimum
requirements were not fulfilled in this respect. As a result a lot of obsolete material was used. Many officers did not know how to handle wireless communications ... and
preferred the old-fashioned telephone."
[ Ibid., p. 455.]
In a highly mobile war this often proved quite useless.
This is just one example in many of the widespread professional inferiority of the Russian soldier and officer as compared with their German opposite numbers in 1941, and it was, in fact, not till 1943 that, in the estimation of the Russian military leaders themselves, the Russian soldier and officer became professionally as competent as the German, if not more so.
Very few officers or soldiers in 1941 had had any direct experience of war, and many of them were novices who had only lately been trained as "replacements" for the thousands of officers who had been purged back in 1937 and 1938. Although the officer's "single command" had been re-introduced in August 1940 through the eclipse of military
commissars, an uneasy relationship continued to exist between many officers and those Party and Komsomol cadres in the Army which were expected to go on "helping" the officers; and, in July, the fully-fledged military commissars were reintroduced again.
Although (in July 1940) fifty-four per cent of officers were Party members or Party
candidates and twenty-two per cent were Komsomols, there remained, among the
officers, a constant after-taste of the Tukhachevsky affair, and a feeling of strain between them and certain Party bosses in the army with their anti-officer complex. It was not till the autumn of 1942, as we shall see, that the officer fully came into his own rights.
The training of specialised troops—notably tank crews and airmen—had also been
seriously neglected. There are some quite astounding admissions on this score in the official History. Not only was there a shortage of modern tanks and planes in the frontier areas on the day the Germans struck, but there was also a serious shortage of properly trained airmen and tank crews: