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You get into trouble with counter-factuals like this - Stalin did in fact lead the Red Army to victory - but then maybe you wouldn't have had the Hitler-Stalin pact. It's also difficult to disentangle the propagandized myth of Stalin from the real thing. Is it that Stalin was necessary to defeat Hitler? Or is believing this necessary to justify Stalin's rule?
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Jul 1, 2014 06:00
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Molotov–Ribbentrop sounds like a perfectly sensible idea. Russia needed a bit more time to industrialise and re-arm, so while you're at it, why don't you fascists take our oil and rubber and minerals and use it to gently caress up the capitalists? It's not like the capitalists hadn't landed soldiers on our ports several years back to gently caress us up.
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Jul 1, 2014 06:19
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quote:Yet the greatest German intelligence error lay in under-estimating the Soviet ability to reconstitute shattered units and form new forces from scratch. Given the German expectation of a swift victory, their neglect of this Soviet capability is perhaps understandable. In practice, however, the Red Army’s ability to create new divisions as fast as the Germans smashed existing ones was a principal cause of the German failure in 1941. For much of the 1920s and 1930s, the Red Army had emphasized the idea of cadre and mobilization forces, formations that had very few active duty soldiers in peacetime but would gain reservists and volunteers to become fully-fledged combat elements in wartime. As war approached in the late 1930s, the Red Army tended to neglect this concept, gradually mobilizing most of its existing units to full-time, active duty status. Still, prewar Soviet theory estimated that the army would have to be completely replaced every four to eight months during heavy combat. To satisfy this need, the 1938 Universal Military Service Law extended the reserve service obligation to age 50 and created a network of schools to train those reservists. By the time of the German invasion, the Soviet Union had a pool of 14 million men with at least basic military training. The existence of this pool of trained reservists gave the Red Army a depth and resiliency that was largely invisible to German and other observers. From David Glantz's Operation Barbarossa
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Jul 1, 2014 06:25
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Raskolnikov38 posted:They are also all reasons why EE isn't living or visiting in Russia Military service in Russia. Life is good. And the rule of the grandfathers is benign. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Jul 1, 2014 |
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Jul 1, 2014 07:16
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Phobophilia posted:Molotov–Ribbentrop sounds like a perfectly sensible idea. Russia needed a bit more time to industrialise and re-arm, so while you're at it, why don't you fascists take our oil and rubber and minerals and use it to gently caress up the capitalists? It's not like the capitalists hadn't landed soldiers on our ports several years back to gently caress us up. It is really hard to overstate just how much of an industrial change Russia saw in the opening part of the 20th century. Large parts of it were still pretty much agrarian communities with peasants and all before the revolution. They had some industry, but nothing compared to what they had at the start of WWII. Even with the M-R pact the Soviet military was still pretty drat deep in the process of rearming at the start of the invasion, hell even a year or two into it. Just like at Pearl Harbor, a lot of their massive losses in military equipment were of obsolete poo poo (T-26s, T-28s, BT-7s) and the T-34 didn't even become the dominant tank in their forces until at least 1944, I believe.
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Jul 1, 2014 07:30
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Taerkar posted:It is really hard to overstate just how much of an industrial change Russia saw in the opening part of the 20th century. Large parts of it were still pretty much agrarian communities with peasants and all before the revolution. They had some industry, but nothing compared to what they had at the start of WWII. That's the T-34-85 iirc, the 76mm model was probably the backbone of the tank forces by late 1942. Another thing about the M-R Pact, the USSR had been trying desperately to get security agreements with France and Britain to contain Germany; for example the Soviets and the French had an agreement to defend Czechoslovia, but particularly at Munich repeatedly told the Soviets off and so they decided not to be the next country offered on a plate.
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Jul 1, 2014 08:44
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Tomn posted:I realize this is probably getting into gay black Hitler territory in terms of how unanswerable it is, but this statement made me curious - was Stalin's totalitarian and autocratic style of leadership an important factor in the Soviet Union not falling apart politically in the early days of Barbarossa? Did it hold together primarily because Stalin was willing to fight and nobody was really willing to cross Stalin directly, or was the Soviet Union likely to have held together, regrouped and hit back anyways, Stalin or no Stalin? As difficult as it is to admit because of the consequences of his leadership, Stalin was a huge part of the USSR being able to withstand the German onslaught. Bear in mind that by 1941 he had systematically eliminated all those at high levels of leadership who opposed his way of thinking, and cowed all others into submission. Where the USSR could exert state control (which was not everywhere, despite the myth of the totalitarian state), it was directly exerting Stalin's will and his decisions. As a result, we can attribute most major events in the USSR from the early 30s on to Stalin's decision-making. Recent archival research by guys like Oleg Khlevniuk have shown that Stalin was deeply involved in day-to-day decision making at all levels and in all areas of Soviet politics. He was directly responsible for the massive forced industrialization of the USSR in the 1930s, which resulted in millions of deaths but also built up the heavy industry that was essential to Soviet survival. His particular brand of paranoia certainly contributed to the Soviet doctrine that they would have to fight a war of survival at some point, and so they prepared for it in peacetime--this wasn't just the industrial adaptability that others have mentioned, it also extended to Soviet propaganda and treatment of society. Soviet citizens were told from the first day they set foot in a classroom that someday they would have to fight, and possibly die, to defend their homeland from the fascists and the capitalists in a war of annihilation. They were prepared for a total war in ways that the Germans simply weren't, because every campaign Nazi Germany had fought up to that point was won in a single operational campaign. The counterfactual is very difficult to answer because the question is where and when you replace Stalin, who is in charge instead, and what they do differently. If Stalin had shot himself on June 22, 1941, there may not have been a lot different because so much groundwork had already been laid for the Soviet ability to throw bodies at the Germans until their tanks ran out of gas. if Stalin had never come to power in the 20s, there's no way of knowing how the USSR would have been. It's an unanswerable question.
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Jul 1, 2014 09:22
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I find it fascinating that while Hitler delved deeper and deeper into the minutia of the Wehrmacht's activities, right down to ordering battalion-scale (!) maps of the war, Stalin started from the opposite end of getting directly involved with Stavka's activities then slowly learned to trust generals like Zhukov and Rokossovskiy over time.
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Jul 1, 2014 09:49
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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:This also led indirectly to the idea that the katana is vastly superior to any European sword. Because firearms were introduced to Japan rather than innovated, swords were seen as a symbol of Japan's glorious military tradition while Western pop culture viewed swords as unwieldy relics. World War II and the subsequent occupation showed American soldiers how a sword is still a sharp deadly weapon, and the idea spread around that Japanese swords specifically were better than anything produced in Europe. I'm not sure where I read it, but the Allies were supposedly less than impressed with Japanese swords and rated their close quarters effectiveness not just below bayonets and handguns, but also below shovels.
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Jul 1, 2014 12:22
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Yeah, I think the mystique of the katana has a lot less to do with their use as a battle weapon and a lot more to do with attempts to rehabilitate Bushido culture in the eyes of the world during Japan's attempt to become America's Bestest Ally Ever after WWII. Contemporary accounts of encounters with katanas in WWII tend to either be in terms of 'what an insane waste of human life', or 'what a bunch of horrifying war criminals'. The sense that samurai are cool had to be built from the ground up. Fangz fucked around with this message at 12:36 on Jul 1, 2014 |
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Jul 1, 2014 12:28
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I have to be honest, I'm sometimes a bit leery about discussions of Stalin's role in the war since they often seem to treat the astonishing German advance of the first months and catastrophic losses on the Russian side as an inevitability. Considering Stalin's role in eviscerating the Red army's command at the worst possible time and ignoring critical intelligence it would seem to me that he put the Soviet Union at a grossly unnecessary disadvantage to assuage his own paranoia.
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Jul 1, 2014 12:49
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That goes into a whole other bag of counter-factuals about the Red Army and what would have happened if the purges hadn't occurred. I think this goes into fairly nebulous territory since it is hard to say if a coup could have occurred or not either prior or even during Barbarossa (if a coup would have happened at all, that is). I seem to recall that the purges occurred as an attempt to remove Trotsky's influence in the Red Army, although I could have been mistaken about that. Or if something similar to what happened in Barbarossa would have happened even if the purges hadn't taken place.
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Jul 1, 2014 12:56
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khwarezm posted:I have to be honest, I'm sometimes a bit leery about discussions of Stalin's role in the war since they often seem to treat the astonishing German advance of the first months and catastrophic losses on the Russian side as an inevitability. This is sort of tied into how the common view of Barbarossa is that it was just 4-5 months of the Germans swallowing up retreating Russians over and over until they run out of gas / get slowed down by mud / freeze in winter, when really the Russians had a lot of agency in their own successful defense of the Leningrad/Moscow/Rostov line
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Jul 1, 2014 13:01
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the JJ posted:Cavalry et. al. were still in service for quite a while. I don't think the idea that 'steel sharp cutty ow' had quite disappeared from memory that quickly. Cavalry's major advantage ACW onward was strategic mobility, not pressing home a charge.
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Jul 1, 2014 13:08
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The thing with counter-factuals like this is that Stalin and his cronies played an active role in European politics, so if we were to replace him with eg. Trotsky then who is to say that Nazis ever rose to power had German communist party been instructed to fight against Nazis instead of socialists, or would Germany and Soviet Union have agreed on division of Poland, and so on. Not to mention the effects of this on Soviet internal politics. So we really don't even know. Maybe without Stalin there wouldn't have been a war, or maybe without Stalin the war had broken before or later than 1941. However, as a wartime leader Trotsky would have been a far superior choice, he had already shown his competence at organizing the Red Army during the civil war and the Polish war, and before Stalin made him a non-person he enjoyed the genuine respect of veterans, whereas Stalin was a bumbling fool as a military commander and had to build myths of how his genius saved the revolution at Tsaritsyn etc.
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Jul 1, 2014 13:10
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gradenko_2000 posted:This is sort of tied into how the common view of Barbarossa is that it was just 4-5 months of the Germans swallowing up retreating Russians over and over until they run out of gas / get slowed down by mud / freeze in winter, when really the Russians had a lot of agency in their own successful defense of the Leningrad/Moscow/Rostov line Oh, I don't mean to imply that I believe that whole thing about a Teutonic juggernaut sweeping aside an endlessly retreating Bolshevik rabble with basically no resistance until the winter intervened/Mussolini needed help (I've seen the Glantz lecture) but the Germans did advance hundreds miles and the Russians did take almost four times more casualties in the initial invasion, on a purely military level that's quite an achievement for the Germans. I guess what I'd be more curious about would be how Trotsky would have dealt with the situation compared to Stalin, considering his experience in the Civil war. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Jul 1, 2014 |
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Jul 1, 2014 13:19
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khwarezm posted:I have to be honest, I'm sometimes a bit leery about discussions of Stalin's role in the war since they often seem to treat the astonishing German advance of the first months and catastrophic losses on the Russian side as an inevitability. Considering Stalin's role in eviscerating the Red army's command at the worst possible time and ignoring critical intelligence it would seem to me that he put the Soviet Union at a grossly unnecessary disadvantage to assuage his own paranoia. There's a pretty fierce debate about the purges' effect on the Red Army. With the exception of certain pretty clearly boneheaded targets like Tukhachevsky, there's little guarantee that any of the purged Red Army officers would have been any more competent at the defensive campaign of Barbarossa than the officers that replaced them. And beyond the high levels of command, the lower-ranking officers were purged in smaller numbers than usually thought and typically weren't killed, simply removed from their posts, and often allowed back into their posts a year or two later. Arguably more important than the purges themselves were the opportunities that were opened up for the promotion of competent but loyal officers into spaces vacated by officers either killed or removed during the purge, or killed or removed following the failures of Barbarossa. While many of the purged were perfectly loyal themselves, it's equally important that Stalin saw the new officers as loyal as the fact that they actually were, and as time went on he was more and more willing to trust them to handle military affairs rather than intervening directly. Hitler, on the other hand, ensured the loyalty of his officers with enormous bribes and as time went on became convinced of his own military genius and, as we've discussed, micromanaged everything to a ridiculous extent. gradenko_2000 posted:This is sort of tied into how the common view of Barbarossa is that it was just 4-5 months of the Germans swallowing up retreating Russians over and over until they run out of gas / get slowed down by mud / freeze in winter, when really the Russians had a lot of agency in their own successful defense of the Leningrad/Moscow/Rostov line I would argue that the original question also denied agency to the German war machine. Barbarossa was probably the peak of blitzkrieg strategy, and potentially the Nazis best-executed campaign against an enemy with the resources to fight back rather than get overrun. The German military was at its most effective offensively, before many of its most experienced troops were killed in the meatgrinder of the eastern front, and its strategists and tacticians were relatively free of Hitler's interference compared to later campaigns. Framing Barbarossa as only being successful because of Stalin's interference in Soviet affairs completely overlooks how frighteningly effective the German military was during that operation. They also outnumbered the Soviets at the time (large amounts of Soviet forces were very far from the German border), which is often overlooked in the misconception of small elite German forces overrunning giant ineffective Soviet formations.
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Jul 1, 2014 13:19
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Raenir Salazar posted:That's the T-34-85 iirc, the 76mm model was probably the backbone of the tank forces by late 1942. IIRC numbers-wise the Soviets still had a massive number of light tanks in their army in 42 and 43. I think I remember reading that a significant portion of the tanks at Kursk were T-70's, something around 30% or so. Ensign, you have better numbers?
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Jul 1, 2014 16:38
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steinrokkan posted:I'm not sure where I read it, but the Allies were supposedly less than impressed with Japanese swords and rated their close quarters effectiveness not just below bayonets and handguns, but also below shovels. quote:Ronald Reagan has a stack of three-by-five cards in his lap. He skids up a new one: "What advice do you, as the youngest American fighting man ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, have for any young Marines on their way to Guadalcanal?"
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Jul 1, 2014 18:21
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Yeah, Neal Stephenson's obsession with swords is fairly well documented.
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Jul 1, 2014 18:37
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It was one of the less groan-worthy dominant aspects of the Snow Crash.
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Jul 1, 2014 19:05
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steinrokkan posted:It was one of the less groan-worthy dominant aspects of the Snow Crash. "they weren't afraid of the gun, but they feared my swords hurrrrr"
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Jul 1, 2014 19:09
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On the other hand, the sword and pistols that cavalrymen carry are both accurate to the same range, so...
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Jul 1, 2014 19:11
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Taerkar posted:IIRC numbers-wise the Soviets still had a massive number of light tanks in their army in 42 and 43. I think I remember reading that a significant portion of the tanks at Kursk were T-70's, something around 30% or so. Nope, but that's a reasonable estimate. A significant portion of the wartime Soviet tank park (excluding pre-war obsolete models) consisted of T-60s/T-70s, and SU-76es, even until the end of the war. RE: Hanzo steel: The metallurgical examination of a Japanese samurai sword
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Jul 1, 2014 19:16
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Katanas were valued as good swords back when people were still using them often, and there are stories of sailors dropping tons of money for them when in port in japan, only to buy a piece of poo poo while attempting to buy a real katana. However they were not special death machines and Japanese mercenaries fought Europeans using armor and swords in the 1600's and poo poo and lost.
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Jul 1, 2014 19:24
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Counterfactuals are silly, and we're so deep into "Gay, black Hitler" territory here that I'm pretty sure he's a transvestite vulcan at this point. That said, a few minor points on the actual history of one of the few things I really know stuff about :vyelkin posted:His particular brand of paranoia certainly contributed to the Soviet doctrine that they would have to fight a war of survival at some point, and so they prepared for it in peacetime--this wasn't just the industrial adaptability that others have mentioned, it also extended to Soviet propaganda and treatment of society. Soviet citizens were told from the first day they set foot in a classroom that someday they would have to fight, and possibly die, to defend their homeland from the fascists and the capitalists in a war of annihilation. They were prepared for a total war in ways that the Germans simply weren't, because every campaign Nazi Germany had fought up to that point was won in a single operational campaign. You're absolutely right about Stalin coming into office in the early 30s, which is kind of interesting because that's precisely when Hitler shows up as THE political power in Germany. The thing is, what you're describing Stalin doing is exactly what Hitler also attempted to do, especially with the indoctrination of kids via youth groups and a deeply hosed with educational system. The big problem for what you're saying, and the big problem for both Stalin and Hitler, is that the war just came to early for any of this to have any real effect. The real nasty raised-from-the-ground-up True Believers were only just beginning to come online at a draftable age in 1945. Someone who would have been of kindergarten age in 1933 is ~16 in '45. Even if we assume that focused indoctrination in the classroom is effective if you only start it in late elementary school only the youngest of your soldiers in 1941 are going to have come through your system. There were all kinds of studies done on German kids at all ages after WW2 by both the Soviets and the Americans to try and figure out just how hosed over they were trying to re-educate the worst of the bunch, the kids who had been exposed from day 1 of their formal schooling to nothing but hardcore Nazi ideology. The net result across the spectrum was "not really." Whether it's because governments systematically over estimate how effective propagandization is to children, or the Nazis just being bad at it, or kids bouncing back from that poo poo faster than you'd expect or whatever other reason you would want to put forward is completely up in the air. That said, the denazification of German youth was not nearly as difficult as had been feared during the war, which itself calls into question just how effective it was in the first place. The average age of a soldier in WW2 was 26. The losses incurred in WW1 don't really matter as much as most people think they do, mostly because that generation was too old to participate in large numbers (i.e. the rank and file). The majority of WW2 in the East, both in Germany and Russia, was fought by men who had their formative educational experiences under the governments immediately before Hitler/Stalin. In the case of the Germans that's of course Weimar, and oh holy poo poo do things get complex when you try to make any broad statements about what the typical educational experience was there or what kind of political agenda the teachers had. In the case of the Soviets you're looking at the years when Lunacharskii was Commissar for Education, and he was a HUUUUUUUGE proponent of all sorts of crazy experimental poo poo, to the point where Soviet education between 1919 and 1927 was obscenely fractured and non-standard. We're talking three completely different programs for primary and secondary education with abrupt transitions between them without regard to curricular, administrative, classroom, or scheduling disruptions. Bubnov, was put in by Stalin in 1929 and hated progressive education at just about every level possible and flushed everything again leading to yet more disruption. This isn't to say that education was totally ineffective between WW1 and Stalin - indeed they did some really amazing poo poo just getting the school and laboring-age population up to basic literacy standards and the early Soviet initiatives in adult education are really amazing - but the politically indoctrinative machine you're describing didn't exist until the mid 30s at the earliest (if at all - I don't want to get into the weeds with arguments over specific aspects of the curricula as I haven't done personal research with Russian sources and am therefore dependent on secondary literature here). Everyone Else posted:Gay Nazi Black Stalin from Space vs. Jewish Robo-Hitler! The one thing I'll add to our counterfactual detour is that you can't underestimate the loyalty issue that people have pointed out re: the purges. How many countries have suffered the catastrophic wholloping that the Soviets took in 1941 without fracturing at the command level? Yet not a single Russian general - not even the guys commanding back water border garrisons - decides to take his army and declare some bizarro SW Asian People's Republic or whatever. On the other hand look at what happened within the Imperial ranks when things got really hair in WW1, especially after the political revolt. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Jul 1, 2014 |
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Jul 1, 2014 19:25
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Speaking of the Eastern Front, Grey Hunter is running a Goon v. Goon Combat Mission LP that'll be starting soon, if you're into that sort of thing. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3645658&pagenumber=1&perpage=40
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Jul 1, 2014 22:25
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There was some fun stuff going on with orientalism after Japan hosed up Russia in 1904-1905. Lots of western interest in their culture and such. I got photos of my family from around that time all dressed up like what their idea of a Japanese family was and I've read reports of Western officers sent to Japan to figure out what made them win, including officers that got sent to their schools and had to attend classes there to figure out their martial spirit. Basically, picture a grown man in uniform attending Japanese basic education and taking some very serious notes.
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Jul 2, 2014 00:53
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Cyrano4747 posted:The one thing I'll add to our counterfactual detour is that you can't underestimate the loyalty issue that people have pointed out re: the purges. How many countries have suffered the catastrophic wholloping that the Soviets took in 1941 without fracturing at the command level? Yet not a single Russian general - not even the guys commanding back water border garrisons - decides to take his army and declare some bizarro SW Asian People's Republic or whatever. On the other hand look at what happened within the Imperial ranks when things got really hair in WW1, especially after the political revolt. To reframe the original question that started this derail in a way that isn't gay black Hitler: Why did the Soviet Union not fracture politically upon contact with Barbarossa? The original phrasing with Stalin was because I was wondering how far a leadership style based on fear and total control by one man contributed to the Soviet Union staying united even during some of the worst hammering the world had seen to date - I wasn't really interested in Stalin himself.
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Jul 2, 2014 05:02
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Tomn posted:To reframe the original question that started this derail in a way that isn't gay black Hitler: Why did the Soviet Union not fracture politically upon contact with Barbarossa? The original phrasing with Stalin was because I was wondering how far a leadership style based on fear and total control by one man contributed to the Soviet Union staying united even during some of the worst hammering the world had seen to date - I wasn't really interested in Stalin himself. You have to be interested in Stalin himself if that's the question you're answering, because a huge amount of the answer to your question is bound up in the figure of Stalin and his actions prior to 1941. By June 1941 the Soviet Union was maybe as close to l'etat c'est moi as a state had been until that point (this is an exaggeration, of course). Stalin had systematically eliminated all his political rivals, and then went one further by eliminating all the people who could have potentially been his rivals in the future, and rounded it off by making sure everyone that was left was completely dependent on him for their patronage networks and lived in fear for their lives constantly because they knew he controlled whether they lived or died or were Politburo members or governors of prison camps in Siberia. When the Germans invaded, the response of the political leadership was not to turn against Stalin for letting it happen, but to turn to Stalin as their leader and empower him even further. On top of that, the state ruthlessly controlled the flow of information. This was a thing that Stalin had put in place long before Barbarossa, but it came in handy then by hiding the actual magnitude of Soviet failure. Losses, retreats, and surrenders were simply not reported to the Soviet people, who got most of their information on the conduct of the war either through rumours and hearsay or through what small details could be gleaned from official sources--things like "they said we were defending Minsk last week and this week we're defending Smolensk, so we must have retreated from Minsk." The actual scale of the Red Army's destruction wasn't known to most Russians, though they could get an idea of it. On top of that, the Soviets didn't have to try very hard to paint the invading Germans as monsters, given that annihilation of Soviet Jews and mistreatment of everyone else was an institutionalized part of the Nazi regime and a major reason for their invasion. Everyone knew what Germany was doing to the civilian population behind their lines. Soldiers from Ukraine knew what was happening to their families when Ukraine had fallen into enemy hands--Vasily Grossman, for example, lost his Ukrainian Jewish mother to the Germans and despite being in Moscow and then on the front lines, far away from Ukraine, he knew what would happen to her if she was captured, and when her town was captured by the Germans he knew she was probably dead. While it's true that a lot of non-Jewish Soviets, especially in areas that had been hit the worst by Stalin's famines and repression, welcomed the Germans, they managed to squander almost all their goodwill by treating the captured civilians as subhuman. As a result, you had a relatively remarkable degree of unity within the non-occupied parts of the Soviet Union, given how much damage the state had suffered and how fractured other states in similar circumstances, including Russia in World War One, become. At the political leadership level, everyone was dependent on Stalin and unwilling to turn on him. And at the ordinary citizen level, most Soviets were motivated by a combination of anger and a desire for revenge against the Germans who had invaded their homes and caused such untold suffering; and fear at what might happen to them should the Germans win or should they not do their part and the Soviet authorities turn on them. Cyrano4747 posted:Education stuff You make a lot of really good points here about education and I don't want to pretend like I'm an expert on the subject, my field is earlier in Russian history. I do want to bring up Merridale's point about the Red Army though, which is that the Red Army that fought the Winter War and Barbarossa was not the Red Army of 1942, and the Red Army of 1942 was not the Red Army of 1945. Simply put, the turnover and casualty rate of the Soviet military during this time meant that entire generations of soldiers were wiped out and replaced with newer, fresher, and generally more indoctrinated generations. Not all of this came about in the classroom, though Soviet education certainly did hammer home the point about a cataclysmic war where the fascists/capitalists would try to wipe out socialism once and for all. A lot of it was also wartime propaganda about how awful the Germans were and how soldiers should fight for their motherland and their families, combined with the previously-mentioned anger and desire for revenge on the Germans, and fear for their lives and families from both sides. There's also a discourse in recent scholarship on the Red Army about how the hardships of Soviet life prepared later Red Army soldiers for the hardships of war. Famine, repression, collectivization, and so on may have hardened or brutalized Soviet men and women and prepared them, more than the Germans, for things like the Soviet winter or urban combat. I'm more hesitant to embrace this approach though because I think it falls into more cognitive traps of seeing the Soviets as simply more hardy people who were saved by their backwardness or the Germans as spoiled by civilization or whatever. I think that approach can undermine the importance of things like small-unit tactics, motivation, and preparation, which were crucial aspects of the war that the Soviets got better and better at as it went on.
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Jul 2, 2014 08:50
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Tomn posted:To reframe the original question that started this derail in a way that isn't gay black Hitler: Why did the Soviet Union not fracture politically upon contact with Barbarossa? The original phrasing with Stalin was because I was wondering how far a leadership style based on fear and total control by one man contributed to the Soviet Union staying united even during some of the worst hammering the world had seen to date - I wasn't really interested in Stalin himself. I'd argue that the answer is that modern states are a lot more sturdy than you'd think. It's the ones that *do* fracture on first contact with the enemy that are the exceptions. WWI's fall of Russia was a mix of fortuitous circumstances that are not often repeated.
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Jul 2, 2014 09:49
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A common misconception is that totalitarian regimes are shallow because they rely on a single figure or on a clique of few top cadres. That's actually a description fitting various praetorian developing countries in Latin America, Africa etc. with more or less dysfunctional political systems. However, totalitarian regimes proper are in fact characterized first and foremost by an extreme political robustness and depth of cadres which manifests itself through nigh constant and universal political mobilization. A working totalitarian regime is going to be very stable regardless of its leadership and factors such as economic performance because the visible leadership only represents an ideology that has been fused with the nation's society, and Stalin's Russia was definitely one of the very few working totalitarian regimes, maybe even the only one.
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Jul 2, 2014 10:05
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After seeing a calendar on the wall of a shop which was printed by the Association of Dresden Vietnam War Veterans, I would like to know more about the Communist Vietnamese experience of the Vietnam War.
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Jul 2, 2014 20:30
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HEY GAL posted:After seeing a calendar on the wall of a shop which was printed by the Association of Dresden Vietnam War Veterans, I would like to know more about the Communist Vietnamese experience of the Vietnam War. The best account I've ever read from the Vietnamese side is Troung Nhu Tang's A Vietcong Memoir. He was a way early follower of Ho Chi Minh, meeting him when they were both students in Paris, and ended up a high ranking Viet Min and VC officer during the wars. Later on got really disillusioned by the way the Vietnamese government turned out and, if I recall correctly, joined the boat people exodus in the 70s. I think he's the highest ranking defector we ever had, seeing as he was their Minister of Justice at one point. The book does a great job of giving the Vietnamese side of the fight from the beginning, using his own childhood to explain why colonialism was a deeply ambivalent thing. His family was privileged as gently caress under the French system since they'd been higher ups in the old mandarin system and he personally benefitted greatly from his French education, so he has a hard time arguing that it was all negatives, but at the same time he was also keenly aware of just how much his country was getting poo poo on by France. The war bits are good too.
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Jul 2, 2014 23:29
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this fantastic book has testimonies from both sides http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vietnam-Definitive-Oral-History-Sides/dp/0091910129
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Jul 3, 2014 15:23
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12th April, 1626 Valentin Treutler or von Treutler, Gemeinwebel, and Johann Eckert, common soldier, had a drink together in "Treutler's village." (The village where he had been quartered. They also say things like "my house" for, well, your house.) And as they were walking home together happily, a member of the village council met the Gemeinwebel by chance and walked beside him. Eckert, who was walking behind both of them, ran up behind the councilman and smacked him on the back of the head. At that the peasants formed a mob, threatening to wipe Treutler and Eckert out. Then a bunch more soldiers showed up. The Gemeinwebel repeatedly told Eckert to keep his dagger in, go back to his quarters, and stay there until the Hauptmann called for him. But Eckert not only refused to sheathe his dagger, he mouthed off to Treutler, saying that he had beef with this peasant ("er hielte es mit dem bauern") and other stuff in that vein--very improper talk. And so the Gemeinwebel, after he was done exhorting him, went for his dagger, and Eckert set himself against him and became wounded. The Gemeinwebel immediately called for the Feldscherr's apprentices. Eight days later, the Gemeinwebel and a bunch of their friends (all but one of them from the same town that Treutler was) went into Eckert's quarters and found him lying in bed. With tears in his eyes, the Gemeinwebel offered Eckert his hand. "What are you doing?" he asked. "I'm thinking very hard about getting better," Eckert said ("er heffte der beßerungk"), but that has to have been a joke, since the reason everyone was there is that the time had come for their culture's ritual of public death. Treutler said to Eckert that if he had anything against him, to please forgive him from the bottom of his heart. One witness says that Eckert said yes; another said that he was so weak he couldn't speak easily so it was hard to understand what he said. But all the witnesses agreed that Treutler and his victim clasped hands, weeping, and then Eckert's temporal life was over. Verdict, according to the praiseworthy Imperial War-Law: Treutler was forced to use his dagger against Eckert with the repeated cause that the latter had given him. He shall not be punished either by life or by body, by his honorable name, by his money or his material goods, but instead is free, quit, and loose. Conclusion: It's not only normal to throw down with your inferiors in the middle of a street fight, it's morally neutral. It may even be good. Eckert's actions, although "repugnant," were also normal, expected. These people are constantly comparing themselves with one another; in this prickly world, you have to respond to a challenge. And who does what may still be fluid enough that Eckert and Treutler met as relative equals--one is a superior officer, sure, but he was elected to that position from the soldiers, and "getting in a fight" is only possible from a position of rough parity, between free agents. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Jul 3, 2014 |
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Jul 3, 2014 19:01
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HEY GAL posted:12th April, 1626 Every single time I read your summaries of one of your documents I want to go put my head in the oven for not picking a more interesting topic to do my own research on.
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Jul 3, 2014 19:39
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Cyrano4747 posted:Every single time I read your summaries of one of your documents I want to go put my head in the oven for not picking a more interesting topic to do my own research on. Every time an Early Modern historian reads the summary of a document from the 20th century, they want to shoot themselves for not picking a period where people have readable handwriting.
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Jul 3, 2014 19:41
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Cyrano4747 posted:Every single time I read your summaries of one of your documents I want to go put my head in the oven for not picking a more interesting topic to do my own research on. Counterpoint, this:  Edit: Ha ha, Archange1, you and I had the exact same thought. gently caress those guys' writing for reals. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Jul 3, 2014 |
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Jul 3, 2014 19:44
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| # ? May 18, 2024 17:18 |
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ArchangeI posted:Every time an Early Modern historian reads the summary of a document from the 20th century, they want to shoot themselves for not picking a period where people have readable handwriting. Man, I should post some of the poo poo I have to deal with. Dark gray chicken scratch on light gray cigar paper, gently caress yeah.
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Jul 3, 2014 20:22
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