You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [75]
In the last half of 1937 and into 1938 over 30,000 officers and noncommissioned officers were executed. The Red Army most certainly ceased to be a threat to Stalin. It also effectively ceased being a threat to Germany, Finland or anyone else. One irony of the entire officer purge is that there is some evidence the purported military coup was actually generated by German intelligence and was not valid. But Stalin was too paranoid to care.
Incidentally, for good measure, Stalin then appointed a new head to the NKVD, and this man, Beria, then executed everyone who had been in a position of authority during the purges of either the army or the party. Those competent enough to execute anyone else marginally competent or creative were now also no longer a threat.
Since he couldn’t consider defeating the Nazis, Stalin did an about-face and, after characteristically purging his entire Foreign Office, signed the infamous non-aggression pact with Germany in 1939. This meant that Stalin had sold out Europe but had gotten himself a few years of peace in which to rebuild the Red Army. So then, a few months later, the dictator looked around and decided Finland, all two million or so Finns, were a threat to almost 100 million people of the Soviet Union because their border was near Leningrad. And when Stalin asked them, they “unreasonably” refused to allow the stationing of Soviet troops inside large portions of their country. So less than a year after destroying all of the leadership, Stalin’s army was invading Finland. A year later, and after losing more men than were in the entire Finnish army, Stalin finally forced the Finns to cede the lands near Leningrad and drove them to become the reluctant but close allies of Nazi Germany. Stalin now had his secure border but had lost many more of the few experienced military officers he had missed in the purge.
It is now 1941. Stalin has watched Germany overrun Poland, destroy France in weeks, and seen Rommel drive the British halfway across northern Africa. An entire chapter in Mein Kampf speaks of the need to cleanse the east of the Russians and their allies. But they have a non-aggression pact. Stalin was soon sent information from his own agents and those of the Allies that Germany was planning to attack the Soviet Union that summer. Winston Churchill sent a personal message directly to Joseph Stalin with details of the invasion. The top Soviet spy, Sorge, also reported that an attack was imminent. Stalin, not paranoid enough for the first time in years, decided it was a plot by the Western powers to get him to attack Germany. Hmmm, okay, maybe he was just too paranoid after all.
Operation Barbarossa comes as a complete shock to the Soviet dictator. So he disappears for two full weeks, leaving the state and army to flounder. Remember what happens to those who show initiative? You only obey orders, Stalin’s orders, but Joseph Stalin is nowhere to be seen. Several million casualties and several thousand square miles of occupied land later, Stalin reappears and begins organizing. He also begins searching for scapegoats to blame for the failure of an army, which he recently decapitated and which was left without top leadership for two weeks after being attacked by the strongest military force in the world, for not stopping the German attack at the border. Yep, more experienced leaders are shot, those few not captured by the Wehrmacht anyhow.
Nothing should detract from the incredible sacrifices and courage shown by the Russian peoples in eventually defeating the Nazis at the cost of tens of millions dead. No one just after the war had the nerve to stop Stalin from falsifying the internal history to show how the dictator had personally saved the nation. But there is little doubt that Stalin personally — and with probably no malice aforethought, as there seems to have been no forethought at all and maybe a bit of cowardice — put the Red Army and