I left the highlited word out of the earlier post #140:
IOW the aggressiveness of the Soviet military action did not even seem to Halder to have been a form of “defence.” That would seem to rule out any backward movement unless perhaps immediately followed by entrapping counterattack against pursuers.
Moscow did have industries but not enough to have ended the war due to their loss. It goes back to Stalin’s industrialization programs in the thirties. Stalin realized it was easier to transport finished goods than raw materials. So he relocated workers and build factories at the sites where the raw materials were produced. (He may have also had security concerns about massing a lot of industrial workers to places like Moscow and Leningrad. Small groups of workers who were scattered about had less potential to organize an uprising.) The result was a lot of the Soviet industrial base was spread out across Siberia and far beyond the German reach.
And the loss of Moscow would have had no effect on Leningrad’s supply situation. The Germans had cut off that city from all land access in September.
I agree.
I had not run across this before. It sounds plausible.
Stalin never had to worry about any uprising! His he probably had 500-1000k KGB plus informants to keep any threat from materializing. Also, I have read Moscow was the largest industrial center in the USSR, especially for armaments, although there was plenty elsewhere.
Also relocated East of Moscow and in part to Siberia were considerable amounts of disassembled industrial plant from the areas occupied by the Germans. This vitally important evacuation effort was led by the organizational genius armament commissar Dmitri Ustinov. (In the 1970s Ustinov, who until that time had been a civilian all his life, was commissioned a Field Marshall upon being appointed USSR Defense Minister.)
Loss of the great railroad center would have affected supply everywhere, including Leningrad. Leningrad was supplied during the winter by ice road on frozen Lake Ladoga. Without RR to get the supplies close I question whether enough could have reached the defenders to keep them alive.
Stalin spent his life worrying about coups, uprisings, assassinations and conspiracies. He assumed, after Barbarossa started, that he would be arrested. It’s the very nature of dictators to fear such things, and in Stalin’s case it was a central part of his character.
Of course Stalin spent his entire life in power worrying about any conceivable threat to his absolute control, and it is likely there was a paranoid aspect to his psyche, but those are not the sense in which I was using the word “worry”.
What I meant was that with the massive KGB security-informant apparatus early and fully under his control no serious threats to Stalin’s power ever materialized past the nipped in the bud stage, if they even got that far.
As for the immediate post-Barbarossa period what happened to Stalin was that he lapsed into a state of what might be termed melancholia-- incapacitated by psychological distress at the invasion. I don’t think he addressed the country by radio until about 10 days after 6/22 (Molotov was the one who first broke the official news)
Gotta cite?
I read a bio of Stalin and I think I would recall this, but it’s been over 20 years, and I can’t find the book.
This is I think the incident:
The historical issue is how much of this account is mythmaking by key Soviet leaders after Stalin’s demise … I dunno how strongly sourced the notion that Stalin genuinely thought the Plolitburo members were there to arrest and execute him is. It is certainly a story that gets repeated a lot.
Besides what I have read, which includes Alexander Werth’s 900-page Russia at War I took a Soviet Government Political Science course in college and this thread is the first I have ever heard of Stalin either being afraid of being whacked, or threatening to resign. Maybe they came out of the partial opening of the Soviet archives, maybe not. They were not orthodoxy before then.
The same paranoia that made him maintain such a large security apparatus and kill hundreds of thousands in purges also meant that he didn’t trust large masses of people being gathered in one place. Spreading workers out into dozens of small towns rather than gathering them all together into one central city would be an example of the kind of nipping things in the bud that you spoke of.
I am not going to go along with a Mao-like down-scale of the size of industrial enterprises;
the reverse happened. For example per Wiki the population of Moscow doubled 1926-39,
an increase I expect mirrored in many other urban industrial centers.
But we’re talking about industrialization not population. The point remains that the Soviets had a large industrial base outside of Moscow.
I’m sorry to have to be back to correct yet another of your gross misinterpretations of history.
No, all of those passages mean jack shit. No tactical withdrawals allowed in 1941? Horseshit. Siege of Odessa:
Why look at that, a STAVKA approved tactical and strategic retreat after they had badly blooded the Romanians who had launched four failed attempts to take the city. Not only STAVKA approved, STAVKA planned.
This is just fucking sad. If you had bothered to read the actual order, it says “No commander had the right to retreat without an order.” Bolding mine, it clearly does not say retreat is never allowed. Any basic reading of the history of the Eastern Front makes this abundantly obvious.
What the fuck are you talking about? You’re not doing my work for me; I already told you that Soviet forces retreated in the face of the '42 offensive. If you had any serious knowledge of the Eastern Front, this is very common knowledge.
Again, how you can read that quote and manage to come to the conclusion you did merely shows why no cite is ever good enough for you, and you will continue to believe your predetermined and incorrect beliefs by finding some wildly bizarre interpretation, by demanding even more proof, and finally deciding the cite isn’t good enough in defiance of all logic. I gave you no less than 3 independent, reliable cites that the rivers in Eastern Europe were at full flood into late spring, and you still are wasting bandwidth arguing the point and insisting that it’s not a proven fact. This style of debate of yours is entirely disingenuous, which is why I said I would no longer respond to you on the topic outside of the pit.
Now, any normal person reading this cite you gave would know that the qualifier “appears to have been” is followed by “ordered by Stalin”. By your own cite that the orders were given is not in question, only if Stalin gave them. The Red Army deliberately retreated in the face of the '42 offensive. From here, Moscow to Stalingrad: Decision in the East, Army Historical Series by Earl M. Ziemke:
Your insistence that if it wasn’t in Halder’s Holy Diary that it didn’t happen is very tiresome. It’s not exactly uncommon knowledge that the Germans had enormous logistical problems with Barbarossa. Lack of enough transport, the transport was of far too many models, and the big one: the Soviet rail used broad gauge, the rest of Europe narrow gauge. Until the rail gauge could slowly be converted over, the railheads where supplies had to be offloaded and brought forward by that insufficient motor transport, or much more commonly by horse, were in the middle of Poland.
Well gosh, I guess either weather ceased to happen or it was perfectly sunny. Was that not your conclusion that weather could not have delayed the launching of Barbarossa since you didn’t recall Halder mentioning the rivers of eastern Europe being at high flood late into spring?
Wow. The one locked in combat with AGS was large enough to result in a bag of 600,000 prisoners when defeated with the aid of AGC. It hardly had its hands entirely full, and an advance on Moscow ignoring this force would have stretched the AGC’s vulnerable flank even greater, inviting a counteroffensive into it by those forces in the south. By the by, you are yet again wrong that the one facing AGC wasn’t able to put a dent into the advance until December. The Yelnya Offensive successfully forced the Germans to abandon the salient:
Glantz has covered it very extensively in several books, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, * Barbarossa Derailed: The Battle for Smolensk 10 July-10 September 1941 Volume 1: The German Advance, The Encirclement Battle, and the First and Second Soviet Counteroffensives, 10 July-24 August 1941*, and Barbarossa Derailed: The Battle for Smolensk 10 July-10 September 1941 Volume 2: The German Offensives on the Flanks and the Third Soviet Counteroffensive, 25 August-10 September 1941. Believe it or not there has been a great deal of scholarship on the Eastern front since Halder’s diary and Shirer.
Regarding the industry in Moscow, the Soviets had evacuated most of their heavy industry east of the Urals and beyond the Germans reach from cities in European Russia before the Germans could prevent them in the face of he rapid onrush of Barbarossa. What makes you think they would not do likewise with the industry in Moscow? Chelyabinsk AKA Tankograd was built essentially from scratch to operate all the heavy industry evacuated to it, and it was the prime production location of tanks for the USSR during the war.
My understanding, for what it’s worth, is that the significance of Moscow for the Germans was two-fold:
(1) it had symbolic importance - it was hoped by the Germans that its capture (together with Leningrad) would, despite the example of Napoleon, break the Soviet will to resist; and, more prosaically,
(2) it was a major transportation hup for the Soviet rail network, something that the Soviets would have trouble doing a “work-around” for if lost - erasing some if not all of the Soviet advantage of fighting within their own rail network. Rail transport was key, given the primitive state of the road network in the Soviet Union, subject to seasonal ‘issues’ to put it mildly!
It shows up in numerous popular histories of the Soviets and of the war. I’ve certainly heard it repeated frequently - and clearly, so have others, such as ** RickJay**, given that he’s referred to it (assuming I am correct and this is what he’s referring to).
Again, I have no idea how well sourced the story actually is.
Your own citation supports my interpretation, as we will see below.
Yeah- I notice how you prefer secondary sources and Wikipedia.
According to your source below, no, none, and maybe none in 1942 either.
Nothing here about a Stavka-authorized break in contact, and…
…and as of 10/14 Odessa had been cut off from the continuous front for close to two months.
What I was talking about was finding a source, which you neglected to do until your last reply to me, for the thesis that the USSR ever conducted a space-for-time strategy.
I previously agreed, since Guderian, a primary source, says so, that the rivers in question were in flood in May. It is still unestablished how long they were in flood. However, I have provided primary source evidence that it did not matter how long they were in flood because it was in April before it could be known that there would be late flooding that the Germans postponed the start of Barbarossa to June 22.
The unsatisfactory aspect is not who retreat appeared to have been ordered by, but that it appeared to have been ordered as a space-for-time device as opposed to being an acceptance of the reality that the Soviet forces in the sector were in rout and it would be some time before the front could be stabilized.
Now here is where you really shoot yourself in the foot:
Thus falsifying your original and oft-repeated contention that strategic retreats also took place before then, including the previous year.
And here is a bit more from this source of yours:
I.E. your source is agreeing with what I said earlier about the Soviet high command perhaps may not really have been thinking of anything so subtle as a strategic withdrawal, but was making a forced concession to the reality of a rout in progress.
Yet somehow the Germans managed to maintain a steady to spectacular offensive pace until the weather slowed them down at some date we have yet to pin down at least three months and possibly four months into the campaign. Then even after the weather turned awful they got to within sight (barely) of the Kremlin.
It was to begin with, but the conclusion was implicitly dropped in view of information related in my post # 107.
The whole reason Guderian was able to conduct his envelopment was that the Soviet forces in the Kiev sector were too heavily engaged to the southwest to spare enough for the northwest to fend him off.
OK. One dent. One temporary dent June 22 to ~ Dec. 5. You are so hurting for debating points that I feel sorry for you, and hereby award you 10% of one point.
Why yes there has been a great deal of scholarship since Halder and Shirer. Including that nice Mr. Ziemke who you so kindly brought to my attention.
As I mentioned in post #143.
What makes me think otherwise is that I have never heard mention of it, and that Moscow must have been the most heavily defended real estate in the whole country, which is saying a lot. I am aware there was a sizeable “skedaddle” of government officials. It would be odd to mention departure of people but not of machinery.
Now, I am tired of this exchange, and since my opponent has falsified his own main point of contention I may rest on his “laurels” and not see fit to continue the conversation.
I see we have reached the stage of using red in large font to ‘prove’ your point. As everyone on the internet knows, using large font and pretty colors indicates how much you are winning a debate, not how close you are to having a meltdown.
Again, you are impervious to logic. You somehow manage to not just move goalposts and play no true Scotsman; you somehow convince yourself that you’ve been proved further correct. The Soviets broke contact with Rumanian 1st Corps, which is clearly a tactical retreat, and in order to cover yourself you seem to now insist not only that it has to be a tactical retreat, but that it had to have been ordered by Stavka, something clearly absurd. When supreme command gets into the business of micromanaging to this level, something is going very wrong. Then you try to insist the strategic evacuation of the troops from the city doesn’t count because the city had been cut off. The simple fact of the matter is not only are you wrong and have been proven so, you have shown something you do repeatedly: misuse sources. Nothing that Halder did or did not decide to record in can possibly prove tactical and strategic level withdrawals did not occur, that is trying to prove a negative. It can only provide proof that it did happen if he wrote about it, not proof that it didn’t if he didn’t write about it. That you waste time and bandwidth using his diary to ‘prove’ this is rather telling of your interpretative skills. The most amusing part is that he proves it occurred, you not only quote it, you bold the part to emphasize it was Halder speaking while completely ignoring that fact that it records a tactical/operational level withdrawal while not under German pressure:
You provide words right from the Holy Halder diary spoken by Halder himself that flatly contradict your position and don’t even realize you are doing it.
Bullshit. As I said, I’ve provided no less than 3 independent, reliable sources that state the rivers in Eastern Europe remained at full flood into late spring. It’s been established how long they were in flood, and that the Balkans campaign did not delay Barbarossa. And as I said when I provided the first cites, I was providing them for the benefit of others reading the thread, not to try to convince you. You have proven yourself invulnerable to being dissuaded from your position, no matter how illogical.
Again, just wow. Where exactly have I said and oft-repeated that strategic retreats took place before then and in 1941? Here’s a clue for you: never. I said tactical withdrawals occurred in 1941, and that the Soviets conducted a deliberate strategic retreat in the face of the '42 offensive.
:rolleyes: It’s not this source of mine, it’s Earl M. Ziemke. You’re also slicing it very thin in your objection that it may or may not have been an order given as a concession to the reality on the ground: the order was given and it was for something as grand as a strategic retreat. Should you want to go on even further, the third paragraph from Ziemke:
Again, that this was your conclusion says a great deal more than you probably realize. ‘I’ve concluded it must have been sunny and clear with no amount of river flooding at all because I don’t recall Halder having mentioned it in his diary’ is not a rational conclusion to begin with, and even less so in response to cites saying the rivers were at full flood until late spring.
Utter tripe. The envelopment was possible because it was occurring on the extreme flank and even more importantly because the Germans enjoyed substantially better skill than the Soviets in 1941, particularly at the operational level. Or is it your contention that all of the envelopments conducted by the Germans during the summer and fall were only possible because the forces being surrounded were too heavily engaged elsewhere?
Truly sad that this is your response when you actually admit to being proven wrong. The contempt with which you view historians when they write something contrary to what you want to be true is both puzzling and obnoxious.
Truly delusional.
I’m no expert, but is colonial effectively arguing that retreats don’t count as such if they are thought to be necessary due to the circumstances? I mean, doesn’t that describe all retreats? I don’t get it.
No I am, not arguing this.
The issue is not whether the Soviets ever retreated- they did. The question is whether
the retreats were authorized by the Soviet high command (Known as “Stavka” sometimes formatted in allcaps)
Right, but you tossed out that “after the fact Stavka concessions [to] the reality of a rout in progress” exception. Those retreats don’t count as being authorized?
No.