Here is what I know about the Soviets after World War II:
They were almost completely overrun by the Germans, but at the last moment were able to mobilize and push them back before the capital city was taken.
20 to 25 million Soviets died during the war. I’m assuming this was a fairly high percentage of their population.
Stalingrad and Volgograd were both decimated. I imagine many other large cities also fared poorly.
Many of the new territories taken over by the Soviets were an equally bad condition, and themselves became money drains.
All of these things considered, it seems to me that the Soviets would be in no position to rival another relatively unscathed superpower for global supremacy. But we all know that they were, and did. Why is that?
Location, location, location. They installed puppet governments in the countries they liberated and stripped Germany of everything they could find that they thought would be useful. Having a pantload of T-34s was useful too.
Big country, big army, and a dictator who would do whatever was necessary. Note that the concept of “superpower” barely existed until the 60s (the OED has a cite from 1911, but the next cite is from 1957, and the Google Ngram viewer shows the word jumping in use in the mid-60s), so the Soviets had time to rebuild.
Russia’s a huge country with plenty of natural resources, and Stalin had managed to turn it into a modern industrial power (at horrific cost). Why wouldn’t it be a natural superpower?
Stalin didn’t have to worry about satisfying public opinion. He could continue throwing the entire economy into military resources while every other country was either cutting back the military by huge percentages or stripped of their armies entirely.
There simply wasn’t any other country with those resources after WWII except the U.S. And once the USSR got the atomic bomb in 1949, every other country treated them as the equal opposite. It wasn’t true, but nobody thought the U.S. would use their military. That gave them power by default.
Another factor that isn’t talked about as much is the old third world. The European powers lost their colonial empires, and virtually every country affected hated their former masters. Naturally they gravitated toward the one alternative.
In the first few years after WWII ended, not only did the USSR take everything they could from Germany, they also shipped back to the USSR any and all German property located in what would eventually come to be known as the ‘Warsaw Pact’ countries. With respect to the latter, that included anything the Germans had, themselves, confiscated/usurped/taken-over from those countries during the War.
So, for example, if a Polish factory had been taken over by the German occupiers, then postbellum that factory was fair game to be shipped back to the USSR even though the Germans had stolen it from the Poles (yes, you read it right - the entire factory, including its contents, machinery, walls, etc., everything was broken down and transported back to the USSR).
Not accurate. Only a minority portion of the(huge) Soviet land area was overrun by German forces. And Stalin had most of the important industrial facilities of that part forcibly moved east,m out of German control. The Capital Moscow had been largely stripped of most things useful – the biggest loss would have been that the transportation system was still very Moscow-centric. (And the psychological cost of losing their capitol – assuming that Stalin allowed the Soviet press to even report it.)
Most of the other previous world powers were in equally bad shape, or worse. England, France, Italy, Austria-Hungary all faced the same. And they didn’t have the vast land or population that the Soviet Union had to kick-start their recovery.
The Soviet Union was a strong power prior to the war. Looking at the warmaking potential of the top seven countries, the USSR is in a close number three.
Country…% of Total Warmaking Potential
United States…41.7%
Germany…14.4%
USSR…14.0%
UK…10.2%
France…4.2%
Japan…3.5%
Italy…2.5%
Seven Powers (total) (90.5%)
Hundreds of divisions of armed forces and nuclear capability. And the appearance of the willingness to use them. The United States today is war weary, but a Pearl Harbor type event would change that, and then no nation in the world would have comparable armed forces other than nuclear weapons, but even those are utterly outclassed by the US capability. The US war hawks consider the US a declining superpower because of the general unwillingness of the population to wage war.
One factor is that, true or not, the USSR was strongly identified with Communism as an ideology, and so when revolutions against colonialism arose all over the world, those with a leftist bent (most of them, I think) gravitated to the USSR as a seemingly natural ally, and the USSR was more than willing to play along. So the Soviet sphere of influence extended a bit beyond the USSR’s actual physical ambit, and it’s that ideological territory gained, that made the USSR a superpower, IMO.
There were probably hundreds of people who knew the secret of creating a nuke bomb.
A few of them would likely have worried about the USA being the only power with that weapon. Worried they would have treated the USSR in an oppressive manner. I don’t know why.
But a few of them figured it was important to balance the level of power by giving the Russians the secret of the bomb.
I think anyone who did that certainly deserved to suffer any punishment they got.
Such a shame that so many of the best and brightest people worked so hard to produce the bomb for the USA and then a few “dirty rats” (just my own opinion) chose to steal it and give it to the USSR.
Surely there was some better way in which they could have acted. Don’t you think?
Exactly. The USSR was in the very top class of military powers well before WW2 kicked off - in fact one of the reasons it kicked off was that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact removed the fear of soviet attack which helped keep Hitler in check. Moreover, like the US it was rapidly rising in economic power while the British and French were declining. Russia had been one of the big boys for centuries despite Czarist backwardness, once it modernised there was no holding it back. Massive natural resources + very large population + industry + nationalism = superpower.
The whole A-bomb thing is a bit overblown, in my opinion. The British had worked out the whole theory of design, production etc. by about 1941, they just didn’t have the industrial resources to build it. For the USSR having access to a cheat sheet saved them a couple of years but once the bomb had been demonstrated as a useful weapon they would have built their own even with no external information.
The Soviets had their own robust nuclear development program. While it’s true that Fuchs passed some important information that helped speed it up, it wasn’t as if the technology was handed to them in a neat package.
What? The UK was relatively undamaged when compared to the Soviet Union, having only suffered from the Blitz in 1940. Italy, France and Austria all benefitted greatly from the Marshall Plan after the war (look up “Italian Economic Miracle” for more info on the Italian experience).
Ultimately, the Soviet rise as a superpower was pretty much strictly a military thing, because at the end of the war, they’d built up an astoundingly huge military, and then more importantly, kept it up after the war due to perceived threats from the West. They also created the Warsaw Pact and ruled the Eastern European satellite states as a buffer zone to prevent fighting in the Soviet Union. Then with nuclear weapons, they became even more formidable.
The USSR without the huge military is… basically Russia today. Hardly a superpower.
Not considered so far is the effect of demoblization after WWII. The Soviet union cut the number of Infantry Divisions significantly but didn’t make significant changes to their armored forces. They kept the most modern formations intact and freed up personnel/budget from the forces that provided the least combat power. The US cuts were massive and left a hollow force that had serious readiness issues when it responded to Korea. Korea forced fixes but also saw a lot of US military spending focused on the actual fight (where equipment and ammo gets used up at high rates). The Soviets main role in that conflict was selling weapons to the Chinese for the fight.
The combination of handling demobilization and roles in Korea gave the Soviets a head start in the early years of the Cold War.
Undamaged, mostly, yes. Also insolvent. They all-but-bankrupted themselves during the war. Items were still being rationed into the 1950s. Their trading partners in Europe were also insolvent, and they were losing their colonies. The U.S. took over as the world’s primary manufacturer and supplier of weaponry.
Although they kept up the pretense, the UK was no longer a major power. That’s why they had to invent James Bond.
While this is true, it is also true the the U.S. explicitly played along with the same game. If a previous colony even hinted at looking to socialist solutions to it problems, the U.S. either arranged a coup to keep that from happening or, if that appeared unlikely to succeed, cut off funding, leaving the U.S.S.R. as the only source of capital.
The Soviets certainly funded a lot of indigenous rebellions: As the primary nation that gave the appearance that Marxism could succeed, it was the genuine inspiration for many rebel groups and as the successor state to Russia’s involvement in the Great Game of the nineteenth century, it fostered a lot of manufactured unrest. However, the corresponding/complementary actions of the U.S. cannot be ignored in those scenarios.
This demonstrates a misunderstanding of the events of 1941 and 1942.
There was no “last moment” mobilization. Hitler made the classic blunder of believing that tactics were more important than logistics and sent his troops into Russia where every mile of territory gained made it more difficult for him to resupply his advancing troops. A large number of other problems also figured into the equation, including unexpectedly (to the Germans) good Soviet armor and tactics and, of course, the Russian winter.
As an enormous country with immense resources, as long as the Soviet Union could avoid being crushed in the initial Blitzkrieg, it was well positioned to defeat Germany. In fact, an honest appraisal of the European theater of WWII demonstrates that the U.S.S.R. defeated Germany with help from the U.S. and U.K. (Make no mistake, it was a lot of help, most of it sent across the Atlantic to Murmansk endangered by German U-boats.) However, even without the invasion of Italy or the Normandy invasion, the Soviets were going to overwhelm Germany, eventually. At the end of the war they had an enormous military force, along with all the resources they could steal from Eastern Germany and the Warsaw Pact countries along with other resources taken from Japan in Manchuria…