Now, definitely, Stalin was a nightmarish burden to the Soviet people, what with his party purges and gulags. But was he a good leader to have at the head of the state during WWII? Would the USSR have withstood and helped defeat the Nazis without such a despot at the helm? Or would someone of more reasonable disposition have tried to appease Hitler?
Actually Stalin signed a non-agression pact with Hitler, and split Poland between them in 1939. Hitler attacked the USSR in spite of the pact. Nothing Stalin (or anyone else who would have been in power) did or did not do would have deterred the attack.
You’re right. I forgot that. I’m a bit fuzzier on the Eastern Front than the West.
Despite the fact that nothing would have stopped the German attack, was Stalin’s response good/bad/indifferent in the final analysis? Was Russia just too big, too hard to invade/control? Was it inevitable that, with their resources/manpower they would be able to wear down the Nazis? Or did Stalin really pull one out of his hat?
Stalin’s purges gutted the Soviet officer corps to the point where he had to let officers out of the camps again to have at least the bigger units led by halfway competent people. Appointing people on their politocal stability doesn’t make for good leadership.
He had a couple of lucky breaks (and German blunders), lots of land to trade for time and, of course, the Russian Winter on his side.
Before the invasion, Stalin refused to mobilize, even when German troops were massing along the border.
Also, despite the bad reputation of the German POW camps, Stalin had to make surrender a capital crime to keep his troops from surrendering in droves. He even had one of his own sons executed.
His main weapons were the Russian winter and his own willingness to send wave after wave of soldiers to face the German Army. The USSR suffered the worst casualties of any country in the war.
When the Germans invaded, Stalin (apparently because he was so utterly shocked that Hitler had turned on him) didn’t even leave his room for a couple of days. His advisors were afraid to speak to him and afraid to act without his instructions, so the USSR’s mobilization was delayed during the crucial start of the conflict. Once they did get moving, much energy was spent moving the country’s industrial base east of the Urals to protect it from the advancing Germans. Whole new cities were built.
You know you’re a bad leader when your soldiers are so eager to surrender to the Germans…
My thoughts, limiting myself to Stalin’s conduct during the war, not beforehand.
In terms of tactical/strategic ability, Stalin was not very good. He went into an utter funk for the first few days of the war, and his stand-and-die orders helped the Germans to encircle large Soviet units. It wasn’t really Budenny’s fault that his entire force got caught in Kiev; it was Stalin who had denied him permission to withdraw. Many of his counterattacks early in the war were premature. Unlike Hitler, however, Stalin did learn from his mistakes and eventually adopted a less hands-on attitude to fighting the war. Also, he was willing to surround himself with generals who would stand up to him when they thought he was wrong, like Zhukov and Rokossovski, and he actually learned to listen to their advice.
A general must also provide leadership and inspiration, and Stalin was actually pretty good at this. When the entire Soviet government fled from Moscow, Stalin stayed on, even when the Wehrmacht tide was lapping at the suburbs of Moscow. How much of the apparent devotion shown him by his subordinates was genuine and how much was from fear is, of course, debatable, but he undeniably did motivate his men. Of course he could not correct his error of murdering most of his best generals, but he did stop promoting men based on their political reliability and start putting them in positions based on merit (remember Rokossovski had actually been sent to the gulag before Stalin recalled him).
Of course Stalin’s pre-war policy was a disaster for the Red Army, for the reasons others have pointed out, but as a wartime leader I would say he was considerably better than Hitler, about the equal of Roosevelt, and not quite as good as Churchill.
The basic difference between Hitler and Stalin’s military leadership was that when German forces suffered a defeat, Hitler turned away from military professionals. When Soviet forces suffered a defeat, Stalin turned to military professionals. So the leadership of the German army got worse and the leadership of the Soviet army got better as the war progressed.