I read a book called "Inside the Soviet Army"in the mid 80's, and I used that book and anything else that I could find during that time to learn about my enemy and without bragging, it made me a pretty good analyst..as far as Soviet doctrine went and how they fight.
The article came from Here
For
many years I maintained far too many magazine subscriptions, more
periodicals than I could possibly read or even skim, so most weeks they
went straight into storage, with scarcely more than a glance at the
cover. But every now and then, I might casually browse one of them,
curious about what I had usually been missing.
Thus, in the summer of 2010, I happened to leaf through an issue of Chronicles, the small-circulation flagship organ of the marginalized paleoconservative movement, and soon began reading a blandly-titled book review.
But the piece so astonished me that it immediately justified all the
many years of subscription payments I had sent to that magazine.
The
reviewer was Andrei Navrozov, a Soviet emigre long resident in Britain,
and he opened by quoting a passage from a previous 1990 book review,
published almost exactly twenty years before:
[Suvorov] is arguing with every book, every article, every film, every NATO directive, every Downing Street assumption, every Pentagon clerk, every academic, every Communist and anti-Communist, every neoconservative intellectual, every Soviet song, poem, novel and piece of music ever heard, written, made, sung, issued, produced, or born during the last 50 years. For this reason, Icebreaker is the most original work of history it has been my privilege to read.
He himself had written that earlier book review, which ran in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement following the original English publication of Icebreaker, and his description was not overblown. The work sought to overturn the settled history of World War II.
Icebreaker‘s
author, writing under the pen-name Viktor Suvorov, was a veteran Soviet
military intelligence officer who had defected to the West in 1978 and
subsequently published a number of well-regarded books on the Soviet
military and intelligence services. But here he advanced a far more
radical thesis.
The
“Suvorov Hypothesis” claimed that during the summer of 1941 Stalin was
on the very verge of mounting a massive invasion and conquest of Europe,
while Hitler’s sudden attack on June 22nd of that year was intended to
forestall that looming blow. Moreover, the author also argued that
Stalin’s planned attack constituted merely the final act in a much
longer geopolitical strategy that he had been developing since at least
the early 1930s.
Following
the Bolshevik Revolution, the new Soviet regime had been viewed with
extreme suspicion and hostility by other European countries, most of
which also regarded their own domestic Communist Parties as likely fifth
columns. So to fulfill Lenin’s dream and carry the revolution to
Germany and the rest of Europe, Stalin somehow needed to split the
Europeans, and break their common line of resistance. He allegedly
viewed Hitler’s rise as exactly such a potential “icebreaker,” an
opportunity to unleash another bloody European war and exhaust all
sides, while the Soviet Union remained aloof and bided its strength,
waiting for the right moment to sweep in and conquer the entire
continent.
To
this end, Stalin had directed his powerful German Communist Party to
take political actions ensuring that Hitler came to power and then later
lured the German dictator into signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to
divide Poland. This led Britain and France to declare war on Germany,
while also eliminating the Polish buffer state, thereby placing Soviet
armies directly on the German border. And from the very moment he
signed that long-term peace agreement with Hitler, he abandoned all his
defensive preparations, and instead embarked upon an enormous military
build-up of the purely offensive forces he intended to use for European
conquest. Thus according to Suvorov, Stalin ranks as “the chief
culprit” behind the outbreak of World War II in Europe, and the updated
English edition of his book bears that exact title.
To
my great surprise I discovered that Suvorov’s remarkable theories had
gained enormous worldwide prominence since 1990, and had been widely
discussed almost everywhere except in America and the other
English-speaking countries. As Navrozov explained:
[The English edition of the] book sold 800 copies.Some months later, a German edition of the book, under the title Der Eisbrecher: Hitler in Stalins Kaulkul, was published in Germany by a smallish house, Klett-Cotta, to timid and gingerly reviews. It sold 8,000 copies. In 1992, Suvorov’s manuscript was delivered to a maverick publisher in Moscow, and at last the book saw the light of day in the original Russian, quickly selling out its first print run of 100,000 copies. In the years that followed, over five million copies have been sold, making Suvorov the most-read military historian in history.And yet, in the nearly 20 years that have elapsed between Icebreaker‘s launch in England and the present publication of The Chief Culprit, no British, American, Canadian, or Australian publisher saw fit to exploit potentially global interest in the drifting Icebreaker—or to so much as touch Suvorov with a barge pole—despite the fact that the almost unobtainable $20 copies of the long-out-of print Hamish Hamilton edition have been changing hands on the internet for upward of $500.
Since
1990, Suvorov’s works have been translated into at least 18 languages
and an international storm of scholarly controversy has swirled around
the Suvorov Hypothesis in Russia, Germany, Israel, and elsewhere.
Numerous other authors have published books in support or more often
strong opposition, and even international academic conferences have been
held to debate the theory. But our own English-language media has
almost entirely blacklisted and ignored this ongoing international
debate, to such an extent that the name of the most widely-read military
historian who ever lived had remained totally unknown to me.
Finally
in 2008, the prestigious Naval Academy Press of Annapolis decided to
break this 18 year intellectual embargo and published an updated English
edition of Suvorov’s work. But once again, our media outlets almost
entirely averted their eyes, and only a single review appeared in an
obscure ideological publication, where I chanced to encounter it. This
conclusively demonstrates that throughout most of the twentieth century a
united front of English-language publishers and media organs could
easily maintain a boycott of any important topic, ensuring that almost
no one in America or the rest of the Anglosphere would ever hear of it.
Only with the recent rise of the Internet has this disheartening
situation begun to change.
Determining
Stalin’s true motives and the basis of his foreign policy during the
1930s is hardly easy, and his statements and actions are subject to
multiple interpretations. Therefore, the theory that the dictator spent
all those years deftly preparing the outbreak of World War II appears
quite speculative to me. But the other central claim of the Suvorov
Hypothesis—that the Soviets were themselves on the verge of attacking
when the Germans struck—is an extremely factual question, which can be
evaluated based on hard evidence. I find the case quite compelling, at
least if the facts and details that Suvorov cites in support are not
totally spurious, which seems unlikely with the Naval Academy Press as
his publisher.
The
Eastern Front was the decisive theater of World War II, involving
military forces vastly larger than those deployed in the West or the
Pacific, and the standard narrative always emphasizes the ineptitude and
weakness of the Soviets. On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched Operation
Barbarossa, a sudden, massive surprise attack on the USSR, which caught
the Red Army completely unaware. Stalin has been regularly ridiculed
for his total lack of preparedness, with Hitler often described as the
only man the paranoid dictator had ever fully trusted. Although the
defending Soviet forces were enormous in size, they were poorly led,
with their officer corps still not recovered from the crippling purges
of the late 1930s, and their obsolete equipment and poor tactics were
absolutely no match for the modern panzer divisions of Germany’s
hitherto undefeated Wehrmacht. The Russians initially suffered
gigantic losses, and only the onset of winter and the vast spaces of
their territory saved them from a quick defeat. After this, the war
seesawed back-and-forth for four more years, until superior numbers and
improved tactics finally carried the Soviets to the streets of a
destroyed Berlin in 1945.
Such
is the traditional understanding of the titanic Russo-German struggle
that we see endlessly echoed in every newspaper, book, television
documentary, and film around us. But even a cursory examination of the
initial situation has always revealed strange anomalies.
Many
years ago, while in Junior High, I became an avid war-gamer with a
strong interest in military history, and the Eastern Front of World War
II was certainly a very popular topic. But every reconstruction of
Operation Barbarossa always noted that the Germans owed much of their
great initial success to the very odd deployment of the huge Soviet
forces, which were all massed along the border in vulnerable formations
almost as if preparing for an attack, and some writers casually
suggested that this might have indeed been the case. But the sheer
volume of supporting evidence amassed by Suvorov goes far beyond this
sort of idle speculation, and he produces a historical picture radically
different than what our standard accounts have always implied.
First,
although there was been a widespread belief in the superiority of
Germany’s military technology, its tanks and its planes, this is almost
entirely mythological. In actual fact, Soviet tanks were far superior
in main armament, armor, and maneuverability to their German
counterparts, so much so that the overwhelming majority of panzers were
almost obsolescent by comparison. And the Soviet superiority in numbers
was even more extreme, with Stalin deploying several times more tanks
than the combined total of those held by Germany and every other nation
in the world: 27,000 against just 4,000 in Hitler’s forces. Even during
peacetime, a single Soviet factory in Kharkov produced more tanks in
every six month period than the entire Third Reich had built prior to
1940. The Soviets held a similar superiority, though somewhat less
extreme, in their ground-attack bombers. The totally closed nature of
the USSR meant that vast military forces remained entirely hidden from
outside observers.
There
is also little evidence that the quality of Soviet officers or military
doctrine fell short. Indeed, we often forget that history’s first
successful example of a “blitzkrieg” in modern warfare was the crushing
August 1939 defeat that Stalin inflicted upon the Japanese 6th Army in
Outer Mongolia, relying upon a massive surprise attack of tanks,
bombers, and mobile infantry. And Stalin apparently thought so highly
of many of his top military strategists in 1941, that despite his huge
initial losses, many of them remained in command and were eventually
promoted to the highest ranks of the Soviet military establishment by
the end of the war.
Certainly,
many aspects of the Soviet military machine were primitive, but exactly
the same was true of their Nazi opponents. Perhaps the most surprising
detail about the technology of the invading Wehrmacht in 1941 was that
its transportation system was still almost entirely pre-modern, relying
upon wagons and carts drawn by 750,000 horses to maintain the vital flow
of ammunition and replacements to its advancing armies.
Meanwhile,
major categories of Soviet weapons systems seem almost impossible to
explain except as important elements of Stalin’s offensive plans.
Although the bulk of the Soviet armored forces were medium tanks like
the T-28 and T-34, generally far superior to their German counterparts,
the USSR had also pioneered the development of several lines of highly
specialized tanks, most of which had no counterpart elsewhere in the
world.
(*)
The Soviets had produced a remarkable line of light BT tanks, easily
able to shed their tracks and continue on wheels, achieving a top speed
of 60 miles per hour, two or three times faster than any other
comparable armored vehicle, and ideally suited to exploitation drives
deep into enemy territory. However, such wheeled operation was only
effective on paved highways, of which Soviet territory had none, hence
were ideally suited for travel on Germany’s large network of autobahns. In 1941 Stalin deployed almost 6,500 of these autobahn-oriented tanks, more than the rest of the world’s tanks combined.
(*)
For centuries, Continental conquerors from Napoleon to Hitler had been
stymied by the barrier of the English Channel, but Stalin was far better
prepared. Although Stalin’s vast USSR was entirely a land-power, he
pioneered the world’s only series of fully amphibious light tanks, able
to successfully cross large rivers, lakes, and even that notoriously
wide moat last successfully traversed by William the Conqueror in 1066.
By 1941, the Soviets deployed 4,000 of these amphibious tanks, far more
than 3,350 German tanks of all types used in the attack. But being
useless in defense, they were all ordered abandoned or destroyed.
(*)
The Soviets also fielded many thousands of heavy tanks, intended to
engage and defeat enemy armor, while the Germans had none at all. In
direct combat, a Soviet KV-1 or KV-2 could easily destroy four or five
of the best German tanks, while remaining almost invulnerable to enemy
shells. Suvorov recounts the example of a KV which took 43 direct hits
before finally becoming incapacitated, surrounded by the hulks of the
ten German tanks it had first managed to destroy.
Other evidence of the scale and intent of Stalin’s armies in the summer of 1941 are equally telling:
(*)
During the early years of World War II, the Germans effectively
utilized paratroops and air-mobile forces to seize key enemy targets far
behind the front lines during a major offensive, and this was an
important component of their victories against France in 1940 and Greece
in 1941. Such units are necessarily lightly armed and no match for
regular infantry in a defensive battle; hence their only role is an
offensive one. Germany entered the war with 4,000 paratroops, a far
larger force than anything found in Britain, France, America, Italy, or
Japan. However, the Soviets had at least 1,000,000 trained
paratroopers, and Suvorov believes that the true total was actually
closer to 2,000,000.
(*)
Sometimes the production decisions of major weapon systems provide
strong hints of the broader strategy behind their development. The most
widely produced military aircraft in history was the heavily armored
IL-2, a powerful Soviet ground-attack bomber that was originally
designed as a two-man system, with the rear gunner able to effectively
defend the plane against enemy fighters during its missions. However,
Stalin personally ordered the design changed to eliminate the second man
and defensive armament, which left the bomber extremely vulnerable to
enemy aircraft once the war broke out. Stalin and his war-planners had
seemingly banked on possessing near-total air supremacy during the
entire course of any conflict, an assumption plausible only if the
German luftwaffe were destroyed on the ground by a surprise attack on the very first day.
(*)
There is considerable evidence that in the weeks prior to the German
surprise attack, Stalin had ordered the release of many hundreds of
thousands of Gulag prisoners, who were issued basic weapons and
organized into NKVD-led divisions and corps, constituting a substantial
part of the Second Strategic Echelon located hundreds of miles from the
German border. These units may have been intended to serve as
occupation troops, allowing the much more powerful front-line forces to
press onward and complete the conquests of France, Italy, the Balkans,
and Spain. Otherwise, I can find no other plausible explanation for
Stalin’s action.
(*)
The planned invasion and occupation of a large country whose population
speaks a different language requires considerable logistical
preparation. As an example, prior to their attack the notoriously
methodical Germans printed and distributed to their troops large numbers
of German-Russian basic phrasebooks, allowing effective communication
with the local Slavic villagers and townsmen. Ironically enough, at
around the same time, the USSR seems to have produced very similar
Russian-German phrasebooks, allowing conquering Soviet troops to easily
make themselves understood to German civilians. Many millions of these
phrasebooks had been distributed to Soviet forces on the German border
during the early months of 1941.
Suvorov’s
reconstruction of the weeks directly preceding the outbreak of combat
is a fascinating one, emphasizing the mirror-image actions taken by both
the Soviet and German armies. Each side moved its best striking units,
airfields, and ammunition dumps close to the border, ideal for an
attack but very vulnerable in defense. Each side carefully deactivated
any residual minefields and ripped out any barbed wire obstacles, lest
these hinder the forthcoming attack. Each side did its best to
camouflage their preparations, talking loudly about peace while
preparing for imminent war. The Soviet deployment had begun much
earlier, but since their forces were so much larger and had far greater
distances to cross, they were not yet quite ready for their attack when
the Germans struck, and thereby shattered Stalin’s planned conquest of
Europe.
All
of the above examples of Soviet weapons systems or strategic decisions
seem very difficult to explain under the conventional defensive
narrative, but make perfect sense if Stalin’s orientation from 1939
onward had always been an offensive one, and he had decided that summer
1941 was the time to strike and enlarge his Soviet Union to include all
the European states, just as Lenin had originally intended. And Suvorov
provides many dozens of additional examples, building brick by brick a
very compelling case for this theory.
The
book is not overly long, running perhaps 150,000 words, and $20 plus a
few mouse clicks on Amazon will provide you a copy to read and judge for
yourself. But for those who desire a simple summary, Suvorov’s 2009
lecture at the Eurasia Forum of the Annapolis Naval Academy is
conveniently available on YouTube, though slightly hindered by his weak
English:
Also his C-Span series
Controversial
theories, even if backed by seemingly strong evidence, can hardly be
properly evaluated until they have been weighed against the
counter-arguments of their strongest critics, and this should certainly
be the case with the Suvorov Hypothesis. But although the last three
decades have seen the development of a large secondary literature, much
of it sharply critical, nearly all this international debate has taken
place in Russian, German, or Hebrew, languages that I do not read.
There
are some exceptions. Several years ago, I came across a website debate
on the topic, and one strong critic claimed that Suvorov’s theories had
been totally debunked by American military historian David M. Glantz in
Stumbling Colossus, published in 1998. But when I ordered and
read the book I was sorely disappointed. Although purporting to refute
Suvorov, the author seemed to ignore almost all of his central
arguments, and merely provided a rather dull and pedantic recapitulation
of the standard narrative I had previously seen hundreds of times,
laced with a few rhetorical excesses denouncing the unique vileness of
the Nazi regime. Most ironically, Glantz emphasizes that although
Suvorov’s analysis of the titanic Russo-German military struggle had
gained great attention and considerable support among both Russian and
German scholars, it had been generally ignored in the Anglo-American
world, and he almost seems to imply that it can probably be disregarded
for that reason. Perhaps this attitude reflected the cultural arrogance
of many American intellectual elites during Russia’s disastrous Yeltsin
Era of the late 1990s.
A far superior book, generally supportive of Suvorov’s framework, was Stalin’s War of Annihilation,
by prize-winning German military historian Joachim Hoffmann, originally
commissioned by the German Armed Forces and published in 1995 with an
English revised edition appearing in 2001. The cover carries a notice
that the text was cleared by German government censors, and the author’s
introduction recounts the repeated threats of prosecution he endured
from elected officials and the other legal obstacles he faced, while
elsewhere he directly addresses himself to the unseen government
authorities who he knows are reading over his shoulder. When stepping
too far outside the bounds of accepted history carries the serious risk
that a book’s entire print-run will be burned and the author imprisoned,
a reader must necessarily be cautious at evaluating the text since
important sections have been skewed or preemptively excised in the
interests of self-preservation. Evaluating scholarly debates on
historical issues becomes difficult when one sides faces incarceration
if their arguments are too bold.
Can
we say whether Suvorov is right? Since our information gatekeepers of
the English-language world have spent the last three decades closing
their eyes and pretending that the Suvorov Hypothesis does not exist,
the near-complete absence of any substantial reviews or critiques makes
it very difficult for me to come to any definite conclusion. But based
on the available evidence, I believe it is far more likely than not that
Suvorov’s theories are at least substantially correct. And if so, our
current understanding of World War II—the central formative event of our
modern world—is entirely transformed.
Suvorov
notes that treaties or pacts are traditionally named for the city in
which they are signed—the Warsaw Pact, the Baghdad Pact, the Munich
Agreement—and thus the so-called “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact” signed in
August 23, 1939 by which Hitler and Stalin agreed to the division of
Poland should more properly be called “the Moscow Pact.” As a direct
result of that agreement, Stalin gained half of Poland, the Baltic
States, and various other advantages, including a direct border with
Germany. Meanwhile, Hitler was punished by declarations of war from
France and Britain, amid worldwide condemnation as a military aggressor.
Although Germany and Russia both invaded Poland, the latter managed to
avoid being dragged into any war with Poland’s erstwhile allies. Thus,
the primary beneficiary of the Moscow Pact was clearly Moscow.
Given
the long years of trench warfare on the Western front during the First
World War, almost all outside observers expected the new round of the
conflict to follow a very similar static pattern, gradually exhausting
all sides, and the world has shocked when Germany’s innovative tactics
allowed it to achieve a lightening defeat the allied armies in France
during 1940. But at that point, Hitler regarded the war as essentially
over, and was confident that the extremely generous peace terms he
immediately offered the British would soon lead to a final settlement.
As a consequence, he returned Germany to a regular peacetime economy,
choosing butter over guns in order to maintain his high domestic
popularity
Stalin,
however, was under no such political constraints, and from the moment
he had signed his long-term peace agreement with Hitler in 1939 and
divided Poland, he ramped up his total-war economy to an even higher
notch. Embarking upon an unprecedented military buildup, he focused his
production almost entirely upon purely offensive weapons systems, while
even discontinuing those armaments better suited for defense and
dismantling his defensive lines of fortifications. By 1941, his
production cycle was complete, and he made his plans accordingly.
And
so, just as in our traditional narrative, we see that in the weeks and
months leading up to Barbarossa, the most powerful offensive military
force in the history of the world was quietly assembled in secret along
the German-Russian border, preparing for the order that would unleash
their surprise attack. The enemy’s unprepared airforce was to be
destroyed on the ground in the first days of the battle, and enormous
tank columns would begin deep penetration thrusts, surrounding and
trapping the opposing forces, achieving a classic blitzkrieg
victory, and ensuring the rapid occupation of vast territories. But the
forces preparing this unprecedented war of conquest were Stalin’s, and
his military juggernaut would surely have seized all of Europe, probably
soon followed by the remainder of the Eurasian landmass.
Then
at almost the last moment, Hitler suddenly realized the strategic trap
into which he had fallen, and ordered his heavily outnumbered and
outgunned troops into a desperate surprise attack of their own on the
assembling Soviets, fortuitously catching them at the very point at
which their own final preparations for sudden attack had left them most
vulnerable, and thereby snatching a major initial victory from the jaws
of certain defeat. Huge stockpiles of Soviet ammunition and weaponry
had been positioned close to the border to supply the army of invasion
into Germany, and these quickly fell into German hands, providing an
important addition to their own woefully inadequate resources.
The
enormous and fully-militarized resources of the Soviet state,
supplemented by the contributions of Britain and America, did eventually
turn the tide of battle and lead to a Soviet victory, but Stalin ended
up with only half of Europe rather than its entirety. Suvorov argues
that the fatal weakness of the Soviet system was its total inability to
compete with non-Sovietized states in the peacetime production of
civilian goods, and because such states had still survived after the
war, the Soviet Union was doomed to eventual collapse.
Navrozov, the Chronicles
reviewer, is a Russian Slav and therefore hardly favorable to the
German dictator. But he closes his review with a remarkable statement:
Therefore, if any of us is free to write, publish, and read this today, it follows that in some not inconsequential part our gratitude for this must go to Hitler. And if someone wants to arrest me for saying what I have just said, I make no secret of where I live.
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