When World War II ended in 1945 few doubted that the victor’s laurels belonged mainly to Joseph Stalin. Under his leadership the Soviet Union had just won the war of the century, and that victory was closely identified with his role as the country’s supreme commander.
World War II was a global conflict of immense proportions in which 50 million people died, but at its heart was the epic struggle between Stalin and Hitler on the Eastern Front. The war began with Hitler’s attack on Poland in September 1939 and was followed by the stunning German defeat of France in summer 1940. Not until June 1941 did Hitler launch his invasion of the Soviet Union—a state that posed a strategic threat to German domination of Europe as well as being an ideological rival and racial enemy.
At first all went well for Operation Barbarossa—the codename for the German invasion—as Hitler’s armies penetrated deep into Russia, reaching the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow by the end of 1941. In 1942, however, the Soviets turned the tables on the Germans and won a great victory at Stalingrad that spelled doom for the Wehrmacht. In 1943 and 1944 the Red Army expelled the Germans from the rest of Russia and then began an invasion of Germany that culminated in the capture of Berlin in May 1945.
Eighty per cent of all the combat of World War II took place on the Eastern Front. During the four years of the Soviet–German struggle the Red Army destroyed 600 enemy divisions (Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Finnish, Croat, Slovak and Spanish as well as German). The Germans suffered ten million casualties (75% of their total wartime losses), including three million dead, while Hitler’s Axis allies lost another million. The Red Army destroyed 48,000 enemy tanks, 167,000 guns and 77,000 aircraft. In comparison, the contribution of Stalin’s western allies to the defeat of Germany was of secondary importance. Even after the Anglo-American invasion of France in June 1944 there were still twice as many German soldiers serving on the Eastern Front as in the West. On the other hand, Britain and the United States did supply a huge quantity of material aid to the USSR that greatly facilitated the Soviet victory over Germany.
Even so, victory did not come cheap. Red Army casualties totalled sixteen million, including eight million dead (three million in German POW camps). Adding to the attrition was the death of sixteen million Soviet civilians. Among these were a million Soviet Jews, executed by the Germans in 1941–2 at the beginning of the Holocaust. Material damage to the Soviet Union was equally staggering: six million houses, 98,000 farms, 32,000 factories, 82,000 schools, 43,000 libraries, 6,000 hospitals, and thousands of miles of roads and railways were destroyed. In total, the Soviet Union lost 25% of its national wealth and 14% of its population as a direct result of the war.
When the Red Army captured Berlin, the full extent of Soviet war damage was far from clear, but there was no doubt that the Soviets had fought a brutal war against a barbaric enemy and that the cost had been astronomical. Some saw the Soviet victory as pyrrhic—a victory won at too great a cost. Others worried that German domination of Europe had been replaced by a Soviet and communist threat to the continent. But for most people in the allied world, Stalin’s victory—whatever the costs and problems it brought—was preferable to Hitler’s dream of a global racist empire. Stalin was widely seen as Europe’s saviour from this fate, and when in June 1945 he was proclaimed ‘generalissimus’—the superlative general—it seemed only appropriate.
Stalin shared the military glory with his generals—above all with his deputy supreme commander, Marshal Georgi Zhukov—but Stalin’s role was political and economic as well as military. As supreme commander Stalin decided on military strategy and supervised all the big battles and operations. As People’s Commissar for Defence and chairman of the State Defence Council he was responsible for the country’s mobilisation for total war. As head of government Stalin represented the USSR at summit meetings with its British and American allies and corresponded on a regular basis with Winston Churchill and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As leader of the Communist Party it fell to him to rally the Soviet people for a patriotic war of national defence.
Stalin’s public image was that of a benign dictator, and hopes were high that his regime would evolve into a more liberal and democratic state. But it was no secret that he was a ruthless dictator who presided over an authoritarian communist state that terrorised its own people. During the war the harshest discipline was imposed, and Stalin brooked no wavering in the face of the enemy: some 170,000 Soviet military personnel were executed for treason, cowardice or ill discipline. Whole communities and ethnic groups, accused of collective collaboration with the enemy, were uprooted and deported. At the end of the war millions of returning Soviet POWS were screened for disloyalty, and a quarter of a million of them were executed or re-imprisoned. Needless to say, there was no mercy for the million Soviet citizens who had fought on the German side.
At the time much of this repression remained hidden, and public attention focused on Stalin’s image as a highly successful and very effective war leader. The contemporary impression was summed up by one of his earliest biographers, Isaac Deutscher, writing in 1948:
‘Many allied visitors who called at the Kremlin during the war were astonished to see on how many issues, great and small, military, political or diplomatic, Stalin took the final decision. He was in effect his own commander-in-chief, his own minister of defence, his own quartermaster, his own minister of supply, his own foreign minister, and even his own chef de protocol . . . Thus he went on, day after day, throughout four years of hostilities—a prodigy of patience, tenacity, and vigilance, almost omnipresent, almost omniscient.’
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http://www.historyireland.com/20th-...ns-victory-the-soviet-union-and-world-war-ii/
