For the prior thread of my Icebreaker Thesis Chronology project, click here (http://www.grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=24393.0).
For the Table of Contents and Introduction thread, click here (http://www.grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=24392.0).
The Shadow of Death
------------------------
As Stalin works to consolidate his rule, against his competitors for Lenin's legacy, this leads into an introduction for how Stalin prefers to make government policy. Anastas Mikoyan, for example, becomes a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party this year, 1923 -- and will stay in the Committee until 1973! (Beating all records of political survival under Stalin.) For forty of those fifty-three years, he will also be a candidate or member of the Politburo, the most important power organ of the nation, which governs the entire Soviet Union and its satellite republics. An article later in the Soviet Journal of Military History (hereafter JMH) #6, 1976, p.68, cites him for a typical Stalin policy meeting: "Most often there were five people. We met late in the evening or at night, rarely in the afternoon, usually without preliminary notice. There were no protocols or records kept during the course of such meetings."
Later in Stalin's reign, Air Force Colonel-General A.S. Yakovlev will serve as one of Stalin's personal aides. In his memoir "Life's Task", p.498, he will write, "During the meetings of Stalin's inner circle there were no stenographers, no secretaries present, no records or protocols kept."
During the coming Great Patriotic War, Marshal of the Soviet Union Dmitry F. Ustinov will be the People's Commissar of Arms. In his memoir, "In the Name of Victory," he will write, "During the meetings and conferences conducted by Stalin, discussions of problems and the making of decisions frequently occurred without records, and often without the corresponding paperwork marking the decision made."
During the coming war, once Stalin takes the role of Commander in Chief, the epic G.K. Zhukov will serve as his deputy. From his "Memoirs and Reflections", 1969, p.296, "Many political, military, and general government questions were discussed and solved not only at the official meetings of the Politburo and in the Central Committee Secretariat, but also in the evening at dinner in Stalin's apartment or at his dacha, where the Politburo members closest to him were usually present."
JMH #2, 1962 (page uncited) will quote Colonel-General B. Vannikov, the People's Commissar of Ammunition, "At the meetings and conferences, Stalin had a habit of discussing questions and making decisions without protocols or records... From this it is clear that the understanding of many events just based on documents is incomplete and unclear, and in many cases incorrect."
In short, as Stalin begins consolidating his rule during and after Lenin's death, he is continuing to operate primarily like the leader of a mafia gang: secret gatherings of plotters and conspirators, in spirit and in essence. By contrast, Hitler will hold meetings in the presence of large crowds, ensuring that a personal historian and three stenographers would be available for historical records. Doubtless, this was due to Hitler's egotistic insistence on shaping, and even on being the shape, of history! But the different result is that we have a lot of, often contradictory, material from Hitler to work with, even for tracking his policy considerations and decisions; while for Stalin we have to work with more indirect references and propaganda.
(As a sidenote, regarding Suvorov's occasional lack of pages cited: he reports in a postscript to Chief Culprit that he often has had to work from requested photocopies of material available only in Russia at the time, made by friends of his and smuggled out; consequently, the page numbers aren't always visibly aligned correctly.)
Their Struggle
----------------
August 1st, 1923: from Stalin's speech at the Plenary meeting of the Central Committee and the Oversight Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks: "The Comintern [Communist International] Commission for German Affairs, made up of Zinoviev, Bukharin, Stalin, Trotsky, Radek, and a number of German comrades, took a number of decisions on how specifically to help German comrades seize power."
While various decisions had been made, one decision was that the Central Committee's regular members would not be involved in the secrets for these preparations. Only the listed Soviet leaders, plus their "German comrades", would know about it and run the operation. Stalin thought it was necessary to avoid anything that might reveal that the revolution was instigated, much moreso dictated, by the USSR; Soviet Russia was too much of an enemy to Germany after preceding years, so this had to look like a spontaneous grassroots movement -- of the type Marx had predicted.
End of September, 1923: an emergency meeting of the Political Bureau (i.e. the "Politburo") of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks is called, specifically to fix a date for the German coup. They decide upon November 9, 1923.
The only non-Politburo attendee is Stalin's private secretary Boris Bazhanov, who later elaborates (criticizing this plan and reporting Stalin's secret opposition to it) that the resources initially released to create a German revolutionary war were already enormous, but that a follow-up decision simply issued a blank check.
The Soviet Union mobilized all German-born and German-speaking communists, then trained and dispatched them to Germany for undercover work to prepare for the armed uprising. High ranking Soviet officers joined them, among them the People's Commissar Vasily Schmidt; Central Committee members Karl Radek and Grigory Piatakov; and Politburo candidate member Nikolai Bukharin. Many other high ranking officers arrive in Germany under aliases: among them, Unshilikht; Vatsetis; Menzhinskii; Trillisser; Yagoda; and the butcher of blood himself, General Mikhail Tukhachevsky!
Why would anyone would even bother sending the butcher of blood to join this coup group, aside from the obvious reason that he has a lot of experience commanding army-sized terror groups?! Suvorov doesn't bother to mention here, but elsewhere he's clear that Tukhachevsky is a prime exponent and teacher of theories about establishing secret Soviet government organizations within target nations, so that they can rise up to rule simultaneously with the arrival of Red Army units to 'defend' and 'counterattack' against property owners oppressing the workers rising up spontaneously this way to throw off their shackles and yokes etc. The Red Army cannot currently reach German territory (not even Eastern Prussia), but apparently the Politburo expects major components of the German army to defect into a Red German Army sizeable enough that someone experienced in the command of such units, and directly under the Politburo's trust and influence, should be nearby to take overall command of the situation. And of course, again, Tukhachevsky is currently the leading mastermind of secret Soviet governments rising up to collaborate with military overthrow.
Besides, with Lenin still slowly dying (under Stalin's careful overwatch), having one of the leading potential inheritors of Lenin's command over all Soviet property and means of production, busy overseeing the revolutionary takeover of Germany several thousand kilometers away from Moscow, might be regarded as a bonus opportunity for some people!
Soviet ambassador to Germany Nikolai Krestinski forms a powerful web of secret intelligence for distributing the weapons and ammunition flowing through the Soviet Embassy in Germany. Bazhanov in his memoirs will write (p.67), "[Deputy Chariman of the State Political Directorate] Unschilicht was given responsibility for recruiting, organizing, and arming brigades for mounting an insurrection and bringing down the government. He was also expected to form a German Secret Police to eliminate the property owners and enemies of the revolution." This is very much in synch with Tukhachevsky's takeover strategies.
November 7, 1923, is the official Soviet anniversary of the Communist takeover of Russia after the "Great October Socialist Revolution".
The Comintern plans to arrange workers' demonstrations of solidarity today in Germany, in honor of this anniversary; while special units who have been trained in Moscow by Soviet secret police and military intelligence, under the supervision of Joseph Unshlikht, will provoke conflicts with the police, to cause violent clashes and arrests, thus inflaming the anger of the workers.
This part goes according to plan.
Tomorrow, the plan is to grow the street fights into more serious clashes, escalating again throughout the following day; then on the night of November 9, Unshlikht's units are to seize the most important government establishments, making this appear to be a spontaneous reaction of the masses against police brutality.
The German Workers' Party meanwhile has added some details for a new name, the NSDAP, the English acronym for the German title translated as the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The unofficial but increasingly popular abbreviated nickname: Nazi.
It has a new Fuehrer, member 007, Adolf Hitler. One of their slogans is, "War on Poincaré and Stresemann!" -- these are, respectively, the prime minster of France, and the German Chancellor and Foreign Minister. This is also a slogan of the Comintern at this time.
Karl Radek, now back in Germany again to try fomenting revolution again (he has been here several times already for that purpose), will meet with representatives from the Nazi party, about coordinating their efforts tomorrow. Afterward he expresses an open enthusiasm for Hitler's storm troopers (nicknamed for the assault troops trained to break through the trenchlines of WW1), "We can see on the faces of German students wearing brown shirts the same devotion and the same inspiration which shone on faces of the Red Army officers. [...] Great guys! You will see that they will fight for us, lobbing hand grenades." (This is reported in Hilger and Meyer's "Incompatible Allies", 1953, p.267; and by Krivitsky's memoir, pp.49-50.)
November 8, 1923: In Munich, Hitler and a group of armed followers try to arrest the government of Bavaria, declaring that the world revolutionary war of the workers rising up against the property owners, has begun.
Hitler, under the red flag of workers' revolution, and avowing the same slogans as the Comintern, declares that the governments of Bavaria and Weimar are demolished. He forms a new government immediately, intending to expropriate non-workers' incomes, nationalize industrial conglomerates, and confiscate German industrialists' war profits; and on this evening a group with Ernst Roehm at its head (second in party authority to Hitler himself) takes control of the headquarters of the military district. Other attempts are put down by the army and the police.
November 9, 1923: the date resolved by the Soviet Politburo for taking control of Germany by armed revolution. However, the uprising never happens.
Partly this is because the German Communist Party could not decide which heir(s) of the political authority of the dying Lenin to follow, and many more Germans joined the Social Democrats instead.
Partly this is because Hitler was already too successful at taking over the script, so to speak, and yet not successful enough to keep from being crushed, captured, put on trial, and sent to prison. Hitler does show personal bravery in leading his militant socialist revolutionary comrades into police fire, taking wounds which result in his capture.
Also, the revolutionary takeover of Germany failed partly because Stalin carefully hampered the support back home for the armed uprising, while consolidating his power: he did not think the uprising would be effective with the Social Democrats opposing it locally, and with Poland still preventing the Red Army from reaching Germany to lend its support. Stalin did however solidly agree that control of Germany was the key to controlling mainland Europe and from there the world. He just differed from Trotsky on how to most effectively use military power to bring Germany (and the whole world) into the USSR. From this angle, another reason for Stalin to carefully undermine the success of the mission also appears: taking over Germany would give Trotsky, and his ally Tukhachevsky, too much increased clout back in the Kremlin!
From this time, Trotsky's star will be in decline. But will Stalin be able to gain and keep control over Tukhachevsky...?
While in prison, Hitler will write Mein Kampf ("my war", i.e. against the Versailles Treaty), an autobiography and political manifesto working his way up to the putsch attempt. Later, after coming to power, Hitler will declare his fallen associates national heroes, and name the dates of his rebellion, November 8th and 9th, as the most important German national holiday.
This will lead to the oddity of Nov 7th and 8th being the greatest official Soviet holiday, and Nov 8th and 9th being the most important Nazi holiday! But the reasons for the convergence lie in the convergence of their socio-economic philosophies: Hitler was piggy-backing on Marxism, and on celebrating Lenin's October Revolution over Russia.
Hitler's autobiography is dedicated to sixteen of those fallen comrades, slain on November 9th, 1923. But Hitler will write nothing, from his prison cell, about how and why he came to be behind prison bars; nothing about what happened on Nov 8-9, the two most important days of his life so far, the culmination of his struggle so far. Instead the last page will briefly state, "I will not venture here into discussions about events which led us to November 8, 1923."
After the failed coup, major strategic roadblocks exist between Stalin and control of Germany:
the very popular Social Democrat Party currently controls German politics;
Poland stands in the way (terrain makes Poland easier to invade from the west than east);
and although the Soviet military is numerous, it's also still weak.
Also, German National Socialists, Nazis, are gaining ground by appealing to German cultural and racial pride, over the threat of the recently established USSR's publicly stated plans to bring the world under control of non-German enemies of Germany -- plans still being distributed into Germany through propaganda papers.
The Nazis also and just as fully intend to use military strength to seize control of the means of production (starting everywhere Germans live), but they are using the Soviet Union as an external threat to build up military strength for protection against being absorbed into the Slavic USSR.
So who will use which military power to take and keep control of the means of production? The Nazis, or the Soviets?
End of 1923: even some scraps of good old-fashioned capitalism, in Lenin's New Economic Policy, have revitalized Russian (if perhaps not exactly 'Soviet') national production. This year there was so much grain that the Soviet Union was able to export it again, without causing mass starvations! Truly, progress is being achieved! <:-) :bd: This will continue until 1927.
End of 1923: by now, Trotsky has become the leader of a minority oppositional bloc within the Communist party. This is a definite notch downward for the originator and first commander of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, and the first president and chief diplomat (in effect) of the Soviet government! -- the man who kick started and led the October Revolution until Lenin could return from exile.
1924: this year, the Junkers factory in the Soviet Union will reach and sustain production of several hundred metal planes a year, for a while.
Following Junkers' Soviet success, Krupp will move production to Russia (for cannons, shells, and tanks);
BMW (for tank and plane motors);
Walther (for rifles);
among others (such as Bersol for poisonous gasses).
Obviously, Stalin is not planning for all this to be used against him. But just as obviously, without Stalin's help Germany would not have been able to re-arm in violation of the Versailles Treaty. Why did Stalin want a re-armed Germany, capable of making war on Europe? -- for poison gas cannot be easily (if at all) used as a defensive weapon!
January 21, 1924, Vladmir Illyich Ulyanov, the bank robber who gave himself the criminal gang nickname "Lenin", and took over control of a Great Power, goes to his reward.
This will set off a flurry of efforts and competitions (briskly encouraged by Stalin) to raise memorials for Lenin. This may be when the idea of a Lenin statue above the Palace of the Soviets is conceived (if not earlier); but it is certainly when Stalin accepts and settles on the idea of raising the Palace so that Lenin will be standing above the ruins of Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow (still standing at the time). Arc lamps will of course be provided to flood the statue so that the people will be called to honor Lenin even at night.
1924: Hitler is working on Mein Kampf, and writes (through dictation) in chapter 14 of volume two (his next to last chapter), "Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy", "We want to return to that point, where our previous development halted six hundred years ago. We want to halt Germany's constant efforts to expand to the south and west, and have our sights set towards the territories situated to the east. At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future. If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primary have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states."
Also in Mein Kampf, "Germany's most evil enemy is, and will always be, France!"
Still, from 1925 (when he publishes the book) going forward, this quote about his soil policy from "Eastern Orientation", will be cited in the essays and public speeches of Soviet leaders including Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. When the Nazis come to political power, from January 1933 onward, this quote will be referenced even more in the Soviet Union, broadcast from loudspeakers, shouted at factory meetings -- used for Soviet propaganda to scare the people so that they will be willing to tolerate Stalin doing whatever he wants to his people.
In other words, Stalin and his regime are not ignorant that Hitler wants to set his sights "toward territories situated in the east"; Stalin's regime will definitely interpret this as an intention to invade and conquer Russia, and use that interpretation to justify their own acts of murderous tyranny to protect the people from the monster, Hitler.
However, in that very same next-to-last 14th chapter, Hitler also writes, "Already the one fact of concluding an alliance between Germany and Russia, would mean the inevitability of a future war, the outcome of which would be predetermined. Such a war could only mean the end for Germany." Suvorov doesn't present the context for this quote, thus tacitly implying that Hitler already knew that allying with the Soviets would necessarily mean a war between the Nazis and the Soviets, which the Nazis must lose.
I suspect (not having read Mein Kampf yet) that Hitler means Germany would become a shield to be splintered by capitalist nations in launching a war to overthrow the Soviet Union. But who knows, maybe Suvorov's implication is correct? That would be very weird in this case, but I'm curious. (Anyone who has the book at hand is free to chime in! O0 )
1925: A. Tupolev's design team creates the TB-1, the first monoplane in the world with a cantilever wing.
It is also the first entirely metal bomber in the world. Several years after the end of WW1, the rest of the world is still building wooden biplane bombers.
Test trials of the TB-1 will yield two world records; and a third world record will be set for producing 216 TB-1s in a short time (per the Tupolev company's own archive volume, "Tupolev's Aircraft ANT-1 -- ANT-15", 1995, p.16.)
The Soviet Union will have more heavy bombers this year, than all other nations in the world combined!
(I like to start years, where possible, with overviews of Soviet aircraft achievements. But I'll have particular entries along the way sometimes, too. O0 )
January 1925: at the plenary of the Central Committee, discussing among other things an increase in military expenditures, Stalin (as found in Vol.7 of his collected works, pages 14 and 72) declares that a second world war is inevitable, as is the Sovet Union's entrance into that war. "There can be no doubt that a war in Europe will start and they will all fight in it. [...] We will have to enter, but we will enter last. We will enter in order to throw in our weight and tip the scale."
This is in context of the ongoing Soviet-Leninist theory that a second imperialist/capitalist world war must be necessary to create the conditions for the final revolutionary world war.
April 15, 1925, Stalin directs his government to sign an agreement with Germany (specifically with the Weimar Republic) about the creation of a secret air force center in the Russian city of Lipetsk for training German military pilots.
The Soviet Union buys one hundred D-XIII military planes from the Dutch company Fokker, for the German pilots to use.
Over the following years, the Heinkel He-34, He-46, He-51; the Arado Ar-64 and Ar-65; the Junkers K-47; and the Dornier D-11 will be successfully developed and tested in the USSR for the Germans! This will however end soon after Hitler becomes Chancellor.
Speaking of Corporal Paperhanger...!
July 18, 1925, Hitler (having been released from jail) publishes the first of his two volumes of Mein Kampf; volume two will be published in 1926.
The first foreign reader is Josef Stalin, who quickly secures a copy, and then personally orders both volumes translated into Russian -- the first foreign translation. :o
Although its Soviet circulation remained limited, a copy is given to each Soviet party and military leader. Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky, later to be a Marshal of the Soviet Union, will write, "In our time we all read Hitler's book Mein Kampf." (We shall be seeing much more of Ultra-General Rokky along the way! :coolsmiley: Suvorov is practically a fanboy of him, for good reason as we shall see. This is his earliest mention in the chronology.)
Out of all the people Stalin eliminates, including in Germany, he doesn't send anyone to crack Hitler's skull and burn down the Munich beerhall where Hitler runs his political party. Why?!
From Stalin's perspective, the two sentences about expanding onto Russian soil in one chapter of one volume, are outweighed by Hitler's "struggle" or "war" against the chains of the Versailles Treaty -- a treaty which Lenin, and then Stalin, have also been opposing from its inception, both vocally in German Communist slogans, and actively by starting to re-arm Weimar Germany.
Stalin will not, however, be ignoring Hitler's briefly stated plans for Russia. On the contrary, Stalin's chief strategic blunder (in my estimate, not quite Suvorov's) will come from being absolutely focused on Hitler's goal of conquering and keeping Russian soil.
Lenin was looking for someone who (as previously quoted) "would emerge, who would raise a struggle against the Versailles Treaty." What does Lenin and his gang have against the Versailles Treaty?! Nothing except that it keeps Germany militarily and even industrially weak. It is at least a selling point for the German Communist Party, run from Petrograd by Lenin at first, then by Stalin from Moscow. But Stalin has been going farther than slogans, by actively helping Weimar Germany re-arm in secret. Within that context, Stalin's focus on supporting Hitler as the enemy of the Treaty's victors can be understood, rather than destroying Hitler as the avowed enemy of whoever is governing that "Russian soil" (namely Stalin's Soviet Union).
From Hitler's Volume 2, 13th chapter, "We must take every point of the Versailles Treaty separately, and systematically make it clear to the broadest masses of the population. We must achieve an understanding among sixty million German men, women, and children, and make them feel the shame of this treaty. We must make these 60 million have a deep hatred of this treaty, so that their scorching hatred brings the will of the people together and evokes a cry in unison: GIVE US BACK OUR ARMS!"
Stalin could make use of the few lines in the subsequent 14th chapter, about Russian soil, for his own tyrannical justifications. But he also made use of Hitler's "struggle" against Versailles and especially against what Hitler called Germany's greatest enemy, the evil France. Also from Vol.2, chp.13, "We must understand the following to the end: Germany's most evil enemy is and will always be France. [...] The task of the day for us is not the struggle for world hegemony," although note that Hitler intends that day to come! "France systematically tears apart our people and according to her plans she strangles our independence... We simultaneously hear protests and slogans against five or even ten different countries, and meanwhile forget that first of all we need to concentrate all our physical strength and mental powers to deliver a blow to the heart of our vilest enemy... France will inevitably strive to make Germany into a weak and crushed nation... At the current moment, our only enemy is France -- that nation which deprives us of our rightful existence."
Hitler has many pages and chapters in his two volumes along this line. By contrast to this "immediate task", the "Russian soil" in the east is a perspective for subsequent centuries. From Vol.1, chp.13, "The effort would have to be envisaged in terms of centuries; just as in all problems of colonization, steady perseverance is a far more important element than the output of energetic effort at the moment."
And indeed when Hitler does strike out into Russian soil, he will have no intention of conquering and colonizing it yet! -- which Stalin will disastrously misunderstand. (Suvorov, I will argue along the way, misunderstands this as well, despite pointing it out several times himself.)
August 27, 1925: Efraim Sklianski (or Sklyansky) had served with distinction under Trotsky during the Revolutionary Civil War, becoming Trotsky's deputy in November 1917. Back in 1924 when Michael Frunze took over as Trotsky's deputy (soon to be his successor as Red Army commander), Sklianski was made chairman of the Mossukno state textile trust. In May 1925 he left on a tour of Germany, France, and the United States to acquire technical knowledge; but on this day he dies in a mysterious boating accident on Long Lake, in Hamilton County, New York State, along with Isay Khurgin (the first head of Amtorg Trading Corporation). So far the (brief) wiki article.
October 31, 1925: Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze has been a staple of Communist revolution since joining the 1905 revolt. A potential successor to Lenin, he had been an Army Commander during the 1917 revolution, and had succeeded Leon Trotsky in January this year as head of all Soviet military forces. In 1921 he had been elected to the Central Committee of the Russian Bolshevik Party, and in 1924 had become a candidate member of the Politburo.
Frunze suffered from severe ulceration, and both Stalin and Anastas Mikoyan visited him in the hospital during his most recent bout, insisting -- indeed requiring (as Frunze wrote to his wife) -- that he be given surgery, which Frunze had rejected all his life even to now: but "both party representatives are requiring it."
Stalin's "daylight secretary" Bazhanov recalls that Frunze has to be placed on the operating table by force; perhaps he had an inkling that death awaited him. While there has never been any direct indication Stalin had this fellow successor to Lenin (and to Trotsky) murdered, wikipedia (from where much of this entry originates) cites an October 2010 article or book "Who Killed Michael Frunze", that he was given seven times the normal chloroform dose.
Suvorov adds that the man who arranged the operation was Grigoryi Kanner, infamous for being Stalin's "dark operation" secretary. (Mekhlis was Stalin's "twilight" secretary.) When Bazhanov hears about that, he decides Stalin has had Frunze killed (per his "Memoirs of a Former Secretary of Stalin", p.141.)
Regardless, Frunze was forever after honored by the institution of Frunze Military Academies across the Soviet Union.
On page 91 of the same memoir, Bazhanov also describes how he received the news of the puzzling death of Trotsky's other deputy Skylansky in August of this year: "Mekhlis [the other, 'twilight' secretary] and I went immediately to Kanner and unanimously said, 'Grisha, it is you who drowned Sklianksy!' Mekhlis and I were completely certain that Skliansky was drowned on Stalin's orders, and the 'accident' was organized by Kanner and Iagoda."
Kanner will be executed by a firing squad on Stalin's orders in 1937, and Iagoda in 1938, during the Great Purge.
1926: although the Soviet invasion of Poland ended in 1920, Soviet "partisan units" comprised of secret police "Chekists" and the "State Political Directorate" (subordinate to the secret police), have been waging a partisan war in the forests of eastern Poland, continuing to murder people in the name of the worldwide workers' revolution. This year, NKVD officer Vauphsassov is recalled home from terror operations in Poland, to become a senior manager for major gulag construction projects, digging Stalin's canals in this case.
January 22, 1926: Stalin from a speech at a Comintern Executive Committee meeting, "The matter of pursuing our struggle... needs to be seen not in terms of fairness, but rather of the dictates of the political moment and the political needs of the Party at any given moment." This will be published openly in Pravda, February 18th.
1926: near the Soviet city of Kazan, Stalin creates a tank school for the Reicshwehr. German tankers wear Soviet uniforms while there.
Stalin bridges the gap between the retiring engineers from the Kaiser era, and the newly ascending generations which shall form the Third Reich, securing the transfer of all amassed scientific and technological potential, knowledge, and experience.
Stalin gives future Panzer Generals tanks, fuel, ammunition, transport, housing, repair facilities, and a gigantic well-guarded weapons range.
In Kazan, the best Panzer Generals of the Wehrmacht Heer are bred and tranined to invent and learn the art of modern armored warfare. These generals will lead tank units to Warsaw, Paris, Belgrade, Athens, to all European shorelines of the Atlantic and Mediterranean -- and to Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Moscow. Oops! :o #:-) :crazy2: :uglystupid2:
1926: Vladimir Triandafillov establishes the Soviet military "operations in depth" doctrine, which will still be the foundation of Soviet military doctrine through the end of the Cold War. He later amplifies these doctrines in his 1932 "Nature of Modern Army Operations".
While he rejects the battering-ram strategies of his own superior, the butcher Tukhachevsky, he agrees about the general strategy of preparing secret cadres in the target nation to rise up to help the invading Red Army with local government, and with the need to rapidly "sovietize" whole nations in 2 to 3 weeks for small countries, or 3 to 4 weeks for larger ones.
This plan will be precisely implemented when the Soviet Union invades Poland in 1939, and then over the next 10 months in the Soviet invasions of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia, and Bukovinia. (A less refined version will be prepared for Finland first, but abandoned after the Winter War.)
Germanic Communists are being prepared at various stages for the same instant Soviet government role.
1926-1927: during this time, the first joint Soviet-German chemical weapon tests are conducted in the Moscow district of Podosinki.
1927: this year, Stalin finally and solidly secures his place at the apex of Soviet power. He will keep the title of mere secretary to the party, so that as the humble "Comrade Stalin" he can take credit for anything good in his administration, but as the mere party secretary he can dodge blame for anything bad.
Speaking of which, as the first major example...
1927: Stalin stops Lenin's New Economic Policy, eliminating its vestiges of capitalism, and starts the first of several Five-Year Plans for industrialization. Suvorov calls it super-industrialization and mega-industrialization. Stalin called specific parts of them Hero Projects. The results by all accounts are worthy of such descriptions! ...well, some of the results.
Despite being primarily centered on building an industrial base first, the first Five-Year Plan will increase Red Army tanks from 92 vehicles (only 13 built in the Soviet Union) to at least 4538 (with 3949 domestic built), an increase of over 4933%. (See among others Meltiukhov's "Stalin's Missed Opportunity", 2002, p.511)
Yes, you read that correctly. In the next five years Stalin will build THREE THOUSAND NINE-HUNDRED AND FORTY-NINE tanks. That's on top of several hundred more tanks he buys from elsewhere. Some of those tanks will be used to train those upcoming German Panzer Generals!
During this period of mega-industrialization, few products are manufactured for Soviet peasants. They have managed by hard work to hoard a significant reserve of gold rubles during the New Economic Policy, but what good is cash if they can find nothing to buy with it? The peasants lose motivation to sell their products, and even to produce anything.
Stalin's government must choose: either direct a part of the super-industrialization to produce manufactured goods for peasants to buy with their gold rubles, or start looting and shooting the smartest and hardest working peasants, as enemies of the people, to take their gold rubles for the people.
What will Stalin's government do, based upon the constantly promoted ideological principle that property ownership is the root of all evil and must be looted with the owners destroyed, figuratively and/or literally, for the good of all people? Hmmmm.... what to do... :dreamer: :-"
:arr:
1927: German Communist Party Politburo member Hermann Remmele, as part of his drive to bring the German Communists under full control of Stalin, openly backs the Nazis in their drive to seize power.
Why would Stalin want a competing militant socialist group trying to use force to seize the means of production in Germany?! Stalin must explain his reasoning to his fellow international socialists.
August 1, 1927, Stalin during a speech at a joint Central Committee and Oversight Committee Plenary meeting, later published in the early 50s as part of Stalin's essays (Vol.10, p 49): "The very fact capitalist countries are going fascist is precisely what will exacerbate their domestic situation and lead to workers' coming out for revolution."
Stalin is explaining why the Comintern should support the German national socialists, competing against the Russian international socialists! -- because national socialism leads to war, which will make nations weaker, including the "fascist" (i.e. national socialist) nations themselves, for international socialism to then take control of the resources and means of production instead.
Stalin says that once war starts (the second imperialist war, not the revolutionary world war of course), the USSR must preserve neutrality until "the warring parties have exhausted one another in an internecine struggle beyond their ability to cope." Which warring parties? Germany for one: "Precisely the fact that the capitalist government [of Weimar] is turning fascist, is leading to a heightening of tensions within the capitalist countries, and to revolutionary actions by workers."
September 15, 1927: Stalin from an article in Pravda, "War can upend any and all agreements."
November 7, 1927: Stalin in Pravda #255 (written Nov 6), "It is impossible to finish off capitalism without finishing off the Social Democrats."
The German Social Democrats will fight if they have to, but aren't militant, and have made allies with the German pacifists. Stalin presents the problem with social-democracy in terms of Marxist-Lenin theory: the Social Democrat Party promotes stability and peace, thus they promote the interests of capitalism (because the Social Democrats are too weak at being true socialists), and thus promote the enslavement of workers by the property owners. Only war can bankrupt and shatter a nation sufficiently enough for the true worker's revolutionary war to arise and succeed! So by diverting the workers' attention to peace, the Social Democrats prevent Germany from going into a war that will shatter Germany itself into final and ultimate revolution.
Also November 7, 1927: Trotsky has been ousted from all his posts and deprived of all duties and privileges. On this day he tries to give a speech in front of a column of demonstrators headed for Red Square in Moscow, but he's pelted with empty bottles and stones. Killing Trotsky would not be a challenge, to say the least!
December 3, 1927: Stalin (unsourced by Suvorov), "War cannot be fought without oil, and whoever has the upper hand in terms of oil, has the best chances of winning the war to come."
Zerg Rush of the Butcher of Blood vs. Alexander's Most Nervous Men!
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December 1927: this month, Tukhachevsky as Chief of Staff of the Red Army, writes a letter to Stalin proposing a military reform. In his praising essay (included in Tukhachevsky's "Selected Works in 2 Volumes", 1964, page uncited), Marshal of the Soviet Union S.S. Biruzov notes that, "The addressing of these questions by M.N. Tukhachevsky was correct and timely, but as to concrete data they need to be made more specific."
What was this military reform? Mil-wik's article suggests, by reference to Montefiore's account of the 1930 preliminary dress rehearsal for the later Great Purge, that Tukhachevsky proposed the industrialization of the military, which Stalin resisted until (after attempting to see if he could get Tukhachevsky arrested and shot) Stalin came to understand the ambitious modernity of Tukhachevsky's strategies and apologized to him, "Now the question has become clearer to me, I have to agree that my remark was too strong and my conclusions were not right at all." (cited in "Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar", p.59)
However, back here in 1927 Stalin is already setting up the start of hyper-industrialization for military production, at scales which will destroy Russia! -- so that isn't the problem. And the previous year, 1926, Triandafillov had already started refining Tukhachevsky's military-political strategies for invading and conquering other nations so as to bring them into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which Suvorov (at least) presents Stalin as backing solidly even before he consolidates power finally this year, and forward ever afterward. So again, as far as can be seen (from Suvorov's account anyway), Stalin agreed with Biruzov in accepting Tukhachevsky's military-industrial theories.
(It should perhaps be noted here that Montefiore regards Stalin as not having solidified his leadership and indeed tyranny over the Party until 1929, compared to Suvorov's estimate of 1927; and Montefiore presents at least some evidence that Stalin regarded Tukhachevsky as his bitterest rival, dubbing him the "little Napoleon". Suvorov acknowledges that Stalin continued ongoing purges after this time, in order to prevent uprisings against his terror regime -- though he did not strike against the military directly until 1937. Until then, Stalin relied on Tukhachevsky to do that!)
Lieutenant-General of the Air Force V.V. Serebrianikov describes (as found in the Central Archives of the National Economy of the USSR, Fund 7297, Index 41, Case 9, Sheet 155) Tukhachevsky's proposal this month:
in 1928, Stalin should produce at least fifty-thousand tanks, or ideally more like one hundred thousand.
Not eventually across several decades; not in ten years; not in five years (Stalin will in fact produce nearly 5000 tanks during the first Five-Year Plan, as previously fore-noted); but by the end of 1928 -- which will start in less than a month.
...it's time for some gloriously sarcastic nitpicking here, which will also serve as a nice illustration of why professionals study logistics.
Germany at this time does not have one single tank (aside from perhaps the proto-tanks they're practicing with, deep in the Soviet Union!) They are restricted to one hundred thousand military troops of all types, from generals down to cooks and courier boys; all of them infantry and cavalry (with a little coastal defense navy). Hitler is not in power, and is not even distant from coming to power.
Suvorov contradicts himself somewhat here, when he says that "Nobody could even image that he would ever come to power." According to Suvorov's own account and records, Stalin in 1927 started ordering the German Communist Party to cooperate with Hitler's National Socialists with the goal of removing the too-peaceful German Social Democrats from power, with the clear goal of having someone replace them as an aggressive instigator of war among the European nations! -- someone not the German Communists apparently! So on Suvorov's own theory, Stalin (at the very least) does already imagine Hitler coming to power!
Be that as it may: Tukhachevky is proposing in December of 1927, that by the end of 1928 Stalin should ideally have one operational tank for every single German soldier down to the last courier boy! -- but if not that many, then at least one tank for every two German courier boys!
Hitler will go into Poland later with 2980 tanks, including no floating or heavy tanks, and including practically no medium tanks (as the PzIII and IV are generally regarded). In Soviet propaganda it is clear that if Hitler has so many tanks, they are not for defense, and not even for conquering Europe, but that he plans to take over the world! (Granted, not with only 3000 tanks.) Suvorov fully agrees with this estimate: someone in 1939 who has produced nearly 3000 tanks is planning on challenging the world for dominance. So what did Tukhachevsky plan to do with 50,000 tanks?! -- much moreso 100,000!?
In 1939, the Nazis will build 743 tanks, most of them included within the 2980 tanks that Hitler had accumulated during the prior pre-war years.
In 1940 Hitler will produce another 1515;
in 1941 (for invading Russia and keeping up the North Africa fight as well as shoring up his European conquests so far) another 3113 (not that he will have the aggregate total so far, of course -- many will have been destroyed or simply run to death);
in 1942 he will produce 4276 tanks (but no heavy tanks yet);
in 1943 he will produce 5663 tanks;
in 1944 he will produce 7975 tanks;
and last, in the first half of 1945 he will produce 956 tanks.
In total, from 1939 throughout the war, not counting whatever of the 2900 tanks he had made before 1939, Hitler will produce 24,241 tanks. Japan, by comparison, will build 5085 tanks, almost all of them light class.
The Soviet Union will certainly have a little more than fifty thousand tanks by the end of World War II, but they will have been accumulating for years, in a much more powerful industrial giant. Not all in one year with less than one month of preparation, with 1928 industrial power.
And those same tens of thousands of tanks will line up threatening to invade Europe during the Cold War! -- until the Soviet Union collapses, partly under the weight of keeping up and replacing those tanks without using them to seize control of all property and means of production, which NATO will dissuade.
Tukhachevsky in December of 1927 is proposing that Stalin should build at least this many in 1928 alone! -- ideally twice as many!
Stalin has barely begun the first of his three Five Year Plans. The USSR has no tank factories yet (those nearly 5000 will be produced in the later parts of the first Five Year Plan).
He's trying to level up to having mega-industrial factories, including tank factories, but even if he already magically had all his eventual factories, every single one of them would have to be re-geared to produce tanks.
Aside from the time necessary to do this, which would sink the proposal at once in itself -- but assuming this could be magically done -- necessarily all other heavy machinery would cease production: automobiles, ships, locomotives, railroad cars, tractors (the equipment most like tanks), everything else.
Locomotives and railroad cars (not even counting ships) would not exist in enough numbers to move the tanks from the factories anywhere; and tanks cannot be feasibly driven from the factories anywhere useful (or not the vast majority of such tanks).
By the standards of any army, two or three hundred tanks is a tank division. Hitler will start his quest for world domination in 1939 with only six tank divisions. Tukhachevsky wants Stalin to produce, in one year, 166 to 500 tank divisions.
The crew of one tank can be averaged as three men, depending on its size: Soviet tanks will range from two to seven crewmen each, but the strong majority will need three. Tukhachevsky's advanced idea of modern military strategy and industrial production will thus need 150,000 to 300,00 soldiers -- at an unrealistic minimum. Tank crews make up an insignificant minimum of troops in a tank division; and tanks themselves constituted an insignificant minimum of materials in such a division!
First, tanks must be constantly supplied, at the right time, with liquid fuel and lubricants. These do not spawn by magic in the engines; they need troops and trucks (and locomotives and rail cars, with operators and with all support staff on the ground) to bring them to the tanks and keep them nearby.
Tanks also need shells and cartridges, both for cannons and machine guns -- although at this time Soviet tanks would only have machine guns, but pretend they might have cannons in 1928. Too bad, no shells or their cartridges, nor their propellants, can be made, because all the factories are busy making tanks this year!
Assuming tank ammunition could magically pop into existence, troops have to carry them with railcars and trucks to the tanks, and keep them nearby -- whoops, no new trucks or railway wagons or locomotive engines to help with that this year: busy making tanks!
Also, all fuel production which might go to trucks now goes to tanks. The non-existent locomotives will need significantly more coal than is currently being produced, or rather vastly much more because all coal usage in the Soviet Union has just been dedicated to making steel and other metal for the tanks.
Tanks tend to break down a little even when not being used; moreso if Tukhachevky intends to use them anywhere aside from nearby the factories. So they will need stationary repair shops, and also field repair shops -- which means mobile tank-repair shops and even mobile tank-repair factories -- all fully staffed with troops and supplies.
To repair a tank, it must of course be towed to where it can be repaired. If the tanks are all sitting without fuel or ammo near the factory, they will even need towing to their parking lots! But if they are in a fight somewhere, they must be towed out of whatever field, or swamp, or ditch they have broken in, possibly under any amount of enemy fire. For any kind of towing, you need a specialized repair-evacuation vehicles, which do not yet exist, and which will not be produced next year (all production being devoted to tanks in the non-existent tank factories). For combat retrieval, you need some specially trained troops on top of, or at least in place of, the normal retrieval troops.
To this, add a column of trucks to each of the 166 to 500 tank divisions, with spare parts for replacement in repairs, and everything involved for that (troops and fuel for the trucks, kit and food for the troops, parts to repair the trucks, etc.)
Tanks are almost useless in close combat, including when seizing towns of any significant size. For this purpose every tank division needs its own regiment of armored-support infantry (in German, the panzergrenadiers), and every tank corps needs its own division of such infantry. Soviet tanks are super-slow right now, so perhaps the soldiers could keep up by walking, although normally they would need to be motorized or, ideally, mechanized (on tracked APCs), but in any case they still need their own trucks of supplies, ammo, food, and fuel and spare parts (for their own trucks). They also need all their weapons and ammunition for such regiments and divisions.
This only accounts for infantry integral to tank divisions and tank corps. Tanks do not hold conquered ground very well; they are made to attack and seize ground, and perhaps to race or rumble around in emergency defense as stopgaps. The boots on the ground keep the land, and cover for an attack, and sometimes they must go into areas you might as well never send a tank nor a tank's attendant panzergrenadiers. For every tank division, at minimum you need three or four rifle divisions; so in 1928 anywhere from 847 to 3000 rifle divisions would need producing, with all the troops and artillery and equipment and supplies including repair parts and field repair capabilities (and even their own attached tank companies and battalions). Germany in 1928 has a total of twelve divisions, by the way, some infantry some cavalry.
Tukhachevky, being a strong proponent of combined arms warfare, would have to agree that tanks need to be supported by artillery fire; for this there needs to be howitzers, mortars, and direct-fire cannons, not only in equipment but with all the supplies, transport, and supporting troops (with their supplies and transport) that come with them. None of this can be produced along with a focus on one year of fifty thousand tanks, much less double that.
Tukhachevsky expects all enemy aircraft to be destroyed by a surprise invasion, but after you have done that once or twice you will never be able to surprise your future or current enemies again. So all tanks, infantry, and artillery, must have at least a minimum amount of useful anti-air. Oh, by the way, forget about literally any air force at all to crush the enemy air force on the ground or otherwise; it's all tanks all the time next year!
Perhaps with so many tanks and with so much other land support (in the classic infantry and artillery roles), you do not need to worry about enemy armor to any degree; so perhaps you will not need anti-tank cannons and all their troops and supplies and so forth. But usually you would! (Stalin will notably stop production of anti-air and anti-tank cannons before Barbarossa.)
Your tanks need to know where to go and what's ahead of them. Their attendant infantry can help provide that, but specialized recon troops and equipment and vehicles (or horses?) must be provided.
Are we done yet? Hardly even started! -- those are only the combat troops. Only a fraction of any army (and we're talking several dozen tank armies) actually fights, and a minority fraction at that!
All the tanks and their combat support need organization and coordination. Troop command needs to have a flow of information through thousands of different channels. This is provided by communication units, which means more men and more trucks and cars and motorcyles and all the things which go with all this.
Troop command also needs command staff, and everything which goes with them. During non-emergency peacetime, a Soviet officer is trained for three years. General-ranks must by proportion go through more training as they rise up through the ranks -- though perhaps Tukhachevsky thought otherwise from his own experience! :P
The USSR would have needed to open and staff and supply new military academies, sufficient to produce officers and staffs of no less than one hundred and fifty six tank divisions, perhaps more like five hundred tank divisions, plus all their attendant divisions and brigades and lesser units (and plus all their superior headquarters at the corps, army, and front levels.) All the officers would have graduated no sooner than 1931 with tanks finished (and starting to rot) back in 1928, all fresh with no experience -- unless training was rushed through 1928, in which case they would have been totally green with no experience!
Where would these officers have lived? Even at the time of Chief Culprit's publication, Russia could not build housing for all her officers. Would they have lived in tents? Where would they have found enough tents? Perhaps the officers would have lived in foxholes?!
Later in 1940, the Soviet standard will consider the minimum necessities for supplying and supporting the operation of one mechanized corps of nominally 1031 tanks, to be 36,008 soldiers and officers; 358 artillery guns and mortars; 266 armored cars; 352 combat tractors; and 5165 automobiles of various sorts from cars to large trucks. This won't count locomotive transport for strategic deployment, nor even the rear formation for supplying the corps and its support divisions -- much less air force support!
One tank doesn't need an average of three men; it needs a bare minimum average of thirty-six men. Except these calculations are also too low! -- once in combat, Soviet logistics will demonstrate that every single tank needs twice as many previously estimated automobiles (trucks mostly), three times as much artillery, and no less than seventy troops per tanks, even up to eighty men!
But never mind experimental reality, which no one accurately predicted; even taking the bare minimum expected 1940 estimates, Tukhachevsky's program for 1928 alone would have needed 1.8 million to 3.6 million soldiers and officers; 18 thousand to 36 thousand tractors; just as many arty pieces; 13 thousand to 26 thousand armored cars; and 250 to 500 thousand trucks. And all the supplies necessary for them. And all the training and production facilities and supplies for them. And all the locomotive railway vechicles and supplies for them. Even if the trucks and tractors (alone) could have been supplied in 1928, that would have shut down all agriculture, all construction, all transportation, and all industry (including all tank production industry, which itself would be shutting down all automobile and tractor production for the year).
We have not yet begun to account for training divisions either, and not only for training the tank crews but for training everyone else. How many training divisions, and their supply and support, would have been needed?
Suppose however you somehow only (!!!) intended to produce fifty thousand tanks, or double that number ideally; never mind anything else at all. And suppose those tanks could be zerg-rushed like in a modern real-time strategy game.
Which type of tanks would the butcher of blood be zerg-rushing with?
This year (1927) in tanks, by the way, the Soviet Union started producing the MS-1 tank for the Red Army. Its armor is held together with rivets. Its maximum speed is 19 km/h -- when on parade at the Red Square. The power of its engine speaks for everything else: 35 horsepower, about the size of a large modern lawnmower today. On its armament, Suvorov gives no indication, because it doesn't matter: this tank was not intended for combat. It was intended to give a first taste of experience in producing and operating tanks.
For that purpose, properly understood and applied, this is the most useful tank in all of Soviet history, upon which everything would later depend! But for fighting, this tank is worthless, except in small border disputes where it can act like a small mobile machine-gun revetment.
True, in the entire world there is no tank worth being manufactured starting next month in 1928, therefore no point buying or stealing the plans to do so. But regardless of that, it is simply impossible to have built even fifty thousand of these worthless tanks in 1928; and simply impossible to use them if they could be built.
This provides the context for Marshal Biruzov's polite assessment: in principle Tukhachevsky is correct, only his numbers need to be clarified. But his numbers are so insane and ignorant that they make his proposal ludicrously incorrect!
So why bother saying his proposal is principally correct at all? Biruzov outranks him, after all, and the butcher of blood has some detractors (for some obvious reasons).
Suvorov doesn't explicitly guess about this, but his information elsewhere shows that Biruzov is thinking of Tukhachevsky's deep operational principles -- combined arms blitzkrieg at strategic levels -- which will predominate Soviet preparations going forward. When you put that together with ongoing Soviet ideology about using the Red Army to capture and secure all property and means of production in the world under the control of the Soviet government (and under the control of whomever controls the Soviet Government), then the numbers of tanks are not even themselves incredible -- only the proposal to have them ready in 1928!
Suvorov himself, while pretending that Tukhachevsky was only talking about producing tanks in 1928 without any support weapons, goes on immediately to quote a Soviet military textbook, reproduced (apparently) in JMH #3, 1999 (page uncited), stating that Tukhachevsky influenced a vision of the USSR's industry reaching a yearly production capacity of 90,000 tanks a year, plus 60,000 combat planes, plus 53,000 artillery pieces, by the year 1938. This is still impossible, even by Soviet mega-industrial standards, but it does demonstrate that Tukhachevsky wasn't only thinking of spamming out tanks like a modern real-time strategy player might! -- not only. ::)
Alexander the Great once quipped that the most nervous men in his army were his logistic officers, because they knew if he failed he would slit their throats first. His logistic officers would have slit their own throats, perhaps, to keep from choking on laughter at this blithely insane proposal.
For our purposes however, let us consider the revelations of the logistics involved in this tank-spam plan, and keep them engraved in our hearts: for they shall provide context for appreciating and understanding the implications of other things actually commanded by Stalin and achieved by the Soviet Union along the way.
Such as, for example, those first 4538 tanks which will in fact be built in the waning years of the first Five Year Plan. Consider their implications in light of their logistic requirements...
1928 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Volume 12, pp.276-277: Marshal Tukhachevsky inserts the "scientific" label "expanding the basis of war", into this edition, to describe the process of his preferred method of "unfettered use of brute force" to exploit the resources of "liberated" areas in order to prepare the Red Army to "liberate" the next areas similarly.
That provides some interesting context about what the butcher of blood intended those 50 to 100 thousand tanks for, by the end of 1928.
Early 1928, Stalin exiles Trotsky to Kazakhstan instead of having him executed or murdered. There, Trotsky is completely isolated and fully monitored by Stalin's secret police.
Running out across the borders would be extremely difficult in the best of circumstances, since the borders are constantly guarded to keep workers from escaping from their workers' paradise, and in many places (such as for example Kazakhstan) there is only a harsh or harsher wilderness to escape to! But for Trotsky, it would have been completely impossible thanks to the constant surveillance.
As it happens, he does not exhibit any desire to run away, even though he has no power strings, no influence, no money, and no means of communication. His letters are always checked; often detained for several months or in most cases they simply disappear.
His few followers are harshly persecuted, starting with beatings in dark alleys; being a Trotskey follower, true or not, will later lead to exiles, prisons, torture, public trials, and executions. Stalin will ultimately exterminate millions of people whom he considers to be his real or even potential enemies, whether sent directly to execution cellars, or by concentration camp gulags in Siberia, the Far East, Sakhalin, or Kolyma. There is a very not-nice gulag in Kazahkstan, too! -- but Stalin doesn't send Trotsky there. He's only under something like house arrest.
More on this curiosity later.
1928 (date unclear): Stalin, from Vol 11 of his works, p.202, figures that Germany's territorial aggression will be critical in starting a second capitalist/imperialist world war. He plans once they do to "smash fascism, bring down capitalism, hoist the hammer and sickle [the Soviet flag-symbol], and liberate the colonies from slavery."
To accomplish this, what must be done, oh Comrade of Comrades? "First of all, a tireless struggle against Social Democrats on all lines... including exposure of bourgeois pacifism."
The 'bourgeois' are the property owners, using pacifism on this theory to bolster and solidify their control over the means of production. Right now the Social Democrats have too much power in Germany, so Germany won't be seeking to conquer new territory. But Stalin needs Germany to be aggressive in conquering new territory!
Thus the SDs must be removed. And a more territorial aggressor government must take their place -- but not the German Communists!
The only question then, is which Germany political party best fits Comrade Stalin's goals for Germany in Europe. Hmmmm.... ^-^
winter 1928: Stalin enacts his plan to loot the gold rubles saved up by the smartest and hardest-working peasants, eliminate the private ownership they've gained from Lenin's smattering of capitalism in the New Economic Plan, and force them to work even if they cannot buy anything worth working for -- even their lives.
This is the process of collectivization.
On Stalin's orders, executed by his rising deputy, Molotov, units of the Red Army encircle entire regions. The peasants who, from their gold reserves (now seized as property from these enemies of the people), worked harder and more successfully than the others, are rounded up in the middle of winter, herded together with their families into railroad cattle wagons, and transported not hundreds of kilometers (as with Hitler's Jewish victims eventually) but thousands of kilometers in those cattle wagons, to Siberia, the Urals, or Kazakhstan, to be thrown out into the bare steppes.
Many years later, Molotov will be asked how many such people were "collected". As reported in Chuev's "Molotov: Master of Half a Domain", 2002, p.458, he will answer, "Stalin said we relocated ten million. In reality, we relocated twenty million." Not all at the end of 1928, of course; this kept going through at least 1933.
The Brain of the Soviet Army
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1929: Soviet military theorists have been debating how to achieve air superiority during a war. There are two basic methods; by fighter superiority, and by close-air support.
Fighter superiority is much more expensive to acquire: the aircraft themselves are complex, and the pilots need to train innate skills, so it's difficult to get enough numbers to achieve the result, and even more difficult to replace those numbers in losses as a war continues. This method does have one advantage: it is universal. It can be used in any situation, from in-depth defense of home territories, to all out invasion of enemies.
Close air support achieves superiority through destruction of enemy air forces on the ground. It can, and indeed must, be accomplished quickly, ideally over the course of one day or even only a few hours. No exhausting prolonged air battles must be fought against enemies of whatever skill and equipment already in their element. Nor do tremendous resources need to be spent on training pilots and creating aircraft -- you can have those, too, or instead, if you really want them, but even pilots of relatively low qualification can be good enough for this job: they only need to learn how to take off, follow a route, and shoot at (mostly) stationary targets on the ground, then return and land to rearm and refuel. The ones who develop more skill can be assigned roles to attack the army's foes on the ground as well, potentially much better than fighter pilots. This method of achieving air domination does have one major drawback: it can only be effectively used (for achieving air domination) against an enemy who is not expecting to be attacked, and in conjunction with an advance by ground forces (and perhaps by airlanding ground forces, through parachutes, gliders, and transports), to secure enemy airports. Close-air support can be of some use on defense, in conjunction with plenty of fighter cover, but in that case fighters should predominate.
Both methods can be used simultaneously to some degree, but any operations commander must decide when to use which one primarily or secondarily at any time, based on his estimation of the situation as it develops.
At the grand strategic level, before the start of a war, the military and political high command of a nation should clearly determine which method will be primary in the early period of a war, and set up their production and training to match their focus. The schools for the chosen superiority should receive most or more of the innately skilled pilots, and be given the largest parts of training resources and fuel, even if this shorts he training of the secondary focus pilots. Aircraft designers of the chosen focus should be given priority for the best production facilities, the best aircraft engines, the most expensive equipment, the rarest materials.
The 1929 article "Start-up Phase of War", published in the Soviet magazine "War and Revolution", #9, 1929, pp.19-20, draws this conclusion: "In our view, there is much to be gained from taking the initiative and launching a pre-emptive strike against your enemy. Whoever is first to strike enemy airfields and hangars with his air force can expect to win air superiority." \
This is presented, and treated, as a major policy piece. Soviet textbooks for training the fighter and bomber air fleet, will emphasize one massive surprise attack against ground targets, and barely concentrate on dogfighting techniques.
This idea is based on Triandafillov's refinements of Tukhachevsky's "deep operations" theories, which will be expressed in the Red Army's Field Regulations of 1929 (this year).
It should also be noted that this year, Tukhachevsky will be replaced as Chief of the Soviet General Staff by Shaposhnikov, who will go on to become Marshal of the Soviet Union before Hitler invades Poland.
As Suvorov puts it, "the General Staff is the brain of the army. A country cannot have a man more cautious than the Chief of General Staff. His accuracy first and foremost needs to be applied to his work with numbers. Thousands of the most highly qualified officers are under the command of the Chief of General Staff. The General Staff exists to think everythng through, count and calculate everything, and then, having weighed all the information and taken into account the thousands of contradictory circumstances, report to the head of the country."
Tukhachevky, despite his key and abiding strategic (and even operationally tactical) influence, which Suvorov must acknowledge (elsewhere, when it serves his purposes better ::) ), clearly did not understand the implications of large numbers in a realistic way: most recently illustrated by his recommendation that Stalin should build FIFTY THOUSAND tanks in the previous year, 1928! -- or ideally ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND!
What about his successor, however...?
1929: this year, the new Chief of the Soviet General Staff, and eventual Marshal of the Soviet Union Boris M. Shaposhnikov, shall publish his three-volume textbook "Nerve Center of the Army" (aka "The Army's Brain" or "Brain of the Army").
From Volume Three of that work (page uncited), "Once reservists have been mustered [to fill out the divisions and their constituents], having them mark time at length with no prospect of going to war may adversely affect their morale. The result will be not to heighten, but to lower the combat readiness... In a word, no matter what the [High] Command, much less the diplomats may wish, for strictly military reasons a call to arms may cause the cannons to roar all by themselves. Doubtful, therefore, must be deemed the proposition that, given the conditions now governing war, you can for extended periods keep mobilized armies quietly standing by, not going into action."
Soviet military science will continue to understand this up through the late Cold War: "Mobilizing, massing, and tactically deploying forces, then using them to conduct initial operations, comprises an inexorable progression." (JMH, 1986, #1, p.15.) Again, from the modern Russian ministry of defense, "No nation can maintain a mobilized army with any intent other than war: the economy cannot stand the strain, and the mobilized but unused army begins to decay." (JMH, #3, 1999, p.10. Suvorov seems to say that the article is directly referencing the mobilization conducted by Stalin starting on August 19, 1939! Much more on this auspicious date, much later...)
Suvorov says that as long as the Soviet military continues to exist, this three-volume book will serve as a manual for every Soviet general and officer. And not only for them! -- just as Lenin always had a copy of Gustav le Bon's "Mob Psychology" on his desk, so Stalin will always have a copy of "The Army's Brain".
Shaposhnikov's point is that thanks to modern numbers mustered in war, once a nation as large as the Soviet Union begins to mobilize, and especially once it has started massing and tactically deploying forces, it cannot halt this progression, or even intentionally slow it down. Eastern Europe's recent experience in the diplomatic runup to the opening of World War One provides a painful illustration of this tendency.
Suvorov summarizes the theory:
1.) To achieve victory in a war, not only the efforts of the entire army, but full efforts by the entire nation, the people, industry, transport, agriculture, etc., are necessary. To win a gunfight, a man's whole body and mind must be focused on shooting the enemy, and ideally the gunfighter should have both hands full with his guns. He should not be hammering with his other hand, or eating, or even trying to take a drink.
2.) A man cannot constantly hold a gun in each hand. If he is always holding two guns, he cannot do anything else. Similarly, a nation cannot constantly expend all its resources on preparations for war. Constant concentration of forces and expenditure of social resources on war preparations, will ruin the nation. Therefore, during peacetime the army and the military industry must operate at a minimal level. However, the nation, its people, government apparatus, industry, transport, agriculture, communication channels, ideological apparatus, etc., must be prepared for a maximally quick and full transition, from a peacetime to a wartime regime.
3.) Mobilization is therefore the transition of the entire country from a peacetime to a wartime regime. Mobilization cannot be curbed or turned back; mobilization is similar to to thrusting both arms down to unlatch your holsters and then drawing both your guns to aim at the enemy with your fingers already on the triggers.
4.) As soon as you reach to draw, your enemy will do the same, trying to be faster than you by at least the time it takes his bullets to stop you from shooting or at least spoiling your aim. If you are a tiny bit of a second slow, you must expect him to kill you. In just the same way, mobilization and a shooting war are inseparable.
5.) You can aim your guns at your neighbors with your fingers on the triggers, and not shoot them, but if you do this the outcome will not be a good one for you! Do not play games with mobilization.
6.) Mobilization cannot be partial. You are either mobilizing or you are not, just as a woman can never be only a little bit pregnant!
There is a further corollary, partially mentioned by Suvorov later, and highly important to how Barbarossa turns out: if your guns are so heavy that you need six months to draw them as fast as you can, you will need at least as much time to holster your guns again, during which time you cannot be doing other work or even feeding yourself.
For these reasons, once mobilization starts, a war will be born, even if military commanders and politicians would rather not do that later! Again, the recent Great War serves as a hideous illustration of the momentum of mobilizations dragging nations to their deaths -- if they are not yet ready to truly mobilize! The politicians and leaders and even some generals (not all) tried to call it off. But they all failed.
As Shaposhnikov puts it, "Mobilization is not only a symptom of war, it is war itself. An order by the government to declare mobilization constitutes a de facto declaration of war... In modern conditions, a mobilizing country must make a firm decision ahead of time to conduct war... In a general mobilization, it is understood that there can be no more return to peacetime positions... We maintain that only a general mobilization has value, the concentration of all resources and forces necessary for achieving victory." As he concludes on page 413 (of the collected edition of "Nerve Center of the Army"), as the ultimate statement of his textbook: "Mobilization is war. In our minds, there is no other meaning for it."
The key to the success of Shaposhnikov's textbook, in Suvorov's estimate, is the simplicity of presentation, in the crystal-clear argumentation, and in the ability to explain the most complex problems in terms anyone can understand. Shaposhnikov's mobilization theory is "simple, understandable, logical, and unquestionably correct."
Understanding his theory, and his supporters and opponents, helps understand Stalin's actions. In Stalin's book "On the Foundations of Leninism", Stalin proves that games are not permissible in the quest for power. You either take control or you do not. Once you attempt the task, you must act with resolve to finish it. This goes along with the teachings of Niccolo Machiavelli: either you deliver a fatal blow, or you do not attack at all; no in-between decisions can exist in strategy or in politics.
Shaposhnikov understands war the same way: no partial, in-between positions can be adopted. Either do not mobilize at all, or conduct a full mobilization and go into the war to win it!
Alas, there is no English translation of his work available on Amazon apparently! -- but in case you're wondering how relevant he will remain to Soviet military doctrine, Time Magazine will feature him on a 1942 cover. :coolsmiley:
1929: sometime this year, Stalin sends Trotsky out of his house arrest in Kazakhstan, to exile in the heavenly islands of Turkey's Sea of Marmara.
This is more than a little strange, considering the death rate of Trotsky's allies! -- in the 1930s, the standard accusation of Stalin against his enemies will be that they are allies of Trotsky, worth a death sentence quickly by nine millimeter headache or more slowly by concentration camps!
Moreover, in Kazakhstan, Trotsky could not publish anything, but from now until his death in 1940 he will be able to write anything he wishes, including the most horrible things about Stalin. After the fantastic beauty of Marmara, Trotsky will go on to live in the south of France, in Norway, and finally in Mexico, publishing his occasional "Opposition Bulletin".
To be fair, Suvorov acknowledges that there will be several assassination attempts before the infamous icepick finally nails Trotsky. However, for a while Trotsky will complain that Stalin has betrayed International Communism and World Revolution by setting up a tsardom for himself under the guise of socialism. In other words, Trotsky will spend a few years loudly complaining that Stalin isn't actually trying to take over Europe and the world!
Trotsky's opinion has credibility for Western politicians, not only because Stalin keeps blaming and persecuting people as Trotsky's followers (even when they aren't), but because Trotsky played a key role in the Communist Revolution, the Civil War, and the establishment of the Red Army, as well as being the first chief diplomat. If he says Stalin is slacking off about instigating a final world revolutionary war, people will tend to believe him.
On Suvorov's theory, Trotsky is inadvertently dulling the fears of the West that Stalin would pursue Revolution: there is no reason to fear Stalin (outside Russia anyway) because he is "the greatest mediocrity in power", and Trotsky fully expects his tyrannical regime will implode from within.
End of 1929: in Kiev Military District alone, 60 demolition teams, totaling 1400 members, stand ready on an instant (per Starinov's "Mines Awaiting Their Moment", p.22) to detonate 1640 fully operational complex-explosive units with tens of thousands of detonator charges in incendiary pipes. The purpose is to hamper any modern military invasion. Similar work, of course, has been prepared in each of the Military Districts.
1929: Finland escalates construction of its Slavic security corridor on the Karelian peninsula, combining it with modern standards. It will be known as the Mannerheim Line, named after Finland's commander-in-chief who won Finland's independence from the Russian Empire, and then from Lenin's communist revolutionaries, in 1918. For the next ten years, Finland will plow practically all her military budget into this world-class marvel of fortification.
1920s: since coming to power, Stalin has promoted the creation of traditional Slavic security corridors, nicknamed the "Death Zones", updated to modern standards of the time, on the Soviet western border. These were the forerunners of the Fortified Sectors soon to be started, and equivalent to Finland's Mannerheim Line except far more extensive (having far more land to work with).
Byelorussia alone features six partisan detachment cores, staffed by 300 to 500 men each (commanders, organizers, and specialists), who would become the experienced nucleus around which several thousand men per detachment would rally upon the threat of invasion -- weapons, munitions, and gear for 50,000 partisans in Byelorussia alone. For these cores, here and in all other areas up and down the border (e.g. Ukraine, Crimea, Leningrad), the Soviets have created secret bases, out in impassable forests or on islets in the middle of vast swamps, to serve as depots and subterranean workshops for arms and ammunition.
The NKVD, and the separate military intelligence service (eventually named the GRU in 1942), as well as party officials, have each set up secret schools to train leaders, organizers, and instructors for guerilla operations; along with secret R&D labs for devising tools designed specifically for this warfare. Partisans are put through regular mandatory exercises, usually with NKVD Special Ops divisions posing as the enemy. Moreover, small 'public' covert-ops forces are trained and prepared to operate in any towns seized by the enemy, their mission being to gain and exploit the enemy's trust. The majority of partisans, outside the city, have plans to keep an invader from repairing the destroyed lines of communication (bridges having been dynamited already, tunnels backfilled, rail hubs wrecked, telephone cables removed, etc.)
Stalin won't stop with such master-class defensive preparations either, as we shall see: this is only the basis for what will later be called the Stalin Line!
But then the question becomes: why will these epic and ultimate defensive measures fail so badly in the summer and autumn of 1941? Well, we shall have to see... ^-^
Getting Off the Ground
-------------------------
1930: Soviet fighter and bomber airfleet training manuals continue to focus teaching one massive ground strike instead of dogfighting. (You're going to be seeing this introducing every year for a while...! ^-^ )
1930: this year, Tupolev starts production model tests of an even more powerful successor to his TB-1, the TB-3.
As designer and historian V.B. Shavrov will write, in his "History of Aircraft Design in the USSR before 1938", 1985, p.488, "This airplane of A.N. Tupolev's design belongs to [the] category of the most remarkable planes, not just of their own time period. It was the first four-motor cantilever monoplane bomber, with engines that were installed inside the wings. Its design became a prototype for all similar airplanes and planes of various designations."
It needs that design for also being the largest airplane in the world this year, whether civilian or military! With a normal bomb cargo of two tons, it has a range up to 2250km (naturally less if carrying its nominal maximum load of four tons), and mounts eight (!) machine guns. Its speed is 288 km/h, practically unthinkable for a mere bomber in 1930.
Other nations will not even be creating blueprints on par with it for a while, much less putting those designs into production -- but the Soviet Union does.
1930: Since starting his takeover of Lenin's faction, Stalin has financed his massive industrialization projects (the Five Year Plans) by plundering churches, monasteries, imperial storehouses, and museums, selling off the treasures collected and created by Russians over the centuries. He has also mass exported timber, coal, nickel, manganese, oil, cotton, caviar, furs -- and so much grain as to cause mass starvations!
In 1930, in response to the mass starvation caused by his selling off Russia's grain production, Stalin now starts a plan of (Suvorov unsourced quote) "siphoning resources from agriculture into heavy industry." Wait, what?! -- the nation is starting starvation unprecedented even by Russian standards, and Stalin is planning to pull resources OUT of agriculture?!
Well, Stalin does have a plan. Sort of.
Specifically, Stalin orders people working the land to be herded into "kolkhozes" where all their grain can be more effectively confiscated for redistribution. The theory here (such as it is), is that the peasants aren't working efficiently, and if they would just be forced to work more efficiently under administrative control, like in a heavy-industry factory, then not only would more grain be available to sell off (not primarily to feed the peasants with) but more peasants could be moved to actual heavy-industry factories by proportion!
Ten to sixteen million Russian citizens will be tortured and will die over the coming years in these concentration camps, while Stalin sells off around five million tons of grain every year to fund his industrialization projects.
Suvorov recommends checking Robert Conquest's 'book on the Five Year Projects'. Presumably he means "The Great Terror: A Reassessment" or "Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine". Conquest isn't included in Icebreaker's works cited, but is quoted by Suvorov on occasion in both books, particularly The Great Terror, which had a 40th anniversary edition in 2007, and (according to its publishers anyway) became considered the definitive account in the final years of the Soviet Union.
June 26 to July 13, 1930, at the 16th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) (the parethetical clarification is actually part of the Party's title, by the way, historically distinguishing them from the Menshaviks): Stalin is giving a speech about his Soviet political opponents. He has no particular evidence to present to the Congress about their nefarious schemes, but as he dryly quips, "How many times have I told you? -- do whatever you want, but do not leave behind any documents, do not leave any traces!"
The congressional transcript here notes the "Homeric laughter of the entire audience." By the end of this year, Stalin will have executed a good number of his political rivals, including almost all the delegates present at the Sixteenth Congress who are laughing so Homerically (whatever that means). He will leave a very minimal number of documents about those executions.
1930: the first peak of the secret police terror operations (operating since 1917) coincides with the climax of the First Five Year Plan, as Stalin grips more tightly upon seizing governmental control of the people, in the name of the people, as the fundamental means of production.
Until now, Stalin has relied on the butcher of blood, Tukhachevsky, to occasionally purge the military of any high ranking officers he deems untrustworthy. This year, the military intelligence branch OGPU (eventually to become the GRU in 1942), forces two officers to testify that Tukhachevsky is plotting to overthrow the Politburo in a coup.
Suvorov doesn't mention this specific detail of the terror operations (doubtless a mere oversight, since it fits into his narrative), but Montefiore (via the mil-wik entry) reports this in his "Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar", pp.58-59.
Stalin tests whether his powerful ally Sergo Ordzhonikidze will agree to cooperate with Molotov in purging Tukhachevsky; but Sergo defends the butcher of blood as one hundred percent clean in his loyalty to Stalin and to Party ideology.
Stalin will continue using the butcher to keep the Red Army officers freshly watered with the blood of sacrificial lambs for a while longer. But he clearly foresees a day when the butcher himself must be thrown into the abattoir.
1930: Stalin creates the world's first airborne assault arm. (Hitler will create the second in 1936.) Along with this, Stalin will spend monstrous sums (selling grain away from starving Soviet citizens), creating a civilian parachute training program, with a full industry to support it. It is no exaggeration to say that this move will eventually save the Soviet Union many times over! -- though not by using them as airborne troops. More on this later as we go...
In parallel, Stalin promotes a civilian glider mania, and creates the industry to support that, too. This was not intended for the amusement of the workers: before Hitler even comes to power, the Soviet Union will create the world's first cargo-landing glider (the G-63, engineered by Urlapov).
Soon the Soviets will create the first glider capable of carrying a truck -- or a two-ton tank!
Designer Gorokhovsky will also soon develop an inflatable rubber glider: pointless for recreational use (at least in the Soviet Union of the 30s), but able to be quickly loaded aboard a transport plane, brought home, and reused -- assuming there was ever any need to do such a thing, such as in a high intensity airborne assault.
It must be stressed that the civilians are not learning to fly single-seat recreational gliders, but troop gliders.
December 24, 1930, a ship carrying two tractors leaves New York. Ultimate destination, the Soviet Union.
The agricultural tractors are not agricultural tractors; the documents have been faked. These tracked vehicles were designed by the great American tank genius George Walter Christie.
An entire family of tanks will be created based on their designs: the BT-2, BT-5, BT-7, BT-7A, and BT-7M. From these will come other families such as the BT-28, and T-34 models; and eventually the Soviet Union will segue the design ideas after WW2 into the world's top-class infantry fighting vehicles, recon vehicles, and armored personnel carriers, famous (or infamous) throughout the coming cold war. The tank design principles themselves meanwhile will be eventually (after WW2) adopted by all Western nations, to overtake Soviet tanks in quality, but still the Soviets will be producing very decent tanks from these designs out to the end of the Soviet government and beyond. Lots and lots and lots of those tanks...
What does the BT designation mean, by the way? -- aside from being a clear precursor to the famous BTR and other Soviet vehicles of the Cold War? This will be revealed at a more opportune time...
Welcome to the new decade with 1931! Soviet fighter and bomber airfleet training manuals continue to focus teaching one massive ground strike instead of dogfighting.
February 5, 1931, Stalin (not anonymously) in Pravda, "We are doing a deed that, if it succeeds, will turn the whole world upside down and will free the entire workers' class." Well, he has some plan in mind it seems.
This same month, Stalin declares the first contest for designing the Palace of the Soviets, intended to be large enough to welcome and include the delegates of all nations on earth as they become Soviet Republics (under control of Stalin, or of whomever controls the Supreme Soviet at that time.)
May 1931, no winners are selected at the end of the contest for designing the Palace of the Soviets. Also, there's the minor problem that the Cathedral of Christ the Savior still exists in the way.
June 2, 1931, a conference of Party elders formally agrees upon the site of the future Palace, and condemns the cathedral to destruction.
July 16, 1931, the Supreme Soviet formally endorses the recognition of the site of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior as the most appropriate 'palace' to be destroyed for erecting the Palace of the Soviets.
July 18, 1931, the magazine Izvestia announces the 2nd contest for designing the Palace of the Soviets, this time expanded to include international submissions. State commissioners start an inventory of the Cathedral properties. A small fraction will be removed and stored, partly at state expense and partly at the expense of the Donskoy Monestary. The remainder will be destroyed.
August 18, 1931, demolition of the cathedral begins.
Say, weren't the Nazis supposed to be arising now? Let's check in on how they're doing...
August, 1931, the Social Democrats hold majority power in East Prussia. The Nazis initiate a referendum to oust the Social Democrats.
Naturally the German Communists oppose this referendum, since if it succeeds it may bring a day closer when Hitler will be shooting or gulaging all German Communists! Stalin gives them orders, therefore...
...to march with the Nazis under a common red flag on which the swastika intertwines with the hammer and sickle! :o :o
The Communists call this a "Red Referendum" in solidarity with the National Socialist Workers' Party, and call the Nazis "working people's comrades". <:-)
The referendum fails to gain a majority, and the Social Democrats stay in power in East Prussia instead of the Nazi Party gaining control.
Communists run by Stalin, openly siding with Hitler's Nazis, evidently makes people panic into supporting the Social Democrats more and/or the Nazis less!
So noted...
October 1931, from Trotsky's "Opposition Bulletin," Vol. 24, p.12: if a communist overthrow of Germany succeeds, "all the Manuels and Remmeles [in the German Communist Party] would have proclaimed it to have been Stalin's initiative. If, instead, it failed, Stalin still had every opportunity [working mostly behind the scenes as 'only' General Secretary] to find himself a scapegoat. This, after all, is the quintessence of his strategy. This is an arena where he excels."
November 1931, from Trotsky's "Opposition Bulletin", Vol.25, p.11, "Stalin's personal dictatorship clearly nears its sunset." Ah, good, no reason to worry, then, about Stalin invading Europe and trying to take over the world!
December 5, 1931: the Cathedral of Christ the Savior has proved surprisingly difficult to demolish for whatever reasons, but today it is finally brought down by two rounds of explosions. Hauling out the rubble will take more than a year.
1932: Soviet fighter and bomber airfleet training manuals continue to focus teaching one massive ground strike instead of dogfighting.
1932: The Second Five-Year Plan begins, expanding and developing infrastructure under Stalin's oversight. Stalin pays for this (and preceding) infrastructure by selling off the accumulated treasures of pre-Soviet Russia from the past thousand years; not only gold reserves but icons, paintings, statues, medals, books, antique furniture, furs, and jewelry -- mercilessly confiscated and sold abroad. In precious metal reserves, not only did Stalin purchase infrastructure in gold, but in platinum and diamonds. In only a few years, Stalin has sold all that the nation had gathered for centuries -- the bank robber plundering all banks, all homes, all churches, in his grasp.
Does he replace this with gold mining? Yes, although this will not peak until around 1940. Stalin will sell off his newly mined gold on the world market, too, along with coal, nickel, manganese, petroleum, cotton, lumber and the quintessentially Russian caviar and furs. In 1930, the sale of oil and oil products, along with timber and timber products, produced 430 million gold rubles, plus another 500 million for flax and furs. The main Soviet export in 1930 became grain, however, at 883 million gold rubles.
1932 starts years of grain overproduction in the United States, so Soviet yearly revenue from grain exports will fall to 369 million gold rubles.
The point is that Soviet citizens are not personally benefiting from the use of any of this export; what isn't directly used in creating and sustaining factories and the military, is sold to help create and sustain factories and the military. Even half of the grain sold during 1932 and 1933 would have been enough to avoid the great starvations (per Rogovin's article "Hunger" in "The Power and the Opposition, 1923-1933", 1993, chapter 48).
Fortunately for Stalin, the Great Depression will make it easy for him to buy Western technology at cut-rate prices from inventors and businessmen in America, Germany, Great Britain, and France. By this process, the USSR will become the world's biggest importer of machinery and equipment.
1932: In the Ukraine, four battalions of mobile railway guards stand ready as demolition teams, to totally wreck key junctions and main lines by sabotaging tracks and placing powerful time bombs to deter invaders destroying the lines. Other key items are prepared to be packed up and taken along: railway switch assemblies, communications facilities, telegraph lines, even some tracks where it seemed like quick replacement might be feasible (per Starinov's "Mines Awaiting Their Moment", p 24.)
These of course are primary defensive measures against a major military invasion. No one on the western side of Russia is preparing in any way to invade Russia at this time, but a murderous dictatorship can never be too careful!
Speaking of anyone in western Europe making plans for invading other nations, however...
1932: Triandafillov writes in his military doctrinal manual, "The Nature of Modern Army Operations", pp. 177-178: "When organizing Revolutionary Committees it will be very difficult to find local forces to count on. Only some of the technical personnel and the lowest-ranking staff, will we be able to come by locally. All higher-ranking cadres and even some support personnel, we will have to bring with us... The number of staff members needed to carry out sovietization of newly conquered areas will be enormous."
The Russian government still plans to expand the Soviet Union by invading other nations and overthrowing the property owners, setting up local governmental control of the means of production as soon as possible.
Triandafillov devises calculations for planning the requirements to supply and manage millions of invading soldiers deep into enemy territory, at all stages of offensive operations and political overthrow. This includes, as a small illustration for his readers (the Soviet military marshals), calculating the personnel needed for five Polish administrative districts ("voivodships", roughly translated into English) from the Soviet border to the River San: the portion swallowed seven years later thanks to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But he has planned out operations reaching to Europe's west coast, before Hitler has even come into control of Germany. :o
Triandafillov proposes special-purpose military units of some sort to pacify and sovietize conquered nations, so as not to distract the main Red Army from its task of invading and defeating the enemy. Hitler will soon propose and enact the same plan, training the SS to set up the "New Order" (to be the New World Order of socialism) after the Wehrmacht defeats any invaded nation.
In the Soviet Union, these occupational military units will be comprised by the NKVD, which has been training by occupying and pacifying Russian home areas first and foremost! Their purpose during Soviet military invasions, however, is to back up "people's representatives" and "servants of the people" by (Suvorov seems to be quoting Triandafillov or someone else here but doesn't source it) "helping the insurgent workers and peasants entrench the power of the proletariat".
This is the standard Soviet military concept: the workers have been instigated to rise up in revolution against the property owners, and so the Red Army isn't supposed to be aggressively invading but just moving in to help the newly Sovietized workers protect and defend their newly conquered nation from reprisal by any former (and still-current) property owners resisting the workers' revolution.
Therefore, NKVD "border guards" are assigned to be first to cross the border into the invaded nation. From the Soviet Journal of Military History, 1970, #7, p. 85, "Operating in small groups, they would seize and hold river crossings and highway junctions."
This of course works best during a surprise blitzkrieg invasion. By the same token, it's better to invade before the workers' revolution actually starts, so as not to lose the element of surprise!
March 23, 1932, the Soviet Union becomes the first nation in the world to create a heavy bomber corps. Soviet doctrine still focuses on one massive groundstrike with close air support, of course. But it's nice to have a heavy bomber corps anyway!
April 20, 1932: the USSR Revolutionary Military Council decrees that invasion armies (soon to be designated strike armies for diplomatic purposes) will effect cover for other armies through invasion. This is the basis for why strike armies gathering near a border, preparing for invasion, shall later be called "covering armies".
Such covering armies must not plan to invade the enemy upon the outbreak of war, of course: that would be ineffectively too late! They must start the war by invading, thus seizing the strategic initiative.
More specifically: the point of the Revolutionary Military Council, as its title suggests, is to discuss what will be necessary to launch and support the ultimate and final worldwide war to smash capitalism and bring about world socialism under control of the Communist International. Chief of Staff Marshal Yegorov during his report to the Council, believes the massive war will need tens of millions of troops mobilized. But mobilizing this freakish number will be a clear sign to the property owners that the workers and peasants are about to raid and take control of all property under the socialist government of the people!
Therefore, to succeed there must be a decisive invasion of enemy territory already prepared, and ready to go at the moment worldwide mobilization is announced. Thus, today, April 20, 1932, the First Strategic Echelon is proposed: a standing group of peacetime invasion corps and divisions. Their job is to cross the border the moment nationwide total mobilization is announced, disrupting the enemy's mobilization and covering the Red Army's own general mobilization and deployment of main force bodies, so that they may enter the final world war (the revolutionary one predicted by Marx) under the most scientifically ideal circumstances.
Fortunately for the Soviet Union, Tukhachevsky disagrees (from his Collected Works, Vol 2, p.219).
Not about a surprise decisive invasion of their neighbors in peacetime; he agrees that part is obviously correct!
No, he disagrees about using divisions and corps rather than whole invasion armies! The First Strategic Echelon must be composed of invasion armies, already created in peacetime, kept right at the border ready to go once the final revolutionary uprising of workers and peasants is announced. "The make-up and positioning of front-line armies must first and foremost be geared toward making it possible to cross the borders the moment mobilization is announced," and "mechanized corps have to be placed 30 to 40 miles from the frontier [translated from metric of course], to cross the border the very first day of mobilization."
Stalin will eventually decide the ruthless murderers Tukhachevsky and Yegorov have to be shot. These traitors to the people and to the world revolution are too timid, by Stalin's expectations, to succeed! -- they talk a good theory but will have done nothing by 1937 to create even one such army on the western border!
We're going to be hearing tons about the "First Strategic Echelon" in coming years, so it's going to be important to keep in mind what the purpose of the First Strategic Echelon is in Soviet military doctrine, as established by this Revolutionary Council in April 1932 -- and in the context for which this Revolutionary Council was convened.
Winston Churchill, incidentally, understood the concept of covering armies very well. In his "History of the English Speaking Peoples", written before and after WW2, he dedicates a good part of Volume 3 to the career of his esteemed ancestor John Churchill, made Earl and eventually Duke of Marlborough, who for ten straight years campaigned on the Continent against French interests, and who despite adverse military and political support never once lost a battle or failed at a siege. On several occasions, particularly while sieging, Marlborough would deploy what Churchill describes repeatedly as a "covering army" or "covering force": its purpose was to take control of the fighting space by invading the opponent's territory, and then to provide hasty mobile cover for the main force to arrive and deploy, especially for purposes of besieging a target. The covering force shifts from offense to defense on enemy territory, to protect the heavier and slower offensive force coming in behind.
(I just happened to run across this while working on the Icebreaker Thesis Chronology, so I decided to include it for context. O:-) )
Spring 1932: up through 1931, the Voroshilov 4th Cavalry Division, housed in palatial quarters in the Leningrad Military District, was considered the peerless masterpiece of the entire Red Army in its training and capabilities.
In 1932, however (Suvorov is a little unclear on the timing, might have been early 1931), the Division was tossed out onto an ill-equipped base. By spring 1932 (or 1933), the Red Army's finest had hit "rock bottom" and had "become unfit for action" according to its new incoming commander; its former commander was assigned most of the blame with predictable consequences, but People's Commissar of Defense Voroshilov (whom the Division had been named after) wanted a new commander to restore the quality and former glory of the 4th Cav.
That new commander? Zhukov!
He didn't assign all the blame to the former commander. From Zhukov's "Recollections and Reflections", p.118, "Over the next year and a half, the Division had had to put up its own barracks, stables, headquarters, living quarters, and depots, as well as a whole training facility. The result was to turn a splendidly trained division into a third-rate outfit of military laborers! Construction material shortages, rainy weather, and other adverse circumstances, made it impossible to get ready for winter in time, which hammered the Division's overall fitness and combat readiness. Discipline went downhill..."
Zhukov does indeed restore the Division to its former glory, and this starts the rise of his star (including promotion to general) in the Red Army, under his mentors, the grateful and impressed Voroshilov (who rises to Politburo Member, a Marshal of the Soviet Union, and Chairman of the Defense Committee), and Timoshenko (also a People's Commissar of Defense, and Marshal of the Soviet Union).
Consequently, all three will know from personal experience that even the finest division in the Red Army needs a year and a half to build sufficient (hardly palatial) new quarters themselves, if no one else is around to do so; and all three of them will know that this will destroy the effectiveness of the division.
Therefore, if Timoshenko and Zhukov should happen to later decide, with Stalin, to move nearly two hundred divisions out of their permanent bases into an area where there are no bases, they will only have two options for each arriving division, no matter when it arrives in the area: sacrifice building new bases to keep up the training, or else spend a year and a half building new bases and lose their training. But some of that training needs base areas for gunnery ranges, vehicle courses, and other training centers; and proper bases (even palatial luxury) provide conditions suitable for keeping combat readiness.
Even if a division is training as much as possible without these things -- and without such things their training will be mostly mobile assault -- leaving them to face one or two winters with only forest canopy, some tents, or maybe dugouts, will steadily erode the capabilities of even the best units.
All right, enough about Stalin and his crew making plans to invade their neighbors and overrun the world for the past several years, and especially this year. What about the Nazis?! -- when are the Nazis going to arise?! Any time now??!
July 31, 1932: during the elections of the German Parliament (the Reichstag) today, Hitler's National Socialist Workers' Party earns 13.7 million votes. Although this tallies 37.3 percent of the total vote, the largest percentage for this year, it isn't enough of a majority to form a government.
This is, and will be, the peak of the Nazi party. After today its popularity will start to decline.
November 6, 1932: an emergency Reichstag election takes place in Germany. Several days before now, a public transportation strike began in Berlin. The Communists (on Stalin's orders of course) jointly coordinated the strike. Nazi storm troopers (in their signature brown shirts) and Communist 'rotfronters' (a paramilitary group in signature red shirts) paralyzed public transportation for five days, dug up tram tracks, picketed, beat up those who came to work, and used force to stop the cars that the authorities managed to put to work.
Now it's election day: the National Socialist Workers' Party (NSDAP) tallies 11,705,000 votes: a loss of 2 million in a little more than three months. The Social Democrats earn 7,231,00, and the German Communist Party gathers 5,971,00.
Hitler is still the most popular politician in Germany, but he still lacks an absolute majority and so cannot form a (legal) government. His party also has the major weakness of being the Nazis! -- and so they took their prior high watermark as a license to act more and more like a thuggy gang, costing them those votes.
It also costs them money, both in expenditures and in a lack of donations. Goebbels around this time writes in his diary, "All hope has disappeared... There is not a pfennig in our cash boxes... Nobody gives us any credit... We are on our last breath."
It looked like the Nazis were finally getting off the ground into the air, but now they are in a stall and about to crash and burn like the Hindenberg.
Stalin should be pumping the air with his fists all day long! -- his chief militant rival for control of Germany's population, material, and means of production, is failing and will soon be politically irrelevant, while Stalin's own Germany Communist Party (which has always been working for Lenin's gang, and which Stalin has carefully taken direct and personal control of in recent years) is increasing its popularity with the German people.
December 23, 1932, the world's tiniest violin is playing sad music for Goebbels as he writes in his diary, "I am overwhelmed by a terrible feeling of loneliness, which borders on a sense of total loss! The year 1932 was a sequence of one misfortune after another. It should be erased completely... We have no prospects, no hopes left."
Only a miracle can save the Nazi Party now!
Ah, but don't worry, it's Christmas! It is the time of miracles...
December 31, 1932: the influential newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung rejoices at the "disintegration of the NSDAP myth."
Around this time, Harold Laski, a leading English leftist intellectual (as quoted in Joachim Fest's "Hitler: A Biography", 1993, Vol.2, p.234) is assured that "The day when the National Socialists presented a lethal danger has passed... If we discount chance, it is not so improbable that Hitler will finish his career as an old man in some Bavarian village, telling tales to his friends in the evenings in some beer hall, about how he once almost orchestrated a takeover in the German Reich."
What is Hitler's opinion about his chances here? Goebbels says in his diary (unsourced by Suvorov) that Hitler is considering only two options: flight from Germany, or suicide!
Hitler, in one of his famous table talks, will later on May 6, 1942, reflect on this time: "The situation was at its worst in 1932, when we were forced to sign many debt obligations in order to fund our press and election campaigns, and keep the party running... In the name of the National Social Workers' Party, I signed for these obligations, knowing that if the NSDAP stopped functioning, everything was lost." He will have good reason in early May 1942 to remember his previous worst time by then! (Quoted by Suvorov from Piker's "Hitler's Table Talks", Smolensk edition, 1998.)
Those debts are about to come due tomorrow, after the end of 1932, and when they do Hitler and the Nazis will be finished -- even suicidally finished! Who can save you now, Hitler!? L:-)
All Stalin has to do is literally nothing, and the Nazis will implode with a giant sucking sound; but if he wants to crush the Nazis politically even harder, all he has to do is order the German Communist Party to team up with the German Social Democrats.
True, Stalin (as previously noted and quoted) regards the pacifistic Social Democrats as a major stumbling block because they don't want war, and war is the mother of revolution. But Stalin has teamed up with his enemies before in order to set up a situation where he can look awesome by crushing them later. He could easily explain that right now it's best to team up with the hated Social Democrats to eliminate the menace of Hitler should that deranged madman ever take power in Germany! -- at least you can be sure the Social Democrats won't cause Stalin and Russia military problems! They'll be easy to roll over, too, when the time comes! What else would Stalin do anyway, other than literally nothing? -- team up with Hitler??
Stalin is well aware that if a militant post-Marxian revolutionary socialist like Hitler comes to power, he's going to throw the German Communists (along with the Social Democrats) into concentration camps as soon as feasibly possible! -- whereas the Social Democrats will allow the German Communists to grow from a newly strengthened second place to who knows where, how soon?
Certainly if Stalin is going to trigger a revolutionary uprising with his German Communists, he needs them alive and well, not dead or in the Nazi equivalent of a gulag. Just team up with the SDs for a little while, or at least just be quiet for a little while, and the situation will take care of itself, no muss, no fuss.
So..... Stalin orders the German Communists to commit delayed suicide by strengthening their attacks on the Social Democrats. :o :wow: :timeout:
The Communist Party's public policy? -- there is no significant difference between a regime of parilamentary democracy, and a fascist tyranny.
That sounds one thousand percent insane, but in Comintern propaganda both Social Democracy and National Socialism are forms of bourgeoise dictatorship growing more and more reactionary against the true workers' revolution of Communist socialism. The only difference (according to this propaganda push) is that the Social Democrats are (supposedly) hiding their true motives more than Hitler.
Specifically, the Social Democrats are (being painted by Stalin's German Communists as) "social fascists" conducting a policy of "hidden fascism" more dangerous than Nazi policy! Why? Because the Social Democrats refuse to go to war; therefore they prevent the revolution that follows from the social destruction of war, and thus ultimately the Social Democrats prevent the victory of the proletariat (the working class). Nazi policy, on the other hand, clearly enhances the chances for war, and thus brings nearer the scientifically inevitable revolutionary world war which shall free the working class!
This won't be the first time that Stalin has ordered his German Communist Party to support the rise of the Nazis; remember East Prussia, August 1931.
January 30, 1933: the Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler and his gang, are still the largest party in the German Parliament, yet still not the majority. The former chancellor Franz von Papen and other leaders persuade President Paul von Hindenberg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor anyway.
Hitler and his Nazis will take around a year and a half to transform the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany, a one-party totalitarian socialist autocracy, with Hitler as the new head of state with a new official title of Leader (as well as continuing the title of Reichskanzler).
In one month, Stalin's German Communist propaganda, by appealing to Germany's war spirit over against the National Socialist Party's unwillingness to fight, has given Hitler and his Nazi Party their Christmas miracle.
For this, there will be consequences...
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