Its why they defeated the nazis, who had a 50-100 year industrialization lead when the USSR started doing a command economy. The USSR also ended up liberalizing, especially in its last decade, creating the circumstances for a coup that resulted in balkanization and massively decreased living standards.
And all Eastern European countries experience explosive growth post communism?
This is counterfactual
I thought a massive international effort defeated the nazis, including strategic bombing, embargos and lend-lease. Weird.
The USSR killed 80-ish percent of the nazi troops, and suffered 26 million casualties, mostly civilians exterminated by the nazis. They were mainly responsible for the victory and suffered the heaviest losses, including a lot of the lower level communist organization whose absence lead to the bureaucratic centralization (that Stalin opposed heavily before his death) that let corruption gradually take over the project.
Yeah, when you organize your army based on politics and not on, you know, military capability, you end up sucking at war and need to make it up in numbers. You ignore intelligence of imminent invasion you let hundreds of thousands of troops get encircled and begging the Yankees for resources.
Consider not learning your ww2 history from pop culture
So, no argument at all? Just a downvote and an ad-hominem? I’m disappointed…
Why would I need to seriously argue against what is essentially tropes, including the asiatic hordes trope? Your argument speaks for itself.
Compare the size of the soviet army at the start of the war to the size of the French and German armies. Now compare the Soviet delaying actions to the invasion of France.
No idea what tropes you talking about, those are history book facts. Embarrassing, but facts.
Remind me how many French and British troops were bypassed and encircled during the invasion of France?
Remember that the combined forces in France were much larger and more mechanized than the soviet army during barbarossa, and were invaded by less troops
They defeated the Nazis by throwing conscripts into a meat grinder regardless of whether they even had a weapon, and by threatening to shoot them if they tried to retreat.
That’s the nature of Authoritarian regimes. Not very working class of them.
They defeated the Nazis by throwing conscripts into a meat grinder regardless of whether they even had a weapon, and by threatening to shoot them if they tried to retreat.
Enemy at the Gates is not a documentary, it’s a propaganda film. In true fact while the Soviets did have a large number of conscripts and did suffer supply issues early in the war, at no point were they sending under-equipped battalions into the front line to die for no reason, and the thing about shooting those who retreated only applied to officers who ordered a retreat without proper cause (you’ll find that every other army in World War 2 had a similar protocol).
I’m sure we’ve seen the towering number of deaths from the USSR meatgrinders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU
We still see the same “throw soldiers at it” mentality in the war in Ukraine today, Russia is just like that. Nothing particularly to do with Socialism, more Authoritarianism.
Likewise we see poorly equipped troops in Russian forces today too. Same thing different era. It’s just the mentality there.
They defeated the Nazis by throwing conscripts into a meat grinder regardless of whether they even had a weapon, and by threatening to shoot them if they tried to retreat.
You are mistaking the movie enemy at the gates for a history lesson, or are absorbing myths that ultimately originate with that movie… During particularly desperate times troops would have to split rifles during training. General order 227 created penal detachments for officers who kept ordering retreats without cause, and created blocking units to turn back retreating units. They weren’t machine gunning conscripts in the back.
Also even if not one step back was as US propaganda claims, every step back allowed the nazis more population to exterminate or enslave. The Soviets lost 19 million civilians, exterminated by the nazis.
