Originally Posted by 'Hamas' Jenkins
How They Won:
1) Soviets didn't just fight with men. Soviet women fought in massive numbers in WWII. That can help blunt those losses. Additionally, people of all ages fought, and almost everyone was conscripted. For example, schools were let out around Moscow so that women and children could dig trenches and anti-tank ditches in preparation for the arrival of the Heer (German Army).
2) The Soviets had 170 million people to draw from even after the famines and purges. That is roughly twice the German population.
3) The Soviet state was criminal and ruthless. It is much easier to win wars when you care not for your own losses, and you can force the populace to do your bidding under threat of starvation and extermination. They were ordered to destroy everything, literal scorched earth, to deny the Germans shelter and food from the land. This makes it much more difficult to sustain an invasion, especially one along a 2000 mile long front.
4) As you accurately noted, much of it is a wasteland, but it's a wasteland the enemy had to move across. A wasteland with brutally cold winters and rainy seasons so bad the mud could suck up a tank; a wasteland with lice giving the Germans typhus.
5) The Soviets received significant assistance from the US and UK in Lend-Lease materials which made continued industrialization easier
6) Stalin made the brilliant decision to decommission Soviet factories and move them east of the Urals, sometimes all the way to Siberia, out of range of the Luftwaffe. And because they were so ruthless, they forced women and prison labor to rebuild those factories and work under inhumane conditions to continually produce material.
7) The Germans had significant logistical issues that made supplying the army difficult (Soviet rail gauge was different, which ruled out trains), and Hitler diverted several thrusts North and South from Army Group Center, which slowed the drive to Moscow. Also, the Germans never supplied their soldiers with proper winter uniforms, and much of the Heer had to resort to stuffing their shoes and uniforms with newspaper to offset frostbite, which crippled nearly as many men as combat.
8) Because the Nazis were Nazis and were committed to the idea of Rassenkampf (Race War), they annihilated the Baltic population and the Ukranians who initially greeted them as liberators. Had they not treated them as sub-human, they could have won. Basically, Hitler needed to act like a wrestling heel. He could have intended to wipe out those populations after the USSR was pacified, but because Nazi ideology was so fervent, they couldn't see those potential allies as anything but subhumans.
How They Maintained Superiority:
The Soviet Union was goddamned gigantic and there were so many people and so many resources that it's really hard to comprehend.
They annexed a ton of satellite states during post-WWII concessions, which helped blunt their losses from WWII considerably. They were also so terribly mismanaged that any level of competent bureaucracy would see them rise to world prominence based upon the size of their population and the breadth of their resources. The state was also horrifically imbalanced. They spent such a large portion of their GDP on projecting military strength that they rotted from within. In some ways, it was the policy equivalent of a Pyrrhic Victory.
|