The War on the Eastern Front: Alternative Views

The conventional view of the Axis' invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 seems to go something like this:

In June 1941 the German army and its allies struck against the Soviet Union. While vastly outnumbered in manpower and equipment by the forces arrayed against them, German troops inflicted six or eight or even more casualties on the enemy for every one they suffered, while even larger numbers of Soviet troops surrendered as the Germans went from victory to victory in a string of triumphs.

The exceptional German performance was due to several factors. One was the extraordinary military proficiency of the country's armed forces, in combination with the extraordinary weakness of their massive, but decrepit enemy. The Soviets suffered from a characteristically rigid command system and shoddy equipment, while many Soviets greeted the Germans as liberators from a wicked Communist rule. All of this was worsened by the madness and incompetence of Stalin--who destroyed his officer corps with a purge in 1937-1938; ignored the signs that an Axis attack was in the offing; and then collapsed for several days, doing nothing as the Wehrmacht rampaged in the west. However, in combination with Hitler's altering the plan mid-course, and exceptionally bad weather--a rainy and muddy fall, an early and harsh winter--Soviet numbers eventually told in the Battle of Moscow in December, finally breaking the six-month succession of victories.

If one accepts Ronald Smelser and Edward Davies argument in The Myth of the Eastern Front that the conventional view of the Axis-Soviet portion of World War II, and especially the contrasting images of German and Soviet capability, has been skewed by Nazi propaganda, then what would the alternative look like? One way is to look to the far opposite end of the spectrum of opinion for "the other side" of that portion of the war--not least, the Soviet version. There are not many books offering that version available in English, of course. By and large it seems to be just a matter of old translations of Soviet-era books (the kind of thing the Moscow-based Progress Publishers would put out). One of the better known seems to be Grigory Deborin's Thirty Years of Victory, which to go by my limited survey of such material, seems typical.

What does it say about the comparative German and Soviet military performance? Obviously it cannot dispute the astonishing run of German military victories in 1941--the depth of their penetration into Soviet territory, the vast area they captured and the massive losses they inflicted. And indeed it does not.

However, it does stress that the Soviets were not up against Germany the interwar nation-state, but a Third Reich that had in the prior three years expanded its resources considerably beyond those bounds through annexations, occupations and other forms of control over most of the European continent--over a million Romanian, Finnish and other troops marching east along with their own forces.1 Another is that the Soviets could not use the whole of their forces in the western theater because there were threats from other directions--in the south from Turkey, in the east from Japan. The result was that the Axis assault substantially outnumbered Soviet troops in the key theater. Deborin's book stresses, too, that the Soviet army had been in the midst of a rapid expansion and reequipment (the world-beating T-34s just beginning to arrive while in the meantime Soviet troops made do with older gear, and were just beginning to learn the use of the new) that left it vulnerable at the decisive moment, in contrast with the Germans who had spent the '30s preparing to strike, as they did at the time of their choosing. And finally it acknowledges that the German army of June 1941 had a vastly greater fund of practical operational and battle experience.

In short, far from the image of German supermen fighting a more numerous Soviet foe, it was the Soviets who were outnumbered, outgunned and outmatched in the practical experience that knocks the kinks out of a system, and badly, all of which seems ample to explain losses and defeats. Deborin also emphasizes the relative speed with which the initial shock passed, the stiffening of Soviet resistance, and the first successful Soviet counter-attack at Yelnya (in late August and early September).

As it happens Western studies of the war do not deny any of this, especially when they get away from generalities to discussing hard facts. However, in their analysis they tend to give these factors (numbers of troops, the need to think of other fronts, reequipment, experience) comparatively short shrift and instead emphasize matters to which Deborin pays less attention, and sometimes none at all. They stress the damage done by the armed forces' leadership by the purges of the '30s (the liquidation of a fraction of the officer corps that included such dynamic elements as the remarkable theorist and reformer Mikhail Tukachevsky, and the intimidation of the rest), and the extent to which Stalin was taken by surprise when the attack came and allegedly paralyzed, while citing poor and often disastrously poor generalship generally.1 Western historiography also pays a great deal of attention to Soviet collaboration with the invading forces, while attributing much of the German failure to inclement weather. Deborin mentions the purges, but on the whole offers a glowing (if vague) appraisal of Soviet generalship instead (I must admit I got an impression of some strategic silences here--saying nothing about certain decisions of Stalin's rather than badmouthing him), while like-minded accounts claim collaboration with the invaders was solely the purview of "priests and criminals," and marginalize the weather as a factor in the slowing of the German advance. It is notable, too, that the Soviet accounts I have seen tend to be light on actual numbers, these surprisingly sparse in Deborin's book, where Western writers emphasize the numbers of Soviet troops who became casualties or were taken prisoner.

In short, when writers make reference to concrete specifics, they tend to be in agreement. (The only Soviet claim I didn't repeatedly find in entirely mainstream Western historiography is the one regarding Turkey's role, though Turkey did sign a Non-Aggression Pact with Germany mere days before the invasion; and there was a precedent in Napoleon combining forces with the Turks when he invaded Russia, a little known part of that well known story; making the tying down of some Soviet forces by fears of a Turkish attack in the south less implausible than it might appear.) It is the omission of some items from the analysis, the marginalization of others--the attribution of relevance and weight--that makes the difference, and this by and large seems predictable in light of the differing biases.

Interestingly, Christer Bergstrom recently endeavored to produce an account of Operation Barbarossa that would transcend the biases of both sides, reviewed here.

1. In contrast with Deborin, Georgy Zhukov in his autobiography has a good deal to say about the surprise the Axis achieved in June 1941, and explains Stalin's refusal to heed warnings that an attack was coming in terms of concern that the West was trying to entangle Germany and the Soviet Union in a war--make the Soviets do the brunt of the fighting to take Germany down, and damage the Soviet Union too in the process.