The one with the rifle shoots

I've read Stalingrad. You know the big beefy book by Antony Beevor. Stalingrad was such a stupid battle. It was fought entirely for symbolic value. The Soviet leadership was full of retards. But interestingly there was no "say anything defiant on the front and you instantly get shot" kind of nonsense. That happened behind the front lines. At the front Soviet NCOs were remarkably chill, they let their men grumble to themselves because that was natural. Better to grumble and fight hard then to keep everything to yourself and pussy out.

They didn't have the production capabilities for it.

Without Lend-lease the Germans would have killed another half million of their soldiers and nearly won on the eastern front.

We sent them every truck, plane, boot, and plate of food they had. Plus 1/3rd their fuel, half their ammo, all their rubber, 2/3rd of their aluminum, all their silk, half their cotton, half their wool....

and for what? Them to enslave the east of europe?

I've read that one, and another on Stalingrad by someone else. Beevor did a good job, and his telling of the fall of Berlin is fucking tragic

Too late but if they waited until spring then Russia would have been much more prepared.

It's funny reading everything about the Germans and the Soviets and then he just casually mentions how the Romanians hated fucking everything and everyone. Their officers. The Germans. Why the fuck they were in Russia in the first place.

FDR was a fool and his administration was filled to the brim with commie spies who told him what he wanted to hear. It's honestly a miracle that Truman ended up being his 4th term VP instead of that commie slime traitor Henry Wallace.

GLORY TO THE HEROES
UUURAAAAAAAAA

Yes it was.
Germans have always been bad at strategy, production, and logistics.
They lost because they were dumb. Germany lacked the manpower and resources to match the Soviets alone.

I've read Stalingrad. You know the big beefy book by Antony Beevor. Stalingrad was such a stupid battle. It was fought entirely for symbolic value.

No it wasn't. The Germans wanted to capture Stalingrad to cut off the Soviets' from reaching the Caucasus region because the Germans wanted the oil fields in that area. Also, Stalingrad was on the Volga River and strategically important. Lend-lease aid via the Iran route was being threatened.

The Soviet leadership was full of retards.

Yes they were.

No it wasn't. The Germans wanted to capture Stalingrad to cut off the Soviets' from reaching the Caucasus region because the Germans wanted the oil fields in that area.

Yes I know. They wanted specifically Baku. Which is funny, because that is also what the French and British wanted to destroy a year earlier. Stalingrad was not vital to achieve that objective. What started as a objective toward Baku became a "decisive battle". Hitler was obsessed with decisive battles. And Hitler became convinced that Stalingrad was the battle that would break the Red Army and their seemingly infinite reserves. Unfortunately for the Germans, the more they dug into Stalingrad the more they turned it into the perfect killing ground for street-to-street hellfire warfare. The perfect place to undo an army. The Germans had unintentionally stuck themselves in a hole with limited supplies whilst the Soviets finally had the breathing room to rebuild their industries and push back.

russia didnt betray hitler, hitler randomly attacked them after he failed to conquer england

Yeah, there's some iconic scenes but it's overall a terrible movie.
Also fucking hate how everyone that isn't American in Hollywood movies has to be English.

nooo we can't just make our audience read subtitles

What an sad state of affairs.

yeah, why didnt hitler focus on getting oil from baku and places in the middle east. there was nothing useful in stalingrad to even claim

Be Stalin

paranoid about the British because they (nearly) bombed the USSR and they're still supporting the Finnish

Comrade Stalin, the Germans are warming their tanks on our border.

do nothing

Comrade Stalin, the Germans have flown into our air space several times today clearly surveying potential invasion routes

do nothing

Comrade Stalin, we captured German leaflets that assist German soldiers in saying "hands up" and "where is your collective farm surveyor" in Russian

do nothing

It's just British trickery.

Stalin was a terrible military leader. what he was good at was acquiring and holding on to his own power, not much else

To be fair he was also very good at public works. He knew what his country needed in terms of industry. You could say he was exactly the man the USSR needed. The only problem was he was only affective when he had a competent military staff.

was it really worth all the millions of his own people he killed just to build some more modern factories? could have improved things without all the death and suffering

This is the great debate. Could the Soviet Union have survived being devoured by other powerful nations without Stalins five year plan? Could it have become a leading industrial power in so short a time in any other way? The quick answer is no.

It made no difference. They did not even get to street fighting stage in Moscow. If they invaded earlier they'd probably be destroyed during the streetfights. In late 1941 Guderian disobeyed orders and retreated at the last possible moment preventing 4x what later happened at Stalingrad.

well stalin also did a big purge of his own military officers right before germany invaded. so that made the war last longer then it should have

I recommend "Court of the Red Tsar" by Sebag-Montefiore. Really in depth biography of the man.
Apparently early on in the war he was holed up at his vacation home convinced the Politburo was coming to arrest him for losing the war up until then.

That was his fault for believing the pact would hold.

was it really worth all the millions of his own people he killed just to build some more modern factories

Depends on who you ask. The USSR would not have survived the World War without his blazing push for industry, but the collective farms were a fucking disaster and he kind of knew it would be, it allowed him to eliminate potential threats and get a stranglehold on the food supply, which is kind of important for a dictatorial jerk. It certainly weakened Ukraine to such an extent that they couldn't rise up against him. As for the notion that he would be kinder to his own people; Stalin killed his entire social circle three times. Being close to him was no guarantee of safety and in fact probably was even more dangerous than being unknown to him.

Could have improved things without the death and suffering

Stalin didn't give a fuck about the death and suffering because he was mostly dealing with the Khazaks, Chechens, and Ukrainians, who had nationalist movements that he wanted to see dismantled before they became a problem. The famine mostly affected Soviet satellites.

Being dumb enough to trust Hitler on his word very nearly killed the Union.

The US developed it's industry without the widespread murder and imprisonment of millions of people. Sovioets are retarded

why do russians enjoy their own suffering and being ruled by dictators? why is that their culture

They had over a hundred years to do so and fought a brutal civil war over the increasing industrial divide between North and South.

The name. That's literally it. He wanted to seize the namesake of his greatest rival for bragging rights.

Ask any red state voter and you'll see why.

From 1928 to 1940, the number of Soviet workers in industry, construction, and transport grew from 4.6 million to 12.6 million

in 1917 it was like 4 million

well russia has also always been backwards in terms of technology compared to the rest of western europe and the US. they made some gains with huge sacrifices but in the end theyre still worst off then western europe and the US

Russia betrays you before you can betray Russia

dick move

damn, and they only had to kill 6-15 million people to get it there!

TLDR: Marxism Leninism works in a developing country but a lot have to die before it gets decent

It's important to remember that from the German side Stalingrad was almost won at day one, but 90% of the mechanized infantry got blasted by AA cannons still on their hanomags.
After that delay Soviets managed to get a Guards rifle division over the river that managed to delay the Germans so much that it eventually turned into the disaster we know it today.
It's hard to order a retreat when you where THAT close to winning, pride and stubborness takes over ration and caution.

90% of the mechanized infantry got blasted by AA cannons still on their hanomags.

who were mostly women btw, which is quite strange
the Germans were horrified to discover they were women, mostly students.

they also had 400k soldiers stationed in Norway guarding fish or whatever

...ok? Do you expect them to just stop because they're behind? They didn't really count on having a stagnating economy and winding up in the position of having half of Europe under their boot, needing to be policed by the largest army in human history and the entire world pointing nukes at them. Hitlers retardation just kind of tossed that into their lap and they spent the next few decades trying to find a way to make it work (it didn't)

The Germans refused to send their women to work in the factories in large numbers, they hated seeing them do anything

The British tried and failed to nail them with a naval invasion there. They figured it was better to be safe than sorry.

It's weird to me how they were totally fine with dropping bombs on cities full of women and children but the notion that women could shoot back was unthinkable. Germans are fucking retarded.

That was a dumb move. Maybe if Hitler let German women work in the munitions factories they wouldn't have had to rely on slave labor, pissing off every occupied country in the Reich.

That is one of the what-ifs - the production could have helped them. Speer tried to get them to go full war time production and they refused. Hundreds more tanks a month could have been produced.

That's what I found strange. I don't get how you can write in your dairy "the people here are really nice" in the outskirts of Stalingrad and then steal the local villagers milk and chickens. Literally so overfed they're eating spoonfuls of honey from a jar.
Then you firebomb the city, turn it into the perfect street battle arena and complain about how "barbaric" the Soviets fight. Maybe you should have thought about that when you created the style of battle you're about to fight in.

They didn't really count on having a stagnating economy and winding up in the position of having half of Europe under their boot

That's absolutely what they wanted though, because communism was a universalist ideology bent on conquering the world and Stalin was fully on board with it. If he didn't want to conquer half of Europe he wouldn't have insisted on it at Yalta. Get the Kremlin cock out of your mouth, Russia was overextended during the Cold War by its own decisions.

what Im saying is russia's natural tendency to live in a harsh, brutal dictatorship isnt beneficial. most of their problems are of their own making

They called it "gangster tactics", which is just top shelf seethe if you ask me. Hubris really is the word of the day here. Hitler believed his own hype and forgot to look at a map before he started shit.

they told them to remove civilians

the russians refused as they wanted to keep the department store open as long as possible.

Oh shid i got rifle I cant beli *dead*

there's a funny story about a tartar who decided whilst on patrol he wanted to defect to the germans so in the pitch black he crawled as far as he could until he was certain there would be no soviet troops to see him run off
turns out he went straight into a soviet forward HQ, but he thought they were Germans because he was so unaware of modern warfare he guessed all soldiers dressed the same way
he was shot, of course.

there is funny story about Russian who fight for Russia but not well enough so Russia kill him for not dying while fighting.

That's absolutely what they wanted though, because communism was a universalist ideology bent on conquering the world and Stalin was fully on board with it.

He had Trotsky murdered for suggesting such things (and for being a Menshivik). His personal vision was to shore up his defenses and just let the revolutions happen after the fascists self destructed. Turns out he was the instrument of their annihilation and he wound up with half the continent.

If he didn't want to conquer half of Europe he wouldn't have insisted on it at Yalta.

Losing twelve million people (through your own personal retardation but nevermind that) and doing most of the legwork on killing the bad guy puts you in a position to make demands at the peace talks, yeah. The last thing he was gonna allow was for the territory he had lost three generations taking to be handed back over.

Get the Kremlin cock out of your mouth, Russia was overextended during the Cold War by its own decisions.

It was a bad move in hindsight, yeah. Can't blame him though, he had just been sneak attacked and knew for a fact that several other world leaders were jockeying to do it again. Also he wasn't dumb enough to just throw away the gains the USSR had won after such a hard fought battle. The public or his own leadership would have killed him.

a lot of those "russians" were Kazakh

Most problems are self inflicted, yes.

Quick simplification.
Trotsky was an idealist. He believed true communism could only be achieved through rapid, constant class war against the capitalist world. Only then could world socialism, and (in the future) communism be achieved.
Stalin was a pragmatist. He believed nothing was more important than solidifying the revolution at home before it can be spread elsewhere, socialism in one country. Make the USSR a strong, united workers state that cannot be easily crushed before even thinking of continuing the class war elsewhere. Stalin only supported revolutions subtly, like how America (initially) supported all the anti-communist movements in asia, africa and latin america after the war. It just so happened Germanys retreat gave Stalin the opportunity Trotsky never had.

Stalin was a good boy and dindu nuffin, it wasn't his fault that he conquered Poland and the Baltics and Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Romania and...

Stalin was always planning on expanding his territory, and he would have gone further if he could. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was explicitly about this. He wasn't at all an innocent little dictator planning to sit around and wait for countries to fail so that he could show them the true path of Marxism, he was always, always planning on being a conquering dickhead. You're just bending over backwards making excuses for him and trying to present him as an innocent man caught up in a situation beyond his control when he was one of the fuckers driving the whole thing.

Stalin only supported revolutions subtly

Invading Poland, very subtle.

Again, that was an opportunity that presented itself. Germany wanted its "sphere of influence" the Soviets got theirs through a quick backstab.

You're just bending over backwards making excuses for him and trying to present him as an innocent man caught up in a situation beyond his control when he was one of the fuckers driving the whole thing.

I'm really not but you're entitled to your opinion

it's very funny to think that for an entire year the Nazis were cockblocked from doing anything to French communists because of the terms of the Molotov Ribbentrop pact

All of your posts read as

well Stalin didn't actually WANT war, but when war came to him he would do what he could!

Which is bullshit. Stalin did want war, and he actively wanted to expand his territory through warfare. That's why he invaded Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states. The narrative only turned around when the meanie Nazis attacked him, then poor little Stalin could do no wrong.

>well Stalin didn't actually WANT war, but when war came to him he would do what he could!

Posturing and actually planning for it are two different things anon. Most of the sources make it pretty clear that he wasn't interested in starting a losing fight. Opportunistic seizures notwithstanding, he wasn't much of a warmonger. Beyond his invasion of Poland, most of the Soviet fights were started by other peeps