What's the best and most realistic PoD for having the Soviet Union perform better in 1941? The earlier in Operation Barbarossa that this PoD begins having a significant effect, the better. And Yes, Operation Barbarossa must still occur. And this PoD should ideally be as close to the start of Operation Barbarossa as possible.
What's the best and most realistic PoD for having the Soviet Union perform better in 1941?
- Thread starter WolfBear
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Probably simply giving Stalin a brain. Or at least making him realise how totally outclassed the Soviet forces were initially and also accepting all the evidence that the attack was coming. However that would require that someone who has spent the best part of 20 years as an unquestioned tyrant realising he's not a god and is definitely capable of fucking things up.
For instance, as the German build up became clearer I would have suggested that, a few sacrificial fortifications on key logistical routes aside you only have fairly minimal defences on the front - at least opposing the Germans north of Romania. Have a more powerful defensive line roughly where the old Stalin line was, hence more out of the range of German escorted bombers until they re-base forward and also mobile counter attack forces behind them.
The plan being to have the fast moving German spearheads advance way beyond the bulk of the army, as they did, then hopefully be held with less air support at the fortified line while counter attack forces seek to isolate them. Of course with the mess the Red Army was after the purges and political control being in place this is still likely to fail. However your got at least some chances of mauling the German forces and winning valuable time.
If you want a change immediately after the start of the invasion then Stalin doesn't go into a funk for several days and accepts at least to himself that he's made a big error. Immediate have a more realistic idea of the actual strengths of the forces involved and allow withdrawals when forces are in danger of encirclement - true this may not always be clear. This would save a lot of the as least partially trained manpower for later battles. Be willing to give space for time and the ability to regroup. The Germans are still going to make huge gains but their likely to take more losses and the Soviets markedly less. As soon as politically possible remove the powers of the political commissars and as he did OTL make it a people's war against the invaders.
True having Stalin starting to act like this is about as ASB as expecting similar actions from Hitler but given how top down the Soviet system is its the primary weak point that improvement of hence gives the biggest benefit.
For instance, as the German build up became clearer I would have suggested that, a few sacrificial fortifications on key logistical routes aside you only have fairly minimal defences on the front - at least opposing the Germans north of Romania. Have a more powerful defensive line roughly where the old Stalin line was, hence more out of the range of German escorted bombers until they re-base forward and also mobile counter attack forces behind them.
The plan being to have the fast moving German spearheads advance way beyond the bulk of the army, as they did, then hopefully be held with less air support at the fortified line while counter attack forces seek to isolate them. Of course with the mess the Red Army was after the purges and political control being in place this is still likely to fail. However your got at least some chances of mauling the German forces and winning valuable time.
If you want a change immediately after the start of the invasion then Stalin doesn't go into a funk for several days and accepts at least to himself that he's made a big error. Immediate have a more realistic idea of the actual strengths of the forces involved and allow withdrawals when forces are in danger of encirclement - true this may not always be clear. This would save a lot of the as least partially trained manpower for later battles. Be willing to give space for time and the ability to regroup. The Germans are still going to make huge gains but their likely to take more losses and the Soviets markedly less. As soon as politically possible remove the powers of the political commissars and as he did OTL make it a people's war against the invaders.
True having Stalin starting to act like this is about as ASB as expecting similar actions from Hitler but given how top down the Soviet system is its the primary weak point that improvement of hence gives the biggest benefit.
History Learner
Well-known member
Cut a deal with Hitler at the Berlin Meeting in November of 1940, with the USSR joining the Axis and having a free hand to expand South into the Middle East and Southern Asia. In of itself, it's a decent deal on top of the existing agreements, and makes it more likely it will build up trust with Hitler so that later on they can push more on Bulgaria, Finland, etc. If not, you can always tear up the agreement after you've been generously provided the time to complete your mobilization.
History Learner
Well-known member
I know for a fact me or @sillygoose have repeatedly pointed out to you before that none of this has a basis in truth. Stalin did not go into any funk; that's Post-War mythmaking, we have the Kremlin logs that show he was in his office everyday. He increased VVS overflights over German territory to gain intelligence, ordered a mobilization in April that saw numerous armies arriving to the front by June including force transfers from the Asian USSR, and rapidly escalated military construction-especially of airfields-in the months coming up to the invasion. The American military attaches noted this intense military activity and thought at the time, until the picture became clear, that the Soviets had pre-empted the invasion. The USSR had, also, been in a war economy mode since 1940.
sillygoose
Well-known member
Arguably sooner, as the Five Year Plans had been about building up the industries that had major military applications and mechanizing agriculture so that men could be freed up for factory or military work.
Also from January 1st 1939 to June 22nd 1941 the Red Army more than doubled:
Рабоче-крестьянская Красная армия — Википедия
ru.wikipedia.org
Deploy away from the 1941 border and instead assemble behind the 1939 border and build up defensive positions. As it was, despite what many of the naysayers have been pushing since the Icebreaker thesis, it really seemed as though the Soviets were deploying offensively and Zhukov's May offensive plan was being implemented, but Hitler preempted them. You'd really have to change the views of the Soviet military away from offensive, or at least defensive-offensive, planning to a more defense in depth/deep deployment mentality to be able to survive the shock of the initial invasion while retaining sufficient combat power.
Doesn't count, since this prevents Operation Barbarossa from occurring on schedule, which I don't actually want for the purpose of this AHC here. This would also make it impossible for the Soviet Union to get Anglo-American aid later on.
Arguably sooner, as the Five Year Plans had been about building up the industries that had major military applications and mechanizing agriculture so that men could be freed up for factory or military work.
Also from January 1st 1939 to June 22nd 1941 the Red Army more than doubled:
Рабоче-крестьянская Красная армия — Википедия
Deploy away from the 1941 border and instead assemble behind the 1939 border and build up defensive positions. As it was, despite what many of the naysayers have been pushing since the Icebreaker thesis, it really seemed as though the Soviets were deploying offensively and Zhukov's May offensive plan was being implemented, but Hitler preempted them. You'd really have to change the views of the Soviet military away from offensive, or at least defensive-offensive, planning to a more defense in depth/deep deployment mentality to be able to survive the shock of the initial invasion while retaining sufficient combat power.
What about having two defensive lines--one along the 1939 borders and another, second one on the Daugava-Dnieper Line?
sillygoose
Well-known member
I suppose you could, but the lines would cross over one another:
The Stalin Line as a line of fortified regions
The Stalin Line is a line of fortified regions along the former western border of the USSR from the Karelian Isthmus to the Black Sea coasts. The defe...
I suppose you could, but the lines would cross over one another:
The Stalin Line as a line of fortified regions
The Stalin Line is a line of fortified regions along the former western border of the USSR from the Karelian Isthmus to the Black Sea coasts. The defe...stalin-line.by
Yeah, so the southern Stalin line + the Daugava and then a second defensive line on the northern Stalin line + the Dnieper.
sillygoose
Well-known member
That would be a much better option than the OTL one.
Good.
Though this would also leave a huge part of the Soviet Union's Jews extremely vulnerable. So, it would probably be prudent to accompany this by a mass deportation of the Jews in the Soviet Union's western borderlands to the interior of the Soviet Union for the sake of their own security. I'm trying to figure out whether it would be best to deport all Soviet Jews who are located west of both defensive lines or who are located west of at least one defensive line, though. Probably the latter if one wants to be really safe, to be honest.
sillygoose
Well-known member
It is claimed they did manage to evacuate about 1 million Jews (my SOs grandfather was one of them), but no decent citations exist that I've been able to find and more academic sources are skeptical. There were something like 16 million people evacuated in 1941 and several million more in 1942, so it is likely quite a few were Jewish, though given how disorganized it all was there is simply no way to tell or what happened to the people specifically once they were tossed where ever the trains took them. As it is the range of Jews killed in WW2 within the 1941 borders is between 700,000 to 3 million, because there simply is not a way to tell what became of millions of people; they might have survived, they might have died in the Holocaust, they might have died incidentally during or after the war. Confusion reigned supreme and Stalin wouldn't allow a census, so the first one that happened after the war happened in 1956 after Stalin's death as he wanted to cover up the immense casualties that were caused by his failures. That of course wouldn't be the first time he did that when he 'corrected' the 1937 census when it showed just how many died as a result of his policies in the 1930s.Good.
This paper talks about the issue:
Toward a Central Database of Evacuated Soviet Jews' Names, for the Study of the Holocaust in the Occupied Soviet Territories
Abstract. Previously unknown data from central Russian archives show that Soviet, post-Soviet, and Western historians have substantially overestimated the
academic.oup.com
For any such deportations to happen they'd have to plan ahead to evacuate vulnerable and useful people from the zones in front of the defensive lines.
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It is claimed they did manage to evacuate about 1 million Jews (my SOs grandfather was one of them), but no decent citations exist that I've been able to find and more academic sources are skeptical. There were something like 16 million people evacuated in 1941 and several million more in 1942, so it is likely quite a few were Jewish, though given how disorganized it all was there is simply no way to tell or what happened to the people specifically once they were tossed where ever the trains took them. As it is the range of Jews killed in WW2 within the 1941 borders is between 700,000 to 3 million, because there simply is not a way to tell what became of millions of people; they might have survived, they might have died in the Holocaust, they might have died incidentally during or after the war. Confusion reigned supreme and Stalin wouldn't allow a census, so the first one that happened after the war happened in 1956 after Stalin's death as he wanted to cover up the immense casualties that were caused by his failures. That of course wouldn't be the first time he did that when he 'corrected' the 1937 census when it showed just how many died as a result of his policies in the 1930s.
This paper talks about the issue:
Toward a Central Database of Evacuated Soviet Jews' Names, for the Study of the Holocaust in the Occupied Soviet Territories
Abstract. Previously unknown data from central Russian archives show that Soviet, post-Soviet, and Western historians have substantially overestimated the
For any such deportations to happen they'd have to plan ahead to evacuate vulnerable and useful people from the zones in front of the defensive lines.
Re: Soviet Jews: It's worth noting that there were around one million Jews in the former Pale of Settlement territories in 1959. And not all Soviet Jews who evacuated in 1941-1942 subsequently returned to their homes--my own Jewish great-grandfather and his family permanently stayed in Kuybyshev Oblast (now Samara Oblast) on the Volga River in Russia even after the end of World War II, for instance.
Chiron
Well-known member
Best thing:
Stalin has a stroke in May 1940 and dies. The man was too much of a team killing moron.
Whoever his successor is must do the following:
Immediately cut the the damn AFV numbers to a more logistically supportable 5,000 Tanks on the T-34 model, another 5,000 other AFVs based on re-purposed T-26 or BT chassis to carry mobile artillery and mortars in properly balanced divisions.
Massively expand truck and tire production. No sense building a massive army without the supporting trucks. Also train more mechanics and get more signals troops into the divisions.
No sense building a large artillery park if they can't do indirect fires and a Division Commander without adequate signals to talk to his units is nothing more than an administrative command with no command and control. Get a true belt fed LMG to each squad and preferably 2.
Fix the mobilizations schedules to not pull factory workers out of the factories and don't over mobilize.
With these changes, the Red Army is far more mobile and able to use its forces a hell of a lot more effectively to bash the Heer to a standstill in a straight up shit kicking contest because they have the right balance of supporting arms and tooth to tail ratios.
Stalin has a stroke in May 1940 and dies. The man was too much of a team killing moron.
Whoever his successor is must do the following:
Immediately cut the the damn AFV numbers to a more logistically supportable 5,000 Tanks on the T-34 model, another 5,000 other AFVs based on re-purposed T-26 or BT chassis to carry mobile artillery and mortars in properly balanced divisions.
Massively expand truck and tire production. No sense building a massive army without the supporting trucks. Also train more mechanics and get more signals troops into the divisions.
No sense building a large artillery park if they can't do indirect fires and a Division Commander without adequate signals to talk to his units is nothing more than an administrative command with no command and control. Get a true belt fed LMG to each squad and preferably 2.
Fix the mobilizations schedules to not pull factory workers out of the factories and don't over mobilize.
With these changes, the Red Army is far more mobile and able to use its forces a hell of a lot more effectively to bash the Heer to a standstill in a straight up shit kicking contest because they have the right balance of supporting arms and tooth to tail ratios.
History Learner
Well-known member
Are we presuming no Soviet expansion in the Baltics and Poland though?
raharris1973
Well-known member
You know, if the Soviet-western fighting in the Middle East isn't too prolonged or too bloody, and later on the Germans and Soviets have a falling out, I would not definitively exclude the west and Soviets patching up a deal later.
sillygoose
Well-known member
I would assume since the POD is supposed to be in 1941.
sillygoose
Well-known member
In the area I grew up there were a large number of Russian Jewish immigrants and that was a common story; many had had family members who had been evacuated and then just stayed where they ended up. Not only that, but there was one report I saw recently that something similar happened for a lot of gulag inmates and researchers were able to track that by the income in areas around former gulags, as a lot of the prisoners were intellectual dissidents, so when they stayed in a prison area after deportation they and their descendants managed to raise the productivity of the area.
Enemies of the people
‘Enemies of the people’ were the millions of artists, engineers, managers, or professors who were thought to be a threat to the Soviet regime solely for being the educated elite. Along with millions of non-political prisoners, they were forcedly resettled to the Gulag, the system of labour camps...
voxeu.org
There were even stories of German PoWs being 'freed' early if they agreed to stay in the USSR and repopulate villages who had lost all of their men in the war.
So it would seem to be a common thing in the USSR, once you're displaced you try to rebuild a life where you're at.
History Learner
Well-known member
So like the Soviets don’t expand into the buffer in 1939-1940? Or Stalin initiates a pull back in the lead up to the invasion.
But this expansion happened in 1939-1940, which is before 1941.
Possible, though there could be a lot of angry Western feelings towards the Soviet Union in such a scenario. The West's logic might be "They fought us before, so why give them aid now? Why not have us completely sit out this Nazi-Soviet death match?"
No, they do expand into this buffer.
In the area I grew up there were a large number of Russian Jewish immigrants and that was a common story; many had had family members who had been evacuated and then just stayed where they ended up. Not only that, but there was one report I saw recently that something similar happened for a lot of gulag inmates and researchers were able to track that by the income in areas around former gulags, as a lot of the prisoners were intellectual dissidents, so when they stayed in a prison area after deportation they and their descendants managed to raise the productivity of the area.
Enemies of the people
‘Enemies of the people’ were the millions of artists, engineers, managers, or professors who were thought to be a threat to the Soviet regime solely for being the educated elite. Along with millions of non-political prisoners, they were forcedly resettled to the Gulag, the system of labour camps...
There were even stories of German PoWs being 'freed' early if they agreed to stay in the USSR and repopulate villages who had lost all of their men in the war.
So it would seem to be a common thing in the USSR, once you're displaced you try to rebuild a life where you're at.
In regards to the Jews specifically, considering that there were around a million Jews in the Pale of Settlement in 1959 (as I previously wrote above here), most evacuated Soviet Jews did, in fact, return to their former homes or at least cities of residence after the war. But Yeah, some did not, such as my own great-grandfather and his family.
As for the gulags, Russian blogger Anatoly Karlin has an interesting article about this:
Magic Gulag Soil Theory
Toews, Gerhard, and Pierre-Louis Vézina. 2018. “Enemies of the People.” Working Paper. (h/t Emil) The presence of Gulag prisoners - especially concentrations of \
www.unz.com
The title is, of course, used to ridicule environmentalist hypotheses of group average IQ gaps.