right..... Well then What if on their march to Baku they incited nationolist revolt in Ukraine and Belarus, could that keep the SU busy, or maybe Durin Stalin,'s purges of the Army Timoshenko, Zhukov, most of the Russian general staff is executed, so the SU makes blunders could that work.
Ukraine's a much-discussed one. To summarise...
- Ukraine was really two seperate countries that spoke Ukrainian: Soviet Ukraine, part of the Soviet society since its founding; and Galicia-Volhynia, former Polish Ukraine, conquered by the Soviets two short years ago.
- In Galicia, the population were as a rule strongly nationalist (and loyal to their local Greek-rite Catholic church). They wanted to be ruled by nobody, German, Polish, or Soviet, and their partisan organisations played their own games, preferring to work with the Germans but quite willing to turn on them.
- The Germans raised Galician troops and police - however in not very great numbers, proportionately speaking, and they had to make concessions about the Greek Catholic faith. A lot of these troops and police were entryists who were really loyal to the nationalists.
- In Soviet Ukraine, the peasants were very hostile to Stalin and it took a (very) short period of convincing before they realised that something worse than Stalin existed; but they were also followers of the Russian Orthodox church, their Ukrainian national identity rather uncertain, and
very averse to foreign invaders. The identity of the cities was more complex: many people living there had been peasants in their lifetimes, of course, but generally the cities were more Soviet in identity. This urban-rural distinction holds true for Russia as well, really.
- The Nazis raised exactly the same sort of troops in Soviet Ukraine that they did in Soviet Russia: "schuma" (detachments of collaboraters organised in anti-partisan death-squads) and "hiwis" (Soviets who became auxilliaries and rear-echelon helpers for the Germans to keep themselves alive). They also did the same things to turn people against them: food confiscation and savage anti-partisan measures.
In short: Galicia is a country where the Germans raised one division and might have raised more; but it's a long way from Baku, was occupied in the first moves of the campaign, and has only so many inhabitants. Soviet Ukraine wasn't going to revolt.