AHC: Soviets encircle the Germans as much as the Germans encircled the Soviets

Deleted member 97083

With the latest possible POD, what has to change in the Red Army to allow the Soviets to encircle German divisions as often as, or more often than the reverse?

If possible, to the extent that the Soviet army gains a reputation for always encircling its enemies, a reputation which survives beyond WW2.
 

Deleted member 1487

With the latest possible POD, what has to change in the Red Army to allow the Soviets to encircle German divisions as often as, or more often than the reverse?

If possible, to the extent that the Soviet army gains a reputation for always encircling its enemies, a reputation which survives beyond WW2.
I mean they were trying to constantly during the war, only getting the requisite mobility, firepower, and numerical superiority over the Germans from late 1942 on. From Stalingrad on the Soviets started with encirclements, but were only consistently pulling that off from early 1944 on. So that did have that reputation from people that followed the details of the campaigns.
 
Yeah, the Soviets from late-'42 on and especially from early-'44 on were quite capable of pulling off encirclements and maeneuvering their forces as deftly as the Germans had in '41.

The problem with the Red Army's rep stemmed less from an inability to encircle their foes and more that it remained something of a faceless mass throughout the Cold War. As almost all western info for 40 years came from the Germans, it allowed their depiction of the Soviets as an unskilled mass of mechanized and human waves swarming over the Germans to entrench itself in the public memory quite heavily. You have to read the detailed histories written since the fall of the Soviet Union to get a really good picture of it.

Some interesting tidbits jump out at you... for instance when Guderian told Hitler he was massively outnumbered, facing odds of five to one, he was actually fooled by Soviet deception plans. Actual Soviet strength was only a little more than half that, the rest were dummy formations.

Also beyond the big names everyone knows such as Zhukov, Konev, Rokossovsky, and Chuikov, the Red Army had many other skilled but lesser known generals like Rybalko, Katukov, Kravchenko, and Chernyassky to name but a few.

So in sum, even if you can conceive a situation where it's only the Germans on the Eastern Front who ever suffer repeated mass encirclement*, the reputation that the Red Army will get is still that the Soviets steamrolled them through nothing but numbers and not skillful maeneuvering like they actually would/did because that's what the surviving German generals who escape to Western Europe/Britain will tell everyone and subsequent post-war Western hostility towards the USSR will facilitate them being believed, as well as dismiss Soviet officially released Soviet records as propaganda for some decades

*A post-poned until '42-or-later Barbarossa might do it, depending on the details.
 
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