Could Stalin Have Just Held Back on the Eastern Front After 1943?

Anaxagoras

Banned
On this board, we've often talked out the possibility of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union making a separate peace with one another. One suggestion I have seen is Hitler deciding he can't win in Russia after Stalingrad or Kursk. This to me is essentially ASB, given Hitler's personality. The war against Russia was the raison d'etre of Hitler's entire program and I don't think he would give it up under any circumstances. Stalin, on the other hand, was a pragmatist who might have been willing to accept a peace offer from Hitler if he thought it was to his advantage. This might be purely academic, since it takes two to make a peace unless one or the other is totally defeated.

As a different take on the idea, could Stalin have simply decided it would be to his advantage to just remain on the defensive against Hitler, perhaps after a few offensive movements to secure a better line, and let the Germans and the Western Allies bleed each other white for a few years, then sweep in with the Red Army and take whatever he wanted? It's not like he cared about the suffering of the people under German occupation. He didn't trust the British and Americans and, if he felt his position to be secure after Stalingrad/Kursk, might he simply left them in the lurch?
 
Wouldn't he be worried they would take all of Germany and parts of Eastern Europe, leaving the USSR with nothing? It's not as if Hitler could have substantially reduced German forces in the East, because after all, if he did so, why shouldn't Stalin restart the war?
 
There is a post war story from a Bulgarian diplomat that he was asked to take a proposal from the Soviet government to the Germans, for a cease fire and armistice. He claimed this occurred in October 1943. He passed the message along & heard no more about it.

Note that Bulgaria never declared war on the USSR & still exchanged ambassadors in 1943.
 
There is a post war story from a Bulgarian diplomat that he was asked to take a proposal from the Soviet government to the Germans, for a cease fire and armistice. He claimed this occurred in October 1943. He passed the message along & heard no more about it.

Note that Bulgaria never declared war on the USSR & still exchanged ambassadors in 1943.

If I recall correctly, that offer was probably something along the lines of 1914 borders (+ Tech transfers) that the Soviets offered until around Bagration. After Third Kharkov but before Kursk they were offering Pre-Barbarossa borders, and Hitler actually did consider it but wanted more land on top of it that the Soviets weren't inclined to agree to.
 
After Stalingrad, Stalin had very little interest in serious negotiations with the Germans as he recognized the Red Army had gained the upper-hand. Kursk proceeded to confirm this view and whatever inclination Stalin had for any sort of negotiations evaporated completely. It was obvious that the Soviets were thrashing the Germans and there was no further incentive to really deal.
 
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"Strike German Animals"
 
If I recall correctly, that offer was probably something along the lines of 1914 borders (+ Tech transfers) that the Soviets offered until around Bagration. After Third Kharkov but before Kursk they were offering Pre-Barbarossa borders, and Hitler actually did consider it but wanted more land on top of it that the Soviets weren't inclined to agree to.

Theres different versions of this in circulation. I've not seen anyone produce the message. & have not yet seen the original of the Bulgarians statement. If anyone has a serious historians work on this subject to recommend please dont hesitate to post it.
 
The only way Stalin considers a peace with the Germans is if, at a minimum they go back to the border the day before Barbarossa kicked off, and of course the Finns are thrown under the bus. Stalin cannot leave any Soviet territory occupied by the Germans, and he will push hard to get the goodies from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact although he might give some or all of that up. The problem is in 1943 the Germans are obviously losing - they have been kicked out of North Africa, and then Sicily in July/August. LL is revving up and the air offensive in the west is getting underway in a serious way. If Stalin has some sort of armistice or even a cease fire more or less in place, LL will stop, and that will make things difficult for the USSR - especially if the Germans still hold much of the fertile lands they overran, think of LL food.
 
Stalin wasn't Lenin. Party ideology was intrinsically tied to the military technical. In the prewar ideology leading up to the outbreak of hostilities with Germany the party line was to take the fight to the enemy's soil and to protect the motherland. The idea of revolution blatantly supplants military evolution (or pragmatism) in the Soviet system. Stalin was a true believer and war for the Soviets was deeply political.

That is like my new favorite World War II art piece. Thank you for that
 
I can't imagine it. The thing you have to keep in mind is that Hitler had broken EVERY similar treaty by this point that anyone had ever made with him (the one concerning Czechslovakia being the prime example) and committed one of the biggest betrayals in human history by invading the USSR after signing a friendship treaty with it. Every allied nation by this point had drawn the conclusion that Hitler's regime was flat-out too aggressive to trust.

Also, how does Stalin know exactly when he's got the situation in hand and can just sit behind his defensive lines and be sure the Nazis won't rebuild to a far higher level of strength, attack, and in doing so place the Soviet Union in existential danger again? Remember, we know a ton more from hindsight than the allied generals knew at the time, and when in doubt they tended to lean towards overestimating the strength of the axis. Hell, they thought Rommel getting to Palestine, the bombing of the West Coast by Japanese bombers, and invasions of Australia, Ceylon, and Hawaii were real possibilities. After the drama of Barbarossa, Stalin making the determination that he's safe without Hitler being dead in a ditch is impossible IMHO.

I also don't think it's plausible that Stalin would just leave the overwhelming majority of the populations of Ukraine, the Baltic States, and Belarus to the tender mercies of German occupation, which surely would have resulted in the deaths of millions of additional people. Even if you make the tenuous assumption that Stalin did not give a single flying fig on a human level about millions of his citizens being murdered in a genocide by fascists, he would have been able to appreciate that the Soviet Union would have been a weaker country without those people and how that was not in his best interests. The thing that would have ensured this decision was that the Red Army was having serious issues with manpower shortages by this point because so much of their population was either dead or behind German lines where they couldn't be called up. David Glantz and others have done some very good work in documenting how the USSR was essentially dependent on recruitment from liberated territory from 1943 onward. If Hitler had rebuilt and posed a new threat, Stalin would have been pretty much out of men except for the ones he already had without the people behind the German lines. No way he would have taken that risk.

This also very probably would have resulted in the WAllies getting more axis-occupied territory because if they had been left to battle it out with Hitler and clearly had Germany on the brink of defeat Germany most likely would have tried to surrender as much as they could to them. The USSR, being much further away, would have been hard pressed to grab much.

So sorry, but I can't see why Stalin would do this. Just makes no logical sense why he would.
 
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