What was Stalin's best possible moves against Hitler (and their significance)?

Don't invade Finland. Performance in Finland (lack thereof) was what convinced Hitler that the USSR would fold if he just kicked in the door.

Which is kind of ironic, considering that Stalin invaded Finland with inadequately allocated troops and resources, in the middle of a very cold winter, because he thought that the Finns would fold if he just kicked in the door.

So, the problem with saying "don't invade Finland" is to somehow convince Stalin that Finland is a tougher nut to crack than it seems. It is arguably even harder to do that than it would be to convince Hitler that the USSR is tougher than it seems.
 
Inform the Czechoslovakian leadership and the Western governments in no uncertain terms that regardless of what Poland and Romania have to say about that, the Red Army will push through westwards to help Czechoslovakia in 1938 if the Germans invade.
Watch the nervous German generals stage a last-minute coup before a shot is fired.
 

Deleted member 1487

Inform the Czechoslovakian leadership and the Western governments in no uncertain terms that regardless of what Poland and Romania have to say about that, the Red Army will push through westwards to help Czechoslovakia in 1938 if the Germans invade.
Watch the nervous German generals stage a last-minute coup before a shot is fired.
The problem there is that makes the Soviets worse than the Germans, as they are invading bigger, more important countries than Czechoslovakia; Poland is allied with the French in fact. So if the Soviets actually follow through they are forcing the Allies to declare war on the Soviets and throwing Poland and Romania into an alliance of necessity with the Germans for their own survival (the Allies can't really aid them without German agreement). All you're doing is forcing the Allies to stand down against Hitler to prevent being forced into a lose-lose situation.
 

FBKampfer

Banned
The problem there is that makes the Soviets worse than the Germans, as they are invading bigger, more important countries than Czechoslovakia; Poland is allied with the French in fact. So if the Soviets actually follow through they are forcing the Allies to declare war on the Soviets and throwing Poland and Romania into an alliance of necessity with the Germans for their own survival (the Allies can't really aid them without German agreement). All you're doing is forcing the Allies to stand down against Hitler to prevent being forced into a lose-lose situation.

Like a wierd IRL variation of the Springtime for Hitler trope. Only..... you know..... a real life metaphorical springtime for actual hitler.


I'm convinced that the Soviets were pretty well backed into a corner without some major political POD's.
 
What is required for the RKKA to stop the invasion at the Dnieper-Dvina (Stalin) line? what are the big things that need to be fixed

Here are some of them imo

Untenable logistics in the annexed areas during war (solved by staying at the pre-war borders)
An equally significant factor was the realization that industry could not cope with the new demands at such short notice. An investigation carried out by the NKVD during the war games disclosed that the master plan for the construction of railways had fallen far behind. Nor had the emergency plans ordered by the Red Army's Chief of Staff been fulfilled: no co-ordinated plan existed for the administration of the railways during the first months of the war. The handling of the mobilization plans in this context had not even been discussed, and the railways leading to the front line could not handle more than 30 per cent of the traffic anticipated. In the central sector of Minsk, for instance, no more than 16.7 per cent of the budget allocated for the improvement of the railways had been used. On average less than 12 per cent of the plans for the expansion of the railways had been accomplished. Heavy tanks had to be transferred to the front on 60-ton platforms; only 387 such platforms were available, and not a single one had been constructed in 1940. Only about 50 per cent of supplies indispensable for the construction of an adequate transport system to the front, such as rails, telegraph posts and railway sleepers, were available. Finally, the alarm was sounded that work on the Baltic mobilization system had 'not even started'. Intensive measures were indeed taken by the SNK to give a boost to the 'production of defensive materials' throughout 1941, placing great emphasis on the construction of the new industrial complexes which could cater for the new demands.

Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia by Gabriel Gorodetsky

A bureaucracy bloating the mechanized corps/divisions organization and structure to absurd proportions
G.K.Zhukov turned out to be more talkative:



"...Remembering how and what we, the military, demanded from the industry in the last months of peace I see that sometimes we did not fully considered the real economic possibilities of the country. Although from our so-to-speak institutional point of view we were right ".



I am not sure that the present-day reader will be able to understand without a translator what exactly Comrade Zhukov said. The words "institutional", "institutional approach to the matter" were common euphemisms (words-substitutes) of the Soviet "newspeach". The word combination "institutional approach" replaced the other, much less harmonious expression: "cover one's ***". Inputting into the mobilization plan exorbitant, unsubstantiated and consciously undoable requests to the material-technical supplies of the army the military agency leaders were preparing for themselves a "legitimate excuse" in the case of a future defeat. It is doubtful they were also thinking about the convenience for the future Soviet historians but nevertheless it was a wonderful gift. Because the percents, those very percents which cover as fly traces the opuses of the Soviet historians, are computed relative to the numbers in the mobilization plan MP-41. That very plan which the Supreme Court Military board tried to present as "wreckage" but the defendant Army General was prepared only to admit that the plan contained "nonsense".
Screwing the Brains by Mark Solonin

Communication issues-- solved simply by mobilizing
Communications performed poorly in the first few days of the war due to the corresponding formations not having been mobilized. By the end of June the communications units had been given the necessary manning and were able to support the operability of the front line communications network with comparative efficiency.
Dubno 1941 by Aleksei Isaev

Here are some explanations from Explaining the Tragedy of 1941: Russian College Textbooks on the Red Army’s Early Defeat
  1. Superiority of the German block based on economic and military parameters [solved by military-economic mobilization]
  2. Weakening of the command staff of the Red Army because of repression in 1937–1939 [a falsehood it strengthened the command staff by dramatically increasing the number of those from academies as one example]
  3. Atmosphere of suspicion and terror in the country and an army that fettered military initiatives
  4. Erroneous aims of national policy in the USSR
  5. Reorganization of the Red Army, which had not managed to move to new types of military equipment and to staff the new units
  6. Military doctrine that provided only offensive action for the Red Army
  7. Dismantling of old and lack of new fortifications on the border
  8. Stalin’s miscalculations: disbelief in Hitler’s attack in June 1941, overestimation of Red Army’s capabilities
  9. Delay in bringing the troops on alert because of Stalin’s position
  10. Stalin’s and the command’s error and in determining the direction of the enemy’s main attack
  11. Germany’s successful campaign of misinformation
  12. The suddenness of the attack, the Red Army’s unpreparedness to repel this blow
  13. Heavy losses of the Red Army in the first hours and days of the war
  14. Numerical superiority of the enemy in the directions of the main attacks
  15. The general superiority of the enemy in quality of weapons, organization, & combat experience [combat experience is irrelevant, not only did the RKKA have it, but looking at any learning model like the Lectio Divina makes it plain that it doesn't matter, learning is learning whether at peace or at war, the simple fact that they may have had more combat experience does not prove anything]
  16. Incompetent commanding officers of the Red Army and Stalin in the initial period of war [they were far from incompetent except for Stalin, utterly baseless]
 

Deleted member 1487

Which is exactly what the Soviets wanted to do in the first place, but Britain and France weren’t interested.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...Hitler-if-Britain-and-France-agreed-pact.html
Only if they were allowed to send 1 million troops to Poland. The Poles knew they'd never leave if they did (and they didn't after WW2), so said no to that provision. The Soviets only wanted to help if they could in effect annex Poland and no one was interested in that, so Stalin signed on with Hitler instead and got half of Poland, the Baltic states, part of Finland and part of Romania.
 
Stalin could still not have signed, sit back, act threatening, and don't trade Hitler the materials needed to invade the Soviet Union, for two years

That's the easiest option which would also gain a moral superiority in eyes of the many in the west: "Look, fascists and capitalists are fighting while workers all around the world want peace". Germany without Soviet raw materials and above all, without secure eastern flank, would be in for a bloody struggle in the West as the Polish campaign would draw out for a (little) longer, France would be getting stronger every day and not as large concentration of forces in the West could be achieved.

In fact, Stalin could gain if he ordered large and provocative military manouvers each time the Soviet (very good) intelligence would show signs of German plans for attack in the west.

So, basically, even doing nothing would be vastly more beneficial than the route taken historically.
 
German logistics could support their largely horse drawn army no more than 500 miles from the front. The Russians should have pulled back in an orderly retreat (starting off by not concentrating so many troops and planes and tanks right near the border) until the German began to weaken due to logistical problems. This is in fact what they did in 1942 in response to Case Blue and it worked. They lost a lot of territory but when the Germans were at the end of their supply tether, they could be beaten.
 
  1. Weakening of the command staff of the Red Army because of repression in 1937–1939 [a falsehood it strengthened the command staff by dramatically increasing the number of those from academies as one example.]

I’m not sure how the improvement of the output in officer academies disproves the assertion that the pre-War repression weakened the command staff. The most obvious reason would be to suggest that adding the numbers of those lost to the repression’s to those who graduated in 1939-1941 is obviously a larger number of command staffers then OTL. The somewhat less obvious reason is that many of those purged in ‘37-‘39 were more experienced at staff work then those entering in ‘39-‘41 simply due to having been on the job longer. This not only affected how the workload was handled, but also the continued on-job training of the new staff officers as they could not now be aided by their arrested more experienced colleagues (and those who survived would be reluctant to help for fear of being denounced but that falls under a later point).
 
Jeez, the knots some people get into in attempts to justify or downplay Stalin's Great Purge as some kind of "efficiency boon" (gross).
 
Uh no. In 1935, half of the corps and division commanders had some higher military education (regimental level was far lower) which was so bad because the RKKA did not recruit solely from military schools. Efficiency would be recruiting flat out from academies where all the cultural capital is.

33 of the 154 division commanders purged had higher military education

12 of 50 corps commanders purged had higher military eduction

Post-purges this didnt actually change, but for some reason there was a negligieble increase.

Thus the purges didnt seem to do much in this way

Even the aformentioned point about officer time in assignments while low pre-war was comparable to 1932

Not that formal education in itself should be some definitice metric for things like command in retrospect. You dont need a doctorate to be good that much is sure, not a prerequisite.
 
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The best thing would be no purges and no commissars, that alone should help immensely. Then realize there are serious logistic problems (lack of spare parts and a supply train to carry them) and get that fixed.

Just my two cents...
 
The Soviets were not ready for war before 1941. Provoking Germans in this stage just after the purge would not likely have helped the Soviets. They could attack Romania, which if successful would deprive Germans of oil, however Germany could send forced in and big down the Soviets.

If they did do that and the US didnt give them the patent to synthetic oil I wonder how deeply undone Germany might be in terms of oil. Theyd still have sources but I doubt it would be remotely enough without the USSR giving them oil.
 

Deleted member 1487

If they did do that and the US didnt give them the patent to synthetic oil I wonder how deeply undone Germany might be in terms of oil. Theyd still have sources but I doubt it would be remotely enough without the USSR giving them oil.
Huh? Germany invented it's own synthetic oil process. I think you mean the TEL additive to increase fuel performance, which was sold by Standard Oil to Germany in exchange for the Buna Rubber patent. IG Farben and standard oil were in a cartel together and leadership of the corp got indicted for trading with the enemy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben#World_War_II_overview
 
Huh? Germany invented it's own synthetic oil process. I think you mean the TEL additive to increase fuel performance, which was sold by Standard Oil to Germany in exchange for the Buna Rubber patent. IG Farben and standard oil were in a cartel together and leadership of the corp got indicted for trading with the enemy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben#World_War_II_overview

They gave that to them too. Tetraethylene is a component in leaded avgas for aircraft. Standard Oil patented the synthetic oil July 30, 1940, and gave it to the Germans

Yet, ten years later in World War II, after transfer of the Standard Oil of New Jersey hydrogenation patents and technology to I. G. Farben (used to produce synthetic gasoline from coal), Germany produced about 6 1/2 million tons of oil — of which 85 percent (5 1/2 million tons) was synthetic oil using the Standard Oil hydrogenation process.
Wall Street And The Rise Of Hitler By Antony C. Sutton
 
The best thing would be no purges and no commissars, that alone should help immensely. Then realize there are serious logistic problems (lack of spare parts and a supply train to carry them) and get that fixed.

Just my two cents...

My point is mainly that it caused mass incompetence is untrue. 'The military buildup in the USSR shows that, even under the best system of military education, no less than fifteen to twenty years are necessary to train excellent senior field-grade officers, and junior officers require five to ten years. Senior staff officers require ten to fifteen years of training. High-ranking commanders need fifteen to twenty or more years.' There were other officers like Zhukov and Timoshenko etc. that could carry the banner in terms of national defense strategy (and did) rather than Tukhachevsky or whoever. Tukhachevsky was still someone that without him the RKKA would probably not have been what it was, in terms of contribution to Soviet military-economic/mobilization planning, field regulations, academies, etc. Another example, Svechin, at his trial, one of the charges levied against him is that he dared to explore a national defense strategy that was defensive instead of offensive (the very kind of thinking that could have saved the USSR from the disaster of OTL). Without Stalinism the Soviet military strategy would very likely have drastically changed oriented more towards a defensive posture, the very thing that might have stopped the Germans. There were untold damages to the institution of the RKKA because of Stalinism that much is true. Although, the idea that Stalinism paralyzed commanders through fear in doing their jobs correctly, that is also untrue.

And of course now that I think about the Purges didn't just hit the military, also, Soviet industry

Stalin wasn't a complete incompetent, he did actually come around after the three war games etc. that were held once he realized how bad the situation really was. Albeit at the very last minute.
 
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