Deserters weren't the only people punished of course. Executions, gulags, and use of punishment units is vastly higher than any other military, perhaps all other militaries combined in WW2. What is wipe spread to you? I'd say 150,000 recorded executions, who knows how many non-recorded ones there were, is extraordinary.
Yet it only represents around 1% of Soviet war dead. That's not widespread at all, which I tend to regard at least a significant minority (so, a minimum of approximately 30%, give or take 5). Of course, most of the Soviet executions are likely piled into the first 1/3rd of the war, whereas the Germans and Japanese are liable to be most pronounced in '44-'45.
>2.8 million desertions? That's enormous. The Wallies recorded only 150k for the entire European and Mediterranean theaters. For those that turned themselves in, they probably found they had little other option, especially given the efficiency of the NKVD in hunting people down.
Well, technically it's 2.8 million desertions and draft dodgers and the figure does include repeat offenders. In comparisons to the number who served, it's 8.2%. This is more then double the corresponding Anglo-American number that Reese gives, at 3%, but it's still not really widespread. It's also worth observing that, like executions, the numbers appear to have been stacked into the first period of war. In 1943, the Soviets caught 201,392 soldiers as either away from their units or stragglers, of whom around 41,000 were determined to be deserters. For 1942, the number caught away from their units was a little over a million and while the number who were determined to be deserters isn't given, it'd be something like 200,000 men assuming similar proportions. Obviously one can conclude that as both the fortunes and professionalism of the Red Army improved, desertion rates fell.
It's also worth considering that Anglo-American soldiers also tended to have oceans separating them from their home, which would act as a practical deterrent to desertion since a Brit or American soldier trying to flee would need to enlist a ship crews aide. What would really be telling is comparing it to German rates of desertion, particularly in 1944/45.
Right and I made it clear he is using a term with an already established definition and redefined it to his purposes, perhaps with a purpose to get the reader to conflate the two definitions, I don't know.
Paging through the section where he discusses the definitions, it seems it
might be because he's using a social science definition rather then a strictly military science one? Or perhaps because there doesn't seem to be a single set definition? It's... actually rather difficult to tell.
If you mean pushing it's troops in front of enemy guns, yes they were able to get them to move in the direction desired. What is debateable was how effective it was compared to other methods of motivation.
Doesn't seem to have been any more or less effective then any other methods of motivation.
It seemed like you were trying to ignore the reality of Soviet use of force as a major element of it's motivation of troops to fight.
Right, which is why I stated a sentences like:
there’s no doubt that force or threat of force was an integral element of the Red Army
Soviet use of blocking detachments is a matter of record, the question is how widespread they were, how often they used violence to maintain troops in the field, and how long they lasted.
The use of blocking detachments is a matter of record. Their widespread use of violence, particularly the old myth of them machine gunning troops to keep them advancing or prevent them from retreating, is not and is found only in Nazis propaganda.
Unless the Soviets were exceptionally bad at finding their war dead or the Finns were truly expert at massacring Soviet PoWs and hiding their bodies, it is extremely unlikely that a force would have such a high proportion of missing to dead and have the vast majority of those missing just be dead. Especially for a victorious army.
Given the isolated location in which the Soviets suffered their losses, the inaccessibility of these regions to the Soviets at the end of the war (since they were on Finnish soil), the low-priority the Soviets placed on recovering bodies, and the even lower priority (not to mention lack of interest) on the part of the Finns in recovering Soviet dead, it is entirely likely a high proportion of those missing were dead.
For comparison German records for WW2 have 4.3 million missing+dead, with 1.2 million of those missing. That's about 27% for a defeated army, lower than the victorious Soviet army in the winter war. What evidence do you have to support that the Soviets were so bad at finding their war dead in a war they won when they controlled the ground that was fought over?
Because they didn't control much of the ground that was fought over? Most of the territory in which the Motti's occurred were still in Finnish hands when the war was over, hell many were still in Finnish hands when the Continuation War was over... Suomussalmi is still Finnish too this day, and even if they weren't, they are in area's with extremely barebones infrastructure and difficult terrain which is why it was so easy for the Finns to isolate and destroy the Soviet units in the first place. These factors would make body retrieval difficult even if the Soviets paid as high a priority to corpse recovery, which they didn't, so there wouldn't be a very good probability of a Soviet corpse killed in those regions being successfully dragged out and identified. If an entire unit was wiped out, which happened frequently enough in a Motti, the only witnesses would be the Finns and they wouldn't know who those dead Soviets were nor have much incentive to retrieve their corpses from some nowhere stretch of woodland, now would they?
Looking ahead a bit, missing making up around a 1/3rd of irrecoverable was also the case for the Soviets at the end of WW2. Looking at other armies in WW2: there's your 27% for the Germans but the US recorded 79,000 missing out of a total irrecoverable of 400,000 at the end of the war and still record 72,000 today, both of which is around 18-19%. I can't find any figures for British missing, but I can't imagine they were very much far apart from the Americans. Japanese missing is even more of a mystery. Looking at WW1, the proportion of missing/pow out of the total irrecoverable losses on the victors side runs the gamut from 0.9% (Japan) to 76.5% (Serbia). Even discounting cases where practically the entire country was overrun (thus dropping Serbia), we still have stuff like Italy's ~50% and Portugal's ~74%. So the assertion that 1/3rd of personnel unaccounted for or prisoner is somehow an unusual proportion for a victorious power, whether it controlled the ground in the end or not, doesn't really withstand scrutiny.
Which based on WW2, would be the overwhelming majority. Only 7.4% of Soviet deserters were never caught.