Mrstrategy
Banned
What if Stalin does not purge the army before the war with germany would it make the war less longer?
Stalin's purges killed over fifteen thousand military officers, many of them extremely capable men.
What if Stalin does not purge the army before the war with germany would it make the war less longer?
Pretty much this. A lack of purges has a lot of butterflies, including a much better performance against the Finns. It seems doubtful that Hitler would have been quite so gung-ho as to attack the Soviet Union if he had just watched them roll over Finland like it wasn't even there. That said, some interesting thoughts would be how well the non-purged commanders would follow Stalin and if they would push for an invasion of Germany as early as possible specifically to prevent something like what happened IOTL.The figure is actually closer to 35,000.
When the Germans attacked, no divisional commander in the western military districts of the Soviet Union had ever actually commanded their division (or any division for that matter; all having been recently promoted, some hadn't commanded anything larger than a battalion) in operations or even in a divisional sized army exercise. None of them were prepared to respond to the German attacks without instructions from Moscow (which in many cases never arrived, either because Moscow was overwhelmed by requests from instructions or because of the highly successful German in depth sabotage actions against telegraph lines); as a consequence, while initial Soviet resistance was fierce, it was also static and uncoordinated and in the first thirteen days of the war the Wehrmacht were able to reach halfway to Moscow.
If, instead of the purges, the Red Army had gone into June 1941 still with its skilled commanders, the Wehrmacht probably would have struggled to get past Minsk. But then, with their commanders in tact and free from disastrous meddling from the Kremlin, they would have been able to overrun Finland in 1940; Hitler and the Wehrmacht Generals wouldn't have considered the Soviet Union to be an open door and wouldn't have attacked in 1941.
To fix the situation, all we need is for Stalin to not be Stalin. Easy!If someone like Budyenny, Pavlov, or Voroshilov were to slip in the ranks of the guilty, there would be no real loss. Instead, the core of the Red Army's junior officer corps, officers both good and bad, capable and incapable, were killed for lulz.
Killing a few incompetent officers is one thing. Wiping out your army's command structure is another entirely.
Avoiding the stupidity of the purges would require that Stalin was either : a) a human being with feelings who wouldn't decide to kill innocent officers for lulz (hahahahahahhaha) or b) militarily competent and therefore would punish the stupid (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA)
You need a less paranoid dictator, in short.